Web traffic refers to the data exchanged between a website and its users. Web traffic is essential for any website to succeed, and it plays a critical role in determining its level of success.
Understanding the different web traffic types is crucial because it can help you understand where your visitors are coming from, what your audience is interested in, and how they engage with your content. This data helps improve website performance, boost traffic, and achieve your online goals.
What Are the Different Types of Web Traffic?
There are seven types of web traffic mentioned, and each has its unique characteristics and implications for your website:
Organic traffic refers to the visitors who visit your website through unpaid, natural, and non-promotional search engine results. Organic traffic comes from the clicks on those non-paid, algorithm-driven search results. When someone searches for something, Google’s algorithm shows a relevant answer to that query.
This type of traffic is also known as unpaid and organic traffic because it is generated through the website’s content and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts rather than through paid advertising. Organic traffic can be a valuable source for website users since it is generally more cost-effective and sustainable over the long term than paid traffic sources.
Paid traffic
Paid traffic refers to the visitors who come to your website through any paid campaign, promotion, or advertisement. Here are some examples of paid campaigns:
Social media advertising (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter)
Direct traffic
Direct website refers to visitors who enter your website through the URL directly into their browser or click on a bookmark to access the website. In other words, users know your website address and intentionally type it into their browser to visit your site.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a form of organizational promotion or informational message to groups of people through emails. The purpose of email marketing is to promote a product, service, or brand, drive traffic to a website, or build a loyal relationship with your customers. This is an effective method to reach your targeted audience.
Referral traffic
Referral traffic comes from the visitors who visit your website through any other website. Referring websites can be any external source like social media promotion, search engine results, guest blogging, infographics, affiliate links, etc. Referral traffic is important for boosting your website visibility and driving more traffic.
Social media traffic
Social media traffic refers to the visitors that come to your website through any social media platform like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. These visitors click on links and posts you share that lead to a website. Social traffic is an important metric for websites and businesses to track. It can help them understand the effectiveness of their social media marketing efforts and how well they are engaging with their target audience.
Other campaigns
Other campaigns are a category that tracks all the traffic that cannot be attributed to a specific source or campaign. When any user clicks on a link or advertisement to visit a website, the website can track where the traffic is coming from by using the parameters of a campaign.
These campaign parameters identify the traffic source, such as the search engine, social media platform, and specific ad campaign. While “Other Campaigns” is a catch-all category, it doesn’t mean that the traffic is not important or ordinary. It could include traffic from a wide variety of sources, such as affiliate links, email campaigns, direct traffic, etc.
Importance of Web Traffic Your Online Business
Website traffic plays a vital role in analyzing a website’s popularity and effectiveness in achieving its goals, such as increasing web traffic, boosting sales, brand building, providing information, and brand awareness. Web traffic can also impact a website’s search engine ranking.
When determining a site’s relevance and authority, Google considers the number of visitors to a website and the duration of time they spend on your pages. Websites with high traffic and user engagement get better search engine rankings, which brings even more traffic to the website.
Conclusion
Understanding different types of web traffic is important for any business or website looking to increase traffic. All web traffic types have unique characteristics that can provide insights into a website’s performance, audience, and digital marketing efforts. Ultimately, by leveraging the power of web traffic data and using it to develop compelling internet marketing strategies, your business can gain online visibility, attract more users, improve conversions, and engage your targeted audience.
Boost Website Traffic with Agency Partner Interactive
Agency interactive Partner is a leading Dallas-based digital marketing agency that offers comprehensive solutions to help businesses improve website traffic, generate more qualified leads, and increase conversions. We understand the importance of web traffic and how to use raw data to form compelling strategies to add value to your brand.
Our content marketing experts create high-quality creative, engaging, and SEO-optimized content for your websites, like blogs, guest posts, social media posts, and more, to engage your audience and help you achieve your brand goals.
SEO is a long-term process, but our clients are happy to achieve results in as little as 3 months. On average, our clients see as much as a 430% increase in their website traffic and a 113% increase in their top 3 keywords rankings.
Are you ready to take your brand to the next level? Reach out to us today, and let us help you drive more traffic, leads, and sales for your business.
These awards are a true testament to the hard work of the Agency Partner Interactive team and our dedication to offering industry-leading service and experience for our clients. We take ownership of everything we do, and our distributed business model enables us to provide the best digital marketing, software development, and digital services worldwide. This recognition by SelectedFirms reinforces our mission of becoming the premier partner for delivering transformational solutions, resources, and expertise businesses need to achieve their full potential.
As one of the leading digital marketing agencies of 2023, our vision is to be the catalyst to unlock growth and value for every business. We work to understand your company drivers before leveraging technology and bespoke internet marketing solutions to achieve and accelerate your digital impact. Ready to bring your vision to life? Speak with an Agency Partner Interactive strategist today!
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We’re excited to make our success yours. Take your business to the next level and contact us to discuss your project
Transform your brand into the digital sphere and take it to new heights with the best web development and digital marketing agency in the US. Get in touch to discuss your next project!
In this day and age, it’s more important than ever for small businesses to have a website and develop a robust online presence. While social media is undoubtedly effective for reaching and engaging new audiences, a well-designed website tailored to your brand can help you achieve your long-term goals. In this blog post, we’ll explain the importance of websites for small businesses and where to find the best web development agency to bring your vision to life.
Why Do I Need a Website and Not Just Social Media?
Since social media accounts are free to create, easy to manage, and can generate new leads, many business owners may think it’s a one-stop shop for their digital marketing efforts. However, websites are a foundation to enhance the effectiveness of digital strategies like social media marketing, email marketing, and more.
When people click on your social media, they should be directed to a website that provides opportunities to take action. A website linked to your social media offers the ability to collect valuable customer data and entice them to learn more about your business. Think of social media as the attention grabber and a website as the closer.
5 Reasons Why Small Businesses Need Websites
A dynamic online presence in today’s digital world is essential for businesses of all sizes and can make or break your success. A well-designed website is key to unlocking new opportunities and creating a unique experience to serve your customers better.
Builds trust and credibility
Establishing trust with your audience is essential regardless of your business’s size or industry. Modern consumers are more skeptical than ever, and not having a website for your business is highly suspicious.
Anyone can create a social media profile and start posting, but businesses that have taken the necessary steps of buying a domain, adding relevant content and information about their business, and designing a unique website for their brand give users peace of mind that they are dealing with a legitimate company. If people search for your brand only to find your primary source of information is a Facebook or LinkedIn post, they’ll feel like they’ve hit a dead end.
Ranking and visibility
A professional website for your small business gives it a chance to rank on search engines. Social media profiles don’t rank nearly as well as a website built with SEO best practices in mind, meaning if you’re only using social media, you’re missing out on organic traffic.
When searching on Google or other major search engines, every result is typically a page on a website. The right keywords, links, and descriptions on your website give it the SEO it needs to increase visibility.
As Google is the one source for people to find information, optimizing your website for SEO allows people to find you and can hinge on the success of your business. You can link your social media posts to your website, offering a place for your audience to go if they want to learn more about your company. The links to your social profile boost your website’s rankings as well, complementing each other to attract new visitors and convert them to loyal customers.
Control and creative freedom
Your social media efforts are limited by the platform you’re using. You’re subject to ever-changing rules and regulations that limit your ability to market and convey your brand’s message to your audience. Having a website allows you to control the design and content, giving you an advantage over social media platforms that can change their algorithms or policies anytime.
Building a website enables total creative freedom. You can break free from conventional restrictions and engage users in unique ways. Working with an accredited web development agency like Agency Partner Interactive allows you to collaborate with world-class web designers to create a custom website completely aligned with your brand and tailored to your users’ expectations.
A website is a reflection of your business
When people search for your business, your website is typically the first thing they come across. Make the best first impression with a professional, functional, and engaging site that invites them to explore more of what you offer. Small businesses should utilize their website to reach their client base and be able to react and communicate with current and prospective customers. A poorly designed website (or no website at all) conveys to modern consumers that you may not be a reliable or trustworthy company.
Websites enable business growth
Growth-focused small businesses wanting to expand their market and attract new customers can benefit from having a website. While social media offers a way to reach new customers, websites can provide:
More information about your brand
Give customers access to your business location
Contact forms
A platform to sell your products or services online
Getting a website is the first step to enhancing your online presence and putting your brand in an environment where it can thrive. Promote your products, build credibility, and gain a competitive edge. If you’re not on the internet, people won’t be able to find you, and they’ll go somewhere else.
Website vs Social Media
Social media is an effective tool for reaching customers and engaging with them more personally. However, you’ll need a website if you’re looking to build and maintain a robust online presence. Websites serve as the foundation for other digital marketing efforts for small businesses and offer benefits that greatly outweigh having just a social media profile. To stay ahead of your competitors and market your brand to new audiences, you’ll need to have both working together to achieve your long-term goals.
Small Business Web Development Agency
Agency Partner Interactive is a full-service digital agency that provides award-winning web design solutions and digital marketing services to small businesses. We work to understand your business drivers before leveraging bespoke technology and internet marketing expertise to help brands achieve their full potential.
Working with a dedicated digital marketing agency is one of the best ways to take your small business to the next level. Starting with a website kickoff meeting, our expert web designers collaborate with you to create a custom web solution aligned with your goals, objectives, and budget. Then, our digital marketing strategists develop interconnected social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO strategies to optimize and maintain your online presence constantly. Get in touch to receive your free personalized proposal today!
In the world of eCommerce, the decision between using a platform or a marketplace can be a daunting one. Both options have unique advantages and disadvantages, and choosing the right one for your business can make or break your online success. In this blog, we’ll break down the key differences between eCommerce platforms and marketplaces and help you determine which option is best for your business goals.
Getting Started with eCommerce
ECommerce platforms and marketplaces are the two most popular options for merchants and sellers to start an online business. Each one attracts a different consumer base with varying capabilities, so understanding which is better suited for your business is essential before going online.
eCommerce Platforms
E-Commerce or eCommerce is the buying and selling activities over the web. In contrast, an eCommerce platform is a software application that facilitates product purchases between the buyer and the seller.
eCommerce platform services involve website design and development, inventory management systems, and customer service and navigation infrastructure. eCommerce web design agencies like Agency Partner Interactive can create features customized for your business, like convenient checkout, in-app analytics, product catalog navigation, personalized notifications, and optimized, responsive design for multiple screens.
It can be a website or app for your online store that enables customers to discover your products, add them to their cart, and check out. Online stores involve one seller who handles the manufacturing, storing and distribution of goods to the buyer.
Easily collect customer data, performance, and feedback for future eCommerce marketing strategies.
Fewer restrictions and rules
Total control over your website’s design, functionality, and navigation
Ability to adopt a ready-made approach to website creation or go with a custom solution
Disadvantages
Greater investment in time and money to build and maintain your eCommerce website.
More financial risks as you scale your business
Bringing in traffic and customer engagement takes substantial effort, and results won’t be immediate.
Requires eCommerce hosting services
An eCommerce platform will be your best option for small businesses, startups, and small to medium-sized companies with the time and resources to develop a unique presence and build brand awareness over time.
Marketplaces
Marketplaces are eCommerce sites or apps where multiple vendors sell products. Buyers can purchase products from different brands and pay for them all at once at checkout. The marketplace owner does not own third-party inventory; instead, they show these products to customers and facilitate transactions while taking a cut of the profit. Online marketplaces also handle the storage and logistics aspects of distribution.
Advantages
Extend sales reach
Save money on startup and initial investments
Quick and easy setup
Less financial risk for expansion
No need to manage inventory and shipping processes
Disadvantages
Highly competitive
Lack of access to customer analytics, data, and communications essential for eCommerce marketing campaigns
Unable to build brand awareness
The COVID-19 pandemic led to the proliferation of eCommerce out of necessity, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Today, online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Google Shopping, Walmart, and Alibaba, to name a few, are expanding services and offerings at lightning speed.
In 2022, marketplaces accounted for more than two-thirds of the global online retail market, with $3.23 trillion spent globally on the top 100 online marketplaces. This rapid proliferation comes with increasingly tough competition for individual vendors to stand out. However, putting your business where customers want to buy from can increase revenue.
eCommerce Platform and Marketplace Differences
Time, effort, and money
eCommerce platform – building an eCommerce website for your brand is more expensive upfront and requires effort to maintain a fully functional site or app. However, the ability to customize your online presence, get insight into customer data, and deliver personalization and experiences rather than just products can be extremely valuable for your brand.
Online marketplace – creating a seller profile and online shop on Amazon or Google Shopping is quick, takes minimal technical skill, and you can start generating sales and profits immediately.
eCommerce Marketing
eCommerce platform – direct access to your customers allows you to reach out to customers for promotions and campaigns and can help you deliver better customer service through personalization.
Online marketplace – limited access to customers makes it difficult to build engagement. Even if you’re selling unique products, you’ll have to rely on offering lower prices to attract customers and stand out in a competitive market.
Brand growth and scalability
eCommerce platform – greater risk and financial investment is required to scale as your business grows, and it takes more time to do so. Instead of having to get more inventory and hire more employees to handle the increased workload, companies should invest more in their website development and ensure they deliver excellent user experiences and customer service.
Online marketplace – since there are fewer financial risks and no need to manage inventory or storage, businesses can see higher sales volume and revenue faster.
Platform vs Marketplace Key Takeaways
According to Statista, online retail sales will reach $6.51 trillion by this year. By 2025, eCommerce retail sales are projected to reach $8.5 trillion globally. While online retailers have a significant profit opportunity, choosing the right option depends on your business needs, goals, and unique product niches.
Online marketplaces are an excellent way for merchants to start selling goods online because the time, costs, and risks are significantly lower. For brands that want a custom solution without sharing profits and customers, the versatility of eCommerce platforms can enable long-term scalability and eCommerce marketing advantages, helping you achieve your long-term goals.
Dallas eCommerce Web Design Agency
If you’re looking for a partner to work through your eCommerce ideas or help with choosing the best platform based on your needs and budget, get in touch with Agency Partner Interactive.
As a full-service digital marketing and web design agency, we work with clients spanning multiple industries to create award-winning eCommerce websites and apps that drive results. Our transparent process ensures you’re in the loop every step of the way, from your website kick-off call to successful deployment and maintenance. Speak with a strategist and get your free personalized proposal today!
SEO content writing is one of the most important aspects of a brand’s digital marketing strategy. By creating high-quality, keyword-rich content, you can improve your website’s visibility, increase organic traffic, and better engage with your audience. In this blog post, we will explain what SEO content writing is, why it’s important, and offer tips on refreshing existing content. We’ll also go through the process of creating SEO-friendly content to help you achieve your 2023 digital marketing goals!
What is SEO Content?
Writing SEO-optimized content involves creating and publishing content with the purpose of ranking on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs), like Google. While there isn’t one correct way to write content that will guarantee first-page rankings, writing with SEO best practices in mind gives Google better insight into the subject and quality of your pages to determine whether they’re relevant to users. The more relevant and useful your content is, the higher the chance to rank.
Content is also subjective, with some users finding it more helpful or relevant than others. However, there are a few strategies and best practices that can help you develop an effective content marketing strategy for your brand that consistently brings in organic traffic and ranks well.
Content Tips for SEO Writing
Before we dive in, it’s important to remember that getting traffic from search engines shouldn’t be your only goal when producing content. To meet search engine requirements that will reward you with higher rankings over time and appeal to potential customers and returning users, you must deliver value above search engine optimization. Producing content without relevancy, intent, and usefulness doesn’t offer value to the people reading it, and it’ll likely result in low rankings and higher bounce rates.
To increase your chances of ranking higher on search engines, your content should:
Match user search intent
Search intent is the user’s purpose when they search for something
Someone who types in “best keyboards for gaming” wants to learn more about the different types of keyboards on the market and their qualities. Google understands this and shows the user blogs or articles about gaming keyboards. The four main types of search intent include
Informational: search for information on a particular topic (what’s the best keyboard?)
Navigational: search for a specific website (Apple website)
Transactional: search for specific products or brands (buy Apple keyboard)
Commercial: research various product or service options (best keyboards 2023)
Based on your user’s search intent, you can create content using keywords that match or provide the information they’re looking for.
Search engines crawl webpages to identify the page’s purpose, then choose the most relevant pages to display on the user’s SERP, so understanding and nailing the intent is crucial.
Keyword research & SEO optimization
Search engines use keywords to understand your content, so optimizing your pages for search engines means incorporating relevant keywords. While keywords are one of the most important aspects of SEO content, keyword stuffing often results in spammy content that hurts your chances of ranking.
A best practice is to choose a primary keyword that best describes the topic you’re covering. Then, choose secondary keywords that relate to subtopics within the main page and support your primary keyword. It’s also a good idea to target long-tail keywords which are more specific and have a lower search volume but a higher conversion rate.
Knowing how and where to implement keywords in your content is imperative to achieve max searchability and make content readable for humans rather than search crawlers.
Format your content for readability
Headers are an excellent way to grab attention and can help improve your content’s readability. Google uses headers to understand what your pages cover to surface it for the correct keywords. Neatly formatted webpages also allow readers to quickly and easily find the information they need without reading the entire page, improving user experience.
Use a visual hierarchy that captures what each section and subsection will be about, with H1 as the main topic, H2’s for each supporting topic, and H3’s to support subtopics.
Content Writing Ideas
Many tools can help you develop useful, relevant topic ideas catered to your audience, like SEMrush, FATJOE, and AnswerThePublic. Depending on your brand, your target market, and your purpose or call to action (CTA), you can cover the subjects that matter to your audience and anticipate their problems to create content that provides solutions.
How to Update Old Content for SEO
Another content strategy that will help improve rankings and traffic without constantly producing more new content is updating your existing pages for SEO.
Google rewards fresh content, and recently published content generally ranks higher, especially for topics that frequently change.
A few tips for revamping old content include:
Answer frequently asked questions
Update an old blog post by adding sections that answer common user questions. If these questions are relevant to your topic, consider incorporating them in new sections to better match queries with your updated content. You can use Google’s “People Often Ask” feature or type your keyword in Quora and other search consoles to find queries with high-average positions.
Revise keywords
Conduct a keyword audit and add new relevant keywords that may be weak or missing from the original content. It’s also a great idea to target keywords with low search volumes because they’ll give you a better chance to rank than high-volume keywords.
Remove broken links
Check to see if the external links on your content are still functioning. Broken links and images reduce user experience and lower site quality for search engines.
Add videos or visual elements
Adding videos and images relevant to your topic can be a great way to increase the amount of time users spend on your page. Short-form videos are also a great way to explain information in a short, easy-to-absorb format for users who prefer to avoid reading.
Add internal links to recently posted or relevant content
After refreshing your content, it’s crucial to promote your updated blog through social media, email campaigns, and industry sources. Adding internal links to product pages or other related pieces can invite users to explore more of your website, increasing your chances of conversion.
Understand when and why content should be updated
While refreshing outdated content is an effective and relatively quick process, you should consider when it’s appropriate to revise content and for what purpose. Taking a look at your content each quarter is a good practice, but it depends on the topics you’ve covered and whether there would be enough substantial value in updating.
How to Develop an Effective Content Marketing Strategy 2023
Creating quality content with SEO best practices in mind can help you achieve steady traffic from search engines, provide helpful information to your users, and attract new audiences who find answers to their questions in your content.
The key to an effective content marketing strategy is to stay consistent. Adopting a systematic approach to creating and publishing content with SEO tactics and relevance will help you achieve reliable and consistent results.
Define your goals – this will help you determine what type of content you should focus on
Understand your audience – analytics tools and surveys can help you narrow down your user demographic, but it’s essential to understand the behavior and concerns of your target audience.
Create and stick to a content publishing calendar – your goals and audience will help you determine a schedule for when and how often you should publish content. Consistency is exceptionally significant for blogs!
Track performance and analysis – regularly assessing your website and conducting content and SEO audits can help you determine what’s working and what isn’t so you can measure your successes and repeat them.
Why Agency Partner Interactive?
Whether you’re just starting to explore the world of SEO content or have been publishing steadily for years, it’s important to stay up to date on Google’s algorithm changes, keyword trends, and new strategies.
As a full-service digital marketing agency, our content marketing and SEO experts work together to create and publish high-quality, SEO optimized content for our clients spanning multiple industries. We blend our creative and data-driven expertise to help get you on page one of Google’s SERPs and boost traffic while growing your brand awareness goes through the roof. Ready to get started? Get in touch with us today for a free personalized proposal!
The holidays are over, and you’ve had a chance to recover from all the parties and family time. Now that you’re back in the office, it’s time to get serious about how you’re going to manage your marketing budget in 2023. Whether you’re a small business owner or a large corporation, there’s never been more pressure on budgets than now. The good news is there are strategies we can all use to manage our money better so we can focus on the work that matters most: helping our customers and businesses succeed!
How to Better Manage Your Marketing Budget
Marketing budgeting is an ongoing process.
While you may start with a finite amount to spend on marketing for the year, this figure should be revisited as your business needs change and grow. There are two primary factors to consider when determining how much money you’ll need:
How much money do I have available? (your budget)
What are my goals? (how much can I afford to spend)
When it comes down to it, understanding what resources are available and having clarity on your goals will allow you to better manage your marketing budget.
Determine Your Total Marketing Budget
Before you begin to plan your marketing strategy and budget, it’s important to determine how much money you must spend. While some companies may be flush with cash, others face tighter budget constraints. Regardless of how much money is available for marketing, there are ways to make the most of what you have.
To determine how much money you can allocate toward marketing:
Use existing financial information (if available). If your company has already conducted its annual budgets or has other recent budgets in the office, this information can provide insight into where funding might come from in the future.
Create a List of Platforms You’ll Use for Marketing
Keeping a list of the platforms you plan to use for marketing is essential. For instance, if you have a Facebook page, then make sure it is on your list. If you plan to run paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram, be sure those are included. In addition to social media platforms, you can also include email newsletters and other digital marketing strategies.
You may want to create a spreadsheet or other type of document where all these platforms are listed so that when it comes time for budgeting purposes in the future (as well as when evaluating how well each platform is performing), it will be easy for everyone involved in managing your social media presence—or any other digital strategy—to see what needs attention most urgently at any given time.
Estimate the Cost and Potential ROI for Each Platform
Understanding how much money you have to spend on different aspects of your strategy is critical. For example, if you don’t know how much it will cost to buy an ad on Facebook or YouTube, you won’t be able to make informed decisions about where best to allocate your budget across these platforms.
Understand How Your Competitors Are Spending Their Marketing Budget
Understanding what other companies are doing is key when deciding how much money you want to spend on each marketing platform as part of your overall strategy. You can use tools like SEMrush and SpyFu to learn about the top keywords that competitors use in their ads and landing pages and which platforms they’re advertising on most frequently. This way, when setting up your campaigns across these platforms based on competitor data, you’ll know what works best and why so that you can make data-driven decisions moving forward.
Evaluate Your Current Strategy to See What’s Already Working
The next step to setting a solid budget for marketing this year is to look at the results of your previous spending strategy. What does your data tell you about what worked and what didn’t?
You can find this information by reviewing your social media analytics, email open rates, and website traffic reports.
Did you have high engagement across all channels at one point in time? Check which posts got the most likes or shares on Facebook or replies on Twitter.
Do some of your social media followers seem more engaged than others? Look at the number of comments compared with likes or shares on each post.
Are people visiting certain pages more often than others? If so, you should figure out why.
Allocate Your Budget
The best way to figure out how much you should spend on each platform is by determining their value and then dividing that by their total cost. For example, if Facebook ads drive 90% of your sales and only cost $10 per month, it makes sense to spend most of your budget there. However, if you have some channels that are working well but generating fewer leads than others, it may make sense to focus more on those channels so they can perform better.
Figure out how much money you have available for digital marketing campaigns
Prioritize the platforms where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck
Agency Partner Interactive
While budgeting expenses for the year can be challenging for small businesses to enterprise corporations, knowing where to put your investment is crucial to realizing a full ROI. Agency Partner Interactive is a full-service digital marketing and web development agency that has worked with budgets of all sizes. Our meticulous, results-driven process ensures you’re kept in the loop every step to get the biggest bang for your buck. Your business success becomes ours. Schedule your free consultation and start the new year right with an award-winning digital marketing agency!
When it comes to marketing your company, there are two types of media that you can use: paid and earned. Paid media is the type that most people think about when they’re thinking about advertising, like TV commercials and radio ads. Earned media refers to any exposure that occurs naturally without you paying for it. Think about all the times you’ve seen a Facebook or Instagram ad or watched a video by an influencer on YouTube—those aren’t paid. Instead, they fall under the category of “earned” because they received free exposure due to something their audience did (like share something). There are pros and cons to both marketing campaigns, but in this post, we’ll discuss why each can help your business grow!
Paid Media
Paid media is any form of advertising that you pay for. It includes media outlets like TV, radio, print, and online ads. Paid media can be very effective at reaching a large audience—and depending on your company’s needs and goals, it may be the best choice for your marketing plan.
Paid media campaigns can also be used to build awareness around a new product launch or event. This approach tends to cost more than simply selling something directly via paid ads alone, but it can also help build brand recognition and sales momentum over time and boost traffic to your website after someone sees one of these ads online.
Examples of Paid Media
Paid media is a form of advertising that can be bought using ad words, ad networks, or other forms of advertising. Paid media is usually the most effective way to reach your target audience because it’s highly targeted and precisely placed. You can reach out to exactly the people who are interested in what you offer—and you’ll know before you pay for it that those people will see your ads.
Ad Words: Google AdWords lets advertisers show ads on Google search results page based on search terms that users enter into Google Search and “display” networks (sites not owned by Google). The paid advertisements are marked with an “Ads by…” message at their bottom right corner—you’ll recognize them as they appear on many websites! The effectiveness of these ads depends on selecting good keywords. If there aren’t enough searches for a particular word or phrase, no one will see your ad. This can help smaller businesses find new audiences and larger companies reach more specific targets within their existing customer base.
Display Networks: These include sites like Facebook or Hulu, where users look specifically for entertainment content; when someone clicks on an ad appearing there, it may direct them back onto another site like yours! You might have seen examples of this yourself if you clicked through YouTube videos on another website during browsing sessions.
Social Media Ads: Social media platforms allow businesses direct access to user data such as age group/gender breakdowns based on publicly available information. This gives marketers better insights about potential customers vs. traditional online platforms, which rely solely upon demographic information.
Benefits of Paid Media
Paid media is a great way to start your marketing campaign. It allows you to be more targeted, measurable, reliable, and scalable. In addition, paid media can be used to test ad copy and landing pages before putting them into a larger-scale campaign.
Earned Media
Earned media results from a company’s actions, products, and services. It can be a positive or negative outcome, depending on what you do. Earned media is free, but it requires time and effort to earn it.
Examples of Earned Media
Earned media is a term that refers to the publicity generated by word-of-mouth, social media, and other forms of advertisement that are not paid for. In other words, it’s free. Earned media can be a great way to build brand awareness.
Earned media includes traditional methods like word-of-mouth advertising and social sharing, as well as newer ones like influencer marketing, which involves getting influencers to promote your products on their platforms (e.g., YouTube).
Benefits of Earned Media
Earned media is a powerful tool to boost brand exposure and loyalty and increase sales. Here’s how:
Earned Media Brings You Exposure: Publicity can drive traffic to your website, increasing SEO effectiveness. People who read positive reviews about your company online or hear about you on the radio are more likely to visit your website and make a purchase.
Earned Media Builds Brand Loyalty: The more publicity you receive, the more likely consumers will be loyal customers who spend money with you instead of other companies in your industry. This gives you an advantage over competitors since earned media builds trust between consumers and brands; people are more willing to buy from brands they have heard good things about than those whose products have been advertised heavily but haven’t received positive feedback from customers yet (or ever).
Earned Media vs Paid Media
Earned media is better for building trust and credibility, while paid media is better for getting your message to a large audience. To reach your target audience, companies should use both earned and paid media in their marketing campaigns.
Agency Partner Interactive
While there are many similarities between earned and paid media, there are also some significant differences to keep in mind for your business. While it is possible to have a successful campaign without these tactics, the internet marketing experts at Agency Partner Interactive recommend using both. If you need help developing your earned and paid media campaigns, contact a digital marketing strategist for a consultation today!
Social media is a powerful tool to help you grow your business. It can help you reach new audiences, increase brand awareness and boost sales. But if you want to make the most of social media in your holiday marketing campaigns, you need to plan. This article will show you how to take advantage of social media for effective holiday marketing campaigns:
Start with Last Year
Before launching your holiday marketing, look at last year’s campaign and see what worked and didn’t. Did you reach the target audience? What was the ROI? Were there any lessons learned that can help guide this year’s strategy? Look back on these questions to determine how successful your social media marketing has been so that you can improve upon it in the future.
Audience Targeting
The first step in creating a successful social media holiday campaign is to identify your audience. This may seem like an obvious statement, but you need to know exactly who you are trying to reach when it comes to marketing on social media. Identifying the right audience will help guide you through all other steps of developing your marketing strategy and ensure that all your efforts yielding the intended results.
Once you have identified who your target audience is, it’s essential to understand their needs and preferences, interests, and demographics. You also want to consider what types of content they consume online so that this can be incorporated into any future campaigns or promotions.
Choose the Most Effective Social Media Channels
It’s important to choose the social media channels that will work best for your brand, and it can take time to know where you should focus. When choosing the proper social channels, consider these things:
What is your target demographic? Are they using this platform? If so, how often? Do they respond better to videos or images? Is there a specific type of content that resonates with them on this channel?
How much time do you have to upload content? For example, if you only have an hour per week available but want to upload videos every weekday, then Instagram is probably not the best choice (unless those videos are quick and straightforward).
What kind of content do users engage with most on each channel?
Be Creative
You want your content to stand out and get noticed. Make sure you are using high-quality images, videos, and various formats and colors. This can include square, landscape, and portrait pictures, bright colors or black & white photos. You may also want to use different fonts for your text to grab people’s attention even more.
Choose a Campaign Hashtag
Choosing a hashtag is an important part of your holiday marketing campaign. It helps to create a cohesive social media experience and brings together your brand’s followers.
A good hashtag should be:
Relevant to your brand—This will help it stand out from other hashtags used by other companies, making it easier for consumers to find you online.
Easy to remember—The fewer letters or characters in the hashtag, the better! People won’t want to type out something complicated whenever they want their friends or family members to see what they’re up to.
Run a Campaign
A social media marketing campaign is the perfect way to get your brand noticed, but it can take a lot of work to come up with a concept that stands out in the crowd. For example, you could run a contest on Facebook and give away some products or services in exchange for “likes” from your fans. Another option is giving special discounts and promotions on certain days of the week or month. You can also offer special rewards for people who post photos or videos using hashtags related to your company, such as #holidayfun or #holidaygiftguide.
If you’re not sure where to start when planning out your holiday marketing campaign strategy this year, we’ve got some tips on how you can make sure yours gets noticed:
Be clear about what the goal of your campaign is before launching it! Clear goals will help keep everyone focused on achieving them instead of getting sidetracked by other projects.
Make sure everything about this project is measurable, meaning that there’s some way for people who participate (or don’t participate) to know whether they were successful at reaching their goal(s).
Agency Partner Interactive
With the right tools and strategies, you can make your brand shine year-round. If you feel your marketing could use a little boost, look no further than the digital marketing experts at Agency Partner Interactive. We’ve been helping small and large businesses in all industries achieve exponential growth, and we can help yours do the same! Reach out for your free consultation and proposal today!
Black Friday is one of the most important days for retailers, and it’s no surprise that many companies use it to drive sales. However, not every business has mastered the art of Black Friday marketing. If you want your Black Friday campaigns to succeed, we’ve got nine little-known strategies that will help you reach your goals:
Get Your Site Ready for Traffic
To ensure that your site can handle the traffic spike and make sure it’s available for customers to access, follow these tips:
If you still don’t have a website, make one! Today’s consumers expect brands to be online and accessible 24 hours a day. So, if you don’t already have a functioning eCommerce site set up for Black Friday and beyond, then now’s the time!
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. According to research conducted by Adobe in 2012, more people are shopping from their phones than ever before. To ensure a positive customer experience on all devices, use responsive web design techniques that let users view content in the same way regardless of which device they use (smartphone or computer).
Make sure your website can handle the surge in traffic. This is where load testing tools can come in handy. Use them to simulate different levels of traffic and determine if your site can handle the increased load before Black Friday hits.
Create a hashtag for your Black Friday campaign to help customers and prospects find you and create a buzz about your brand in real-time.
Engage with customers on social media: answer questions, ask them what their favorite holiday deals are, and offer suggestions on how to save money during the shopping season (early bird specials, gift card deals).
Use influencers to help promote your Black Friday campaign: reach out to bloggers or local celebrities with large followings in your business or industry to see if they’d be willing to post about any special offers related to Black Friday sales.
Create A Black Friday-Specific Landing Page
A landing page is a web page that acts as an online sales funnel. It’s used to capture leads and drive traffic to conversion points on your website, such as an eCommerce checkout or signup form.
Landing pages are often used during events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you have a presence on social media, you can also promote unique coupons or promotions for the duration of your event through ads with links that lead back to your landing page.
Make sure your Black Friday landing page is relevant to your target audience. Also, make sure it includes the following:
A call-to-action (CTA) button—typically “Shop Now” or “Buy Now.”
A clear value proposition: why should someone buy from you today?
Preview Live on Instagram
Create a preview video of your product or service. After you’ve created the video, share it on Instagram to see if people like what they see and want to buy.
If you’re selling an item that requires assembly, show how easy it is to put together. Explain how your team delivers excellent customer care beyond expectations if you’re offering a service.
You can also create a “story” in Instagram stories (a series of photos and videos) that highlights your product or service in action.
Give Your Subscribers a Sneak Peek
Giving your subscribers a sneak peek of what you will be offering for Black Friday is a great way to get them excited about the upcoming event. You could also give them a discount code they can use on Black Friday, which will help get them in the buying mindset.
The most important thing to remember when using this strategy is to ensure the sneak peek entices people to buy from you. If possible, send out an email with some sample products or services and show how awesome they will be on Black Friday when everyone else offers similar products/services at discounted prices.
Retarget Recent Visitors with a Discount Offer
Retargeting is a powerful tool that can help you increase sales. It’s handy for converting visitors who have abandoned their carts and browsing customers who have yet to make purchases.
You can use retargeting to target customers who have visited your website in the past. This way, when they visit again, they’ll see an ad reminding them of the benefits of purchasing from you, and this will encourage them to convert into paying customers! This strategy works best if you have clear messaging about why someone should make a purchase, such as “our products come with free shipping” or “we offer 30-day returns.”
Follow Up with Existing Customers
The best time to reach out to your existing customers is during the holiday season. This is when everyone is looking for gifts and trying to find the right one for the people they care about. Make sure you’re top of mind by sending a timely email marketing campaign that reminds them of your products or services, offers a discount (either in-store or online), provides freebies, and gives them free trial periods on your products.
Set Up Retargeting Ads for Abandoned Carts
Abandoned cart ads are great for a few reasons:
They’re easy to set up.
They don’t take much time or effort (even if you need to create new ad copy).
They can bring back customers who may have forgotten about your product or service.
The idea behind abandoned cart retargeting is simple: when a user abandons their shopping cart on your site, you send them a follow-up email or text with a discounted offer to try and bring them back into the fold.
Retarget Prospects with an Email Campaign
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, and it’s a highly effective way to reach your target audience. A retargeting campaign is a great place to start when you want to reach out to people who have shown interest in your products or services but have yet to purchase.
A retargeting email campaign works like this: when someone visits your website, browser cookies allow you to monitor their web activity and serve ads based on what they do online (and where they do it). If you sell t-shirts, for example, you can track which pages someone has visited on your site and serve ads for related products like socks or hats when they visit other sites. You can also use data from social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram so that if someone liked the shirt of yours that another customer bought last year (which makes them likely), they would see an ad for this year’s version of that same shirt while scrolling through her feed!
Agency Partner Interactive Can Help You Get Started
And there you have it! These are some of the most basic, yet effective marketing strategies for Black Friday. Once you’ve decided which approach works best for your brand, it’s time to implement it. Agency Partner Interactive’s team of digital marketing experts can help guide your company through data-driven decisions to increase traffic, build your brand voice, foster a community of loyal followers, and more. Send us your proposal today!
Digital marketing is a fast-changing industry, and it’s critical to stay up to date on the latest insights that are shifting the landscape. If your competitors understand better how to implement these trends before you, they’ll be able to outmaneuver you and take away more of the market. So, as we head into 2023, here are eight of the most significant trends in digital marketing you should know about:
Shoppable content
Shoppable content is a way of integrating eCommerce into your content.
When done correctly, it allows you to create an experience for your customers that’s more relevant and convenient for them. Shoppable content allows your customers to click on something and purchase it directly from the page they are on. This can also be used as an alternative method of monetizing your content by creating a stronger connection between your brand and your customers to drive more sales.
You could use it as an opportunity to sell an item directly through a product listing or even create an entire store with products matching your website’s overall theme.
Voice search
Voice search is the future. It’s growing rapidly as one of the most frequently used methods of searching compared to traditional text-based search.
Voice search is more accurate to how consumers search online than typing a query into a text field. People often make spelling mistakes when typing, which can lead to poor results in a text-based search engine. However, voice commands are easier for algorithms to understand because they use simple language instead of complex sentences and long words (e.g., “find me hotels in San Francisco that have free breakfast”).
When you ask someone a question by speaking into your phone, there’s no need to type out the question. Speech is also a more natural way to ask a question, and the convenience makes this interface much more desirable than typing things out.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is a technology that can be used for digital marketing. It can help automate tasks like sending emails and updating social media. AI also has predictive capabilities, mimicking customer behavior.
AI can be used to create custom content for each visitor on your website based on what they have previously viewed or searched for online, now or in the past. You may have heard that Google is using AI to provide search results filled with answers instead of just links.
Real-time social media marketing
Real-time social media marketing is a way to get your business in front of potential customers who are looking for your products/services. It can be used as part of an ongoing strategy or as a standalone approach, but it’s important to know what makes this tactic so effective.
When you use real-time social media marketing effectively, you’ll be able to capitalize on opportunities that arise during the day and react quickly to negative feedback from customers (or even competitors). This will help ensure that your company maintains its reputation and builds loyalty among consumers who either already love what you do or are just learning about your company’s value.
Programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising is the practice of using software to purchase digital advertising space. It differs from traditional advertising because it gives advertisers more control over their ads’ targeting, placement, and frequency.
To use programmatic advertising effectively, you need to know how it works and how your audience interacts with your brand online. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Do you have a website?
What kind of content do people use on your site?
How often do they visit it?
If you can answer these questions, then you’re well on your way!
Personalization
Personalization is vital in digital marketing because it helps you to connect with your audience. It can improve customer service, create a more engaging experience for your customers, and increase conversion rates.
Customer service: Personalization allows businesses to customize their response based on each customer’s needs. This can help companies provide the best service possible while saving time and money.
Marketing: Personalization allows brands to deliver a more effective message by providing content that speaks directly to customers’ interests and needs, making marketing more relevant and efficient than ever.
Conversions: Personalizing your web pages also increases engagement with customers. Whether that’s offering discounts or creating interactive experiences like quizzes or customized recommendations based on past behavior, giving your customers what they want when they want it is paramount to increasing your conversion rate.
Authenticity and transparency
The importance of authenticity and transparency in digital marketing is obvious. Consumers want to feel like they’re getting a fair deal, and marketers are constantly trying to build trust with their audiences. But what does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be transparent? And how can you measure your efforts at being both?
The first step towards building trust with customers is understanding what authenticity means for your brand and business. For example, if you’re selling a product that’s traditionally been seen as high-end or luxury, then a more authentic approach would focus on the craftsmanship that goes into making the product rather than promoting its designer brand name or exclusive price point. The goal should always be creating an experience that feels real—not just saying things because they sound nice or impressive but because they align with who you are as an organization.
Video marketing for all devices
As the world’s most consumed content on the internet, video content is also the best way to engage your audience.
Video is so popular because it makes people feel like they are part of something they care about and want to share with others. In fact, YouTube reported that more than 150 million hours of video are watched daily on their platform alone! It’s not just text or images anymore; it’s all about video for all devices.
Digital marketing constantly evolves, so keeping up with the latest trends can seem daunting. But if you keep these eight trends in mind, you’ll be well on your way toward staying ahead of the curve—and maybe even invent some new trends along the way!
Agency Partner Interactive can help you get ahead
As one of the fastest-growing digital marketing agencies in North Texas, Agency Partner provides bespoke web design and development and internet marketing expertise. We specialize in social media marketing, email marketing, content strategy, SEO, and more. Make 2023 your year of explosive growth by sending us your proposal today!
Digital marketing offers businesses of all sizes and industries innovative solutions to achieve their goals. One of the key benefits of internet marketing is that it is cost-effective, measurable, and scalable, with constant areas for improvement and optimization. In today’s digital era, a dynamic online presence is essential. But what if your budget is limited? Where should you invest your time and money if you’re just getting started with digital marketing or don’t have a ton of extra cash? In this blog post, we’ll explore five internet marketing services that deliver data-driven results without breaking the bank.
Web Design and Development
Your website is one of the single most important aspects of your business. Most of your potential customers will find you online before ever getting in touch, so your website must be functional, user-friendly, and easily discoverable. Luckily, website design and development services are affordable, and easy to see a return on investment.
A well-designed website looks professional, aligns with your brand, and allows visitors to find information easily based on intuitive navigation. Additionally, your site should be responsive and adaptable to different screens so anyone can view and interact with your website from any device. Ensure your website includes your contact information and compelling CTAs to turn visitors into qualified leads.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a vital aspect of digital marketing and serves as the foundation for effective content, email, and PPC marketing strategies. It’s the process of optimizing your website with keywords to rank higher in search engines. SEO is a long-term strategy that requires patience and consistency, but with the help of Agency Partner’s SEO experts, you can consistently drive traffic to your site, rank #1 on Google, and target new markets to grow your brand’s reach.
One way you can begin investing in SEO is by creating quality content on your site that answers frequently asked questions about products or services like yours. By strategically incorporating keywords into your content, search engines like Google will prioritize your site on its search engine results pages (SERPs) based on relevancy to the search query (keywords) and how helpful your content is for readers.
This type of content will be helpful for people searching online, so they’ll likely click through when they see it listed as one of Google’s top results for their query (or another search engine). You can also use social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to promote this sort of content—and then link back to it from elsewhere on your site so that all those new visitors have easy access!
Email Marketing
The versatility and reach of email campaigns make them one of the most powerful tools for internet marketing. Through simple automation and personalization, you can engage and market to your list of subscribers while segmenting your customer base to target their specific behaviors. It’s also relatively inexpensive, perfect for companies with limited resources. Email marketing allows you to build trust with your audience, create sequences that call them to act, and build brand loyalty.
There are many ways to use email marketing, but the most common is sending monthly newsletters. You can also send one-off emails about new products or services, special promotions, etc.
Content Marketing
In the era of digitalization, content is king. The most affordable way to utilize content marketing is to start with your website. An effective content strategy ensures that all of your site’s information is easy to read and conveys your brand message clearly. With the use of SEO, those pages will rank higher on search engines, making them easier to find for anyone looking for your products and services.
However, it’s not enough to create and post tons of content; your audience needs to engage with your brand. When done correctly, content marketing can drive conversions, increase brand awareness, and establish your industry authority.
With a limited budget, you might think investing in content creation would be out of reach—but that isn’t necessarily true! With some creativity and hard work (and maybe some help from Agency Partner Interactive), it’s possible to create quality content without breaking the bank.
PPC
PPC (pay-per-click) is a great way to get traffic to your website. You can start by targeting a few specific keywords, meaning you’ll only pay for those particular search terms. It’s also an excellent way to test out a new product or service because it’s easy to stop spending money once you measure your campaign results. PPC is extremely effective at driving leads and conversions, but without the experience of a digital marketing agency, it can lead to unnecessary costs.
If you need help managing your PPC campaign, speak with a digital marketing expert at Agency Partner today! We’ve managed budgets of all sizes, enabling us to lower paid ad costs while maximizing ROI.
Test, test, and test again
If you’re just starting with digital marketing services, the best way to protect your investment is to start small and be patient. A compelling internet marketing strategy requires research, data, and continuous testing. Digital marketing results are measurable, so as you track your campaign’s performance, you’ll have a clear picture of what’s working and what needs improvement.
You can run tests in the same way that we did: create multiple versions of a single element (e.g., different headlines), then let Google Analytics choose which version it thinks performed best based on the traffic metrics provided by your website analytics tool.
An Award-Winning Digital Marketing Agency
Agency Partner Interactive is a full-service internet marketing agency that provides custom web development and bespoke digital marketing expertise. Our digital marketing experts delve into multiple layers of your business to ensure all our marketing efforts deliver scalable and profitable results. Send your proposal to Dallas’ top digital marketing agency today!
DALLAS, TEXAS – Best SEO Service Companies, a leading independent review website for SEO services agencies, has announced Agency Partner Interactive LLC among the best SEO agencies in the United States.
Research experts evaluated each SEO agency based on customer reviews and case studies, the search rankings of the agencies themselves and their customers, industry awards, the tenure and experience of the SEO marketing team, and pricing relative to the industry.
The study conducted by BestSEOserviceComapanies.com examined large and small SEO agencies and following their internal review, Agency Partner earned a rank of #2 in the entire United States.
The review website’s research team conducted an exhaustive SEO services assessment using a proprietary methodology. The Agency Partner team is thankful for this special recognition and attributes much of their success to their constant effort to improve processes and customer service. Since before the pandemic, Agency Partner has created a unique SEO growth strategy that leverages powerful SEO content, link building, and industry leading local SEO services.
ABOUT AGENCY PARTNER INTERACTIVE
Agency Partner Interactive is a Dallas-based digital agency that helps businesses achieve aggressive revenue and customer acquisition goals. An SMU Dallas 100 and Inc. 5000 Award winner, Agency Partner, offers top-converting web and app design and high-performing digital marketing services. The company has grown from the ground up since 2010 and has completed over 1500 digital projects for more than 500 clients, including funded startups, SMBs, and multi-billion dollar enterprises.
Expert Tips For What is Content Marketing & Why Do I Need It?
As we move further into the digital age, content marketing is becoming increasingly more important. In order to stay ahead of the competition, you need to have a content marketing strategy plan that’s up-to-date, innovative, and compelling for your customers and prospects, setting you apart from the rest. In this blog post, we’ll explore what content marketing is, the benefits of content marketing, and how to build a content marketing strategy to grow your business.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant. Consistent content (audio, visual, and/or written) to appeal to and keep a clear target audience, which in turn drives profit and achieves business goals. A successful content strategy should attract your audience at every step, keeping them engaged after their purchase.
Why Do I Need Content Marketing?
A common misconception new business owners may have is that a content marketing strategy is nice to have, but not a necessity early on. Let’s debunk that. Producing high-quality, compelling content can be invaluable in establishing trust with new target audiences and contribute to long-term business success. Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for consistent and reliable, cost-effective sources of new leads and website traffic. If you can develop a single blog post that gets a solid amount of traffic, an embedded link or fee tool will continue to generate leads for you over time, long after the post date. This reliable traffic and lead source from your evergreen content can give you the flexibility to try out other marketing tactics to build revenue, like sponsored content, social media ads, and distributed content. Apart from attracting leads, impactful content educates your prospective customers and generates brand awareness.
Why is Content Marketing So Important?
Content marketing opens a conversation with your audience and keeps those conversations fresh, helpful, and engaging over time. Great content marketing leads to engagement and builds relationships and trust amongst your target audience. A recent study states that marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to see increased ROI than companies that don’t. Content marketing captures 7.8x more organic traffic and generates 3x the leads, and costs less than other digital marketing channels. Lastly, content marketing is a welcoming extension for the user rather than an interruption from their activity.
What Are the Steps to Building a Content Marketing Strategy?
Define your goal: knowing why you want to create content and your aim for developing a content marketing plan is essential to determining what’s best for your strategy.
Conduct research: clearly defining your target audience is the key to developing a successful content marketing strategy. By understanding your target audience, you can produce relevant and impactful content that will keep them engaged and wanting to learn more.
Run content audit: most brands usually start with blog posts. If you’re looking to expand into different formats, you can run a content audit to evaluate your highest and lowest performing content. Then use that information to determine your next steps.
Decide on a content management system: some critical parts of content management are content creation, publication, and analytics. You’ll want to invest in a content management system to keep track of your content in a way that’s easy to read and sustainable.
Determine what type of content works best for your business: you can choose whichever media you think resonates best with your audience, from written blog posts to audio content like podcasts and more.
Generate ideas for content: it’s brainstorming time! Start coming up with ideas for what you want your content to be about. There are many tools you can use to surface relevant keywords or google SEO analytics to gain the most exposure and generate leads for your brand.
Publish and manage content: your content marketing strategy should include more than just the type of content you’ll create – it should also include how you’ll organize your content. A content calendar will help you publish a well-balanced and diverse content library for your website and work in conjunction with other marketing channels like social media marketing.
In conclusion, building a content marketing strategy tailored to your business and target audience is the key to establishing trust and an impactful relationship with your customers. Great content marketing is educational and keeps your audience engaged, leading to higher conversion rates and lead generation that, in turn, helps your bottom line. If you’re ready to start developing lucrative and powerful content marketing strategies to accelerate and grow your business, contact Agency Partner Interactive today to schedule a consultation. The experts at API have all the tools and resources needed to create outstanding content that’s helpful for your audience while keeping the conversation fresh and engaging.
One thing we hear all the time is: How much does SEO cost? How much should I budget for SEO Marketing Services?
As digital marketers, we hear that question and our brains start to think about SEO strategy and everything that goes into getting more organic searches for business owners. Immediately, our SEO specialists consider everything from potential website performance needs, competitor research, on-page SEO optimization, link-building strategies, local SEO, and more as it relates to your goals.
Oh, and let’s not leave out considerations for the fact that there are different SEO pricing models, depending on whether you are looking for a one-time optimization or if you’re truly looking to play the long game and dominate your industry. Depending on what you need, you will likely consider fixed pricing versus monthly retainers that support technical SEO efforts, the cost of content marketing that helps you rank on Page 1 for new keywords, and routine analytics meetings with your SEO consultant.
Those are just a few things we think about. Other questions may include:
How long has your web domain been around? What about other websites that compete for the same keywords?
How much organic traffic are we currently seeing in Google Analytics and what are the referral sources?
Is the site ranking just for branded keywords, or are more competitive keywords resulting in impressions and clicks?
What does the Google Search Console say of impressions and clicks to your website over time? Is growth stagnant?
Is your website currently holding a first page rank for any relevant search terms either locally or nationally?
How healthy is your backlink profile relative to the top ranked sites?
Are we competing with big brands, local businesses, or personalities?
How often do your biggest competitors publish blogs, news articles, and/or new web pages?
Can the business support a SEO campaign right now? …or do immediate needs require that this budget be allocated toward a more immediate, albeit less permanent marketing tactic?
In Google Analytics, what does the website’s bounce rate look like relative to keywords resulting in clicks to the site?
While these questions are fairly common, the answers to them will vary significantly from one business website to another. Competitiveness and your desire to dominate will factor into what your monthly SEO budget should look like. To generalize, most SEO experts will charge a monthly recurring investment of $2,000 to $10,000+ per month. Yes, that’s a big range!
How Much Does SEO Cost? Learn from Texas’ top SEO marketing agency.
A national or international SEO budget in a competitive online market should never be less than $5000 per month. For SEO that seeks to attract local buyers in a not so competitive market, it is possible to kick-off a local SEO campaign in the $500 to $2500 range. Again, depending on competitiveness, your budget will vary significantly.
To learn more about where that money goes, some things to watch out for when selecting a SEO partner, and when you can expect some ROI from SEO, keep on reading!
What to Expect From An Appropriate SEO Budget
Notably, the value from search engine optimization compounds over time… So unlike PPC on Google Ads, SEO is not how you make a quick buck. SEO is how you build wealth through a business website.
SEO is also kind of like caring for a plant. It requires consistent attention over time and when you stop, your SEO value slowly begins to diminish relative to other competing sites on the web. This is because Google’s search algorithm changes constantly. So as you consider your SEO budget, be mindful of the fact that an adequate SEO effort is something that should be a monthly recurring undertaking for the life of your business or website.
SEO, when content driven, ensures that whenever someone is searching for answers to any question that is relevant to your business, your brand is front and center every time. Businesses love SEO because of how the economics of it play out relative to other sales and marketing activities. If you consider an investment over 12 months, notice how the monthly expense stays mostly flat in the graph below. Also take note of what the additional revenue line is doing… strongrevenue growth.
In this example, we are looking at a Texas based, B2B medical supplies company with a monthly SEO budget of $8,500. At the 7th month of this campaign, things started to get exciting because this company’s website began to rank on Page 1 of Google for some its most commercially valuable keywords. At the close of the year and following a 12 month SEO investment of $102,000, this family business counted just under $1 million in additional revenue and a massive ROI. The break-down is as follows:
Total SEO Budget: $102,000
Total New Revenue: $992,742
12 month SEO ROI: $890,742
Unlike this company’s SEO campaign, if you look at their Google Ads marketing performance, new revenue is positively correlated to their monthly ad budget. So as logic would have it, more budget equates to more revenue just as less budget equates to less sales. In this case, the client was competing in a market with a fairly expensive cost per click and PPC was never their most desired source of new business. PPC helped them serve some immediate needs while they worked to establish their SEO game.
To reiterate, this is a big reason that business owners love the economics of an expertly crafted SEO campaign versus other marketing channels. SEO is part of a long-term, industry-dominating digital marketing strategy. A basic SEO campaign typically takes anywhere from 8 to 16 months before a mostly static, consistent monthly investment begins to generate a noticeable ROI. For some industries and markets, like SEO for family law, return on investment may feel exponential once your average page rank starts to hold search engine positions 1 through 3.
Ways to Allocate Your SEO Marketing Budget
There are different ways to allocate your SEO budget and get the work done. You may consider augmenting your existing marketing team to fill any gaps in expertise, hiring an outside agency that happens to be an expert, or you may try the DIY route. Generally speaking, these are the various ways to allocate your SEO marketing dollars:
Hiring a team of SEO freelancers with a budget of $70 to $190 per hour, per person
Hiring an in-house marketing manager or marketing project manager that can manage a team of SEO freelancers.
Depending on experience, expect to budget anywhere from $50,000 to $125,000 per year for this person. You get what you pay for!
Don’t forget to add the cost of your freelancers to this. They will most likely charge a price per word or a flat monthly fee for a set amount of deliverables.
Hiring a SEO agency at $90 to $250 per hour depending on the agency’s bill rate
Small consultancies and startups may easily feel overwhelmed by all of this and most will never have a starting SEO budget of $8500 per month…. but the fact is that there is a way to start small and grow your SEO strength in an effective, strategic way.
Many small to medium sized companies, including law firms and health practices, tend to hire marketing agencies because they are able to gain access to certified, experienced experts that would otherwise be out of reach. Most agencies will offer a full suite, white glove service that functions much like an outside marketing and technology department. Enterprises will almost always utilize their in-house teams for SEO however it is common for them to hire agencies for occasional marketing tests or simply to get some fresh ideas on the whiteboard.
Across all budgets, the common key to success is a commitment to consistent, scheduled content production over an indefinite period of time.
Why $100 Per Month Is NOT The Real Cost of Cheap SEO
Affordable SEO does exist, however there is such a thing as “cheap” or bad SEO… Bad SEO is exactly what it sounds like. It’s wholly inadequate and far too many companies fall into this trap. A lot of this stems down to the fact that less than half of small businesses have a SEO budget of any kind. Of the businesses that do have a SEO budget, a survey indicates that 71% of small businesses budget for only $1 to $99 per month for their SEO. I mean… you get what pay for. $99 is literally nothing and you will almost certainly measure some negative ROI from this.
Most often, this is due to a lack of education wherein business owners are sold by the agency with the cheapest proposal rather than the one with the highest value. This happens ALL the time. Don’t be a sucker.
Unfortunately, SEO spammers know that most business owners have no idea how SEO works.
This is why they exploit businesses every day by sending spam email with promises that you can get on Page One of Google for only $99. Because most business owners assume that SEO is a basic commodity, similar to getting gas at the pump, many opt to invest in the cheapest option. After several months, they may realize that there is “no strategy” and/or no ROI and will opt to end the campaign to either find another vendor or do nothing at all.
The way this often plays out is like this:
Company contacts 2 to 4 agencies for SEO quotes
Some agencies respond with general, templates proposals, almost immediately. Others may ask some basic business questions.
Company considers several proposals. Often, these are reviewed by several stakeholders that really do not understand what SEO is.
Company may reach out to the final 1-2 agencies with follow up questions.
Company opts for the cheapest or second to cheapest SEO marketing proposal.
Company cancels SEO arrangement after several months.
Either immediately or several months later, Company may opt to work with a different SEO Agency or does not invest in any SEO.
This scenario plays out daily. In the end, a lot of time has been wasted, a little money has been burned, and the business hasn’t really achieved its goals. But worse can happen….
Some of the collateral damage from cheap SEO may far outweigh any money that may have been (under) invested to begin with.
There are a ton of LinkedIn and Facebook groups for digital marketers. In some of these forums, you’ll observe extremely elementary questions from people posing as experts. Some of these questions may be so basic as: “I just scored a SEO client and he wants to rank for ‘keyword X’ so how do I do that?”
There are also a ton of online resources that provide free or low cost SEO tools for rookies that want to pose as SEO experts. In most cases, rookie marketers will rely on their personality and salesmanship to “score a client” and then figure out the SEO part after the sale. This is something to fear as the effects of black hat SEO may be permanent in some cases and in others, they may be very difficult to bounce back from. Things to watch out for include:
Utilization of link schemes such a private blog networks (PBNs)
Unnatural, purchased backlinks that may or may not be relevant to your industry
Keyword stuffing and hidden text on your web pages.
Zero requests for a content calendar and weekly recurring blog posts
The single most damaging thing a SEO rookie may lead you toward is a Google penalty. The effects of a penalty from Google can be absolutely devastating and you should expect a huge loss of organic search visibility, clicks to your website, and revenue. There are ways to bounce back from this, but it takes a lot of investment to do so.
DIY Stuff: Start Your SEO Budget By Collecting Some Basic Information
To truly understand where you need to go, it is important that you fully understand where you are today. There are a few ways to do this and the most simple is to ensure that your technology team has been instructed to check your website for some technical best practices. Once you have ensured that some foundational things have been fully accounted for, you also will want to glance at your competitors and see what things look like on their side of the fence. We have found that some of the most powerful SEO strategies start with a basic SWOT analysis.
Compare Your Website’s SEO Grade versus Your Competitor’s
Use comparative data to create your roadmap for success.
This is something that your in-house digital marketer should be doing already: Take 90 seconds and get your Competitive SEO Report Card score to see where you stand. When doing so, be sure to enter the domain of your single biggest competitor, and enter a super common, non-branded word that a customer would search for when looking for the product/services you sell.
Competitive SEO Report Card (scroll down to “Begin Your Free SEO Analysis”)
Ensure That These 3 Fundamental Elements are In Place
Does your site adequately address demands around Mobile Friendliness and Site Speed?
As a best practice, your marketing team should be demanding a routine weekly or monthly audit of your website’s mobile friendliness and site speed. Because a majority of web searches start with a mobile browser, Google wants to ensure a fantastic mobile experience in its search results. So know where you stand and ensure that your site is up to the mark by leveraging these two free tools.
Make certain that your site is defaulting to HTTPS when opening pages.
Google has adopted a strict position on information security. Whether or not a website leverages HTTP versus HTTPS is a Google ranking signal. This means that Google will view a domain that opens in HTTPS more favorably than one that opens in HTTP. To open your website securely you must have an active SSL certificate associated with your web host. To see whether or not your site has an active SSL certificate in place, simply open your website and see what the browser bar tells you. Do you see HTTP or HTTPS next to your web address?
By leveraging HTTPS, you are telling your visitors that you value their privacy and taking a step to help prevent third parties from eavesdropping on a conversation between your website and your web visitor. This is especially important for any web forms that may ask for personal, financial, or other information. If you choose not to have your website default to loading secured HTTPS sessions, Chrome and other browsers will go so far as to inform users that your site may be compromised and unsafe to access.
So before any actual SEO work begins, consult with your technology team and ensure that you have your bases covered as things pertain to Speed, Mobile Friendliness, and Site Security.
If you are starting from scratch and have never optimized your site for speed, security, and mobility, expect to pay anywhere from $300 to $3000 for the first effort.
Once you have covered those three essentials, you are almost ready to call in your SEO experts. Be sure to discuss maintenance of these items with your technology team and inquire about a monthly and annual budget for this routine work effort. Once you get past the first big optimization, your monthly maintenance budget should be fairly minuscule. If you have any questions about that, please feel free to contact us directly by clicking here: Ask Us About Speed, Security, or Mobile Friendliness.
Have a Clear Understanding of Your Business Goals
Now that we have accounted for the basic technological leg work that goes into creating a solid SEO foundation, we can start building. But just what exactly are we needing to build? To answer this question, start by writing down what your business goals and objectives are.
On paper, define what sort of ROI you expect and need from your SEO campaign. Is it leads, sales, retention?
Discuss your goals with other stakeholders and create a realistic, “rigidly flexible” SEO budget as a conversation starter.
Put On Your “Spy vs. Spy” Hat
In a nutshell, it is time to compare your website against your industry’s top ranking sites. This helps you understand what tactics your biggest competitors are employing. In many ways, it should be your goal to match, and then one up whatever it is they are doing. To put this as simply as possible, do the following:
Compare your blog versus their’s — how regularly do they publish new content?
Does their content add value?
What is the approximate word count of their average post?
Does your competitor seem to leverage press releases?
Are there any special sections on their site like FAQs or location specific landing pages?
Does their site have a landing page that is uniquely tailored to each product/service line?
Take note of your findings and be prepared to discuss all of this information with your internal stakeholders. Also, be ready to share this with your agency partner and know that the more candid you are, the more able your SEO expert will be to devise a competition crushing strategy.
Sum It All Up And Share Your New SEO Budget
By now, you know that you need to allocate some of your marketing budget to the following, tangible deliverables:
Site Speed Optimization performed by your web team
Mobile Friendliness update performed by your web team
SSL certificate performed by your web team
At a range of $300 to $3000 for this first overhaul, these are fairly inexpensive optimizations. Once you’re past the first optimization, you should make a plan to revisit these items at least once a month.
With the foundational tech needs accounted for, you also know that you need to allocate part of your monthly SEO budget toward:
On-page optimization performed by your digital marketing team
Off-page optimization performed by your digital marketing team
Expect to pay your in-house team or agency partner anywhere from $1500 to $2500 per month for really good, US based SEO optimization. This should include the cost of monthly analytics and reporting, keyword targeting, strategy, and updates to your meta-titles, tags, and descriptions. Also, know that this alone is not enough to help you grow and dominate your market.
The next big variable, and often the most costly, is the key ingredient that actually helps you retain your favorable position and rank for new, relevant keywords:
Weekly, recurring SEO Content production performed by your digital marketing team
To determine what your content needs are, this is where you refer back to your marketing intelligence. If your competitor is posting a new blog every day at 500 words each, at a bare minimum you should be doing that as well. It is best to curate a writer that is a subject matter expert on your topic or at least familiar with your industry.
To help you do the math on this one, assume that your content will cost anywhere from $0.15 to $1.50 per word. The range is fairly expansive because some writers are much more valuable than others. There are a lot of people that will claim to be content writers but there is a huge difference in style, expertise, and process. Super cheap writing tends to be spun content and it is not suitable for 99% of business websites. If your subject matter requires unique expertise, it is possible to pay as much as $1 to $2 per word.
If it’s super specialized content that you’re after, well… yes, you guessed it: that price per word just keeps going up. Remember, you get what you pay for!
Know that the perfect SEO strategy may or may not conform to your early budget expectations but even a small SEO scope can prove to be valuable… so start with Local SEO and the basics of on-page SEO services! If in fact your site requires a lot more investment than anticipated, discuss what can be done to stretch every investment dollar and whether or not some tactics may be phased into your SEO campaign over time.
As a Leader, Educate Yourself and Make an Informed Decision
Combined with our own data, this information has been aggregated by surveying top SEO agencies and world renowned SEO authorities. If you’re looking to firmly control your market and aggressively grow your market share, a content driven, expertly crafted SEO strategy may be for you. As long as you understand that this is not about making a quick buck, with some patience and equal commitment to a full campaign, SEO can be one of your most reliable performers when it comes to lead generation.
Additionally, the best SEO tends to positively impact your other marketing channels so don’t take this budget decision lightly. For example, if you are running a Google Ads campaign, it will lower your cost per click by improving your Google relevancy score. This means that for the same PPC budget, you end up winning more clicks and impressions.
Also, effective SEO allows you to build a valuable content library that will establish your brand as a thought leader. This content helps your customers make purchase decisions and it gives your sales team a more valuable reason for reaching out to sales prospects. No one likes the “check-in” or “follow-up” email so lead with value and share a new blog with your prospect.
By now, hopefully you understand that search engine optimization is a process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website on search engines. Proper SEO can help a website attract more organic traffic, which can lead to increased sales and brand awareness. While there is no set cost for SEO services, most businesses should expect to budget between $500 and $5,000 per month for SEO. The actual SEO cost will depend on factors such as the size of the business, the competitiveness of the industry, and the desired results. Businesses that commit to a long-term SEO strategy and invest in the full suite of SEO services are more likely to see a return on their investment. For this reason, it is important to partner with an experienced SEO company that can develop a custom SEO plan for your business.
Chances are that you’re seriously looking to improve your SEO game. That’s great, we’re here for it!
To get your search engine optimization game on track, contact our digital marketing experts today. Click the button below and tee up a free, no obligation 1 hour strategy session.
For more reading, we were interviewed by SEOblog. Check out our feature by clicking below.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Create a Budget For SEO” instead.
Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
As we move further into the 21st century, the world of digital marketing is only going to become more and more important. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest digital skills. In this blog post, we will take a look at some of the most in-demand digital skills for 2022. Whether you’re a business owner or an employee, these skills will help you thrive in the years to come!
What are digital skills?
Digital skills are the abilities and knowledge needed to succeed in the digital world. This includes everything from social media marketing to web design to data analysis. As the world becomes more and more digital, these skills are becoming more and more important.
As business owners and employees, it’s important that we keep our digital skills up-to-date. So we stay ahead of the curve in competitive markets.
Why are digital skills important?
Digital skills are important because they can help you succeed in any number of industries. Whether you’re looking to start your own business or get ahead in your current career, digital skills will give you the tools you need to succeed.
Are All Digital Skills Coding?
No! You don’t need to be able to code to have digital skills. While coding is a valuable skill in the digital world, it’s only one aspect of many. There are plenty of other digital skills that don’t involve codings, such as social media marketing, web design, and data analysis.
What are the most in-demand digital skills for 2022?
In 2022 the digital realm has expanded beyond what we could have ever imagined. With technology changing and advancing at breakneck speeds, it can be hard to keep up with the latest trends. Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of the most in-demand digital skills for 2022 so you can stay ahead of the curve.
Digital Marketing Skills
Digital marketing is the process of using digital channels to promote or market products and services. This can include everything from social media marketing to email marketing to search engine optimization (SEO). As the world becomes more and more digitized, businesses are realizing the importance of a strong digital marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most in-demand skills of 2022. As the world becomes more and more connected, businesses are looking for ways to reach their target audiences through social media. If you’re interested in a career in digital marketing, social media marketing is a great place to start.
Email Marketing
Email marketing continues to be strong in the world of digital marketing. In 2022, businesses will be looking for ways to connect with their customers and clients through email. If you’re interested in a career in digital marketing, email marketing is a great place to start.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing a website for Google search. In other words, it’s the process of making a website more visible in Google search results. In 2022, businesses will be looking for ways to improve their SEO in order to reach more customers and clients. If you’re interested in a career in digital marketing, SEO is a great place to start.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC is a type of digital marketing where businesses pay to have their ads displayed in Google search results. In 2022, businesses will be looking for ways to improve their PPC campaigns in order to reach more customers and clients. If you’re interested in a career in digital marketing, PPC is a great place to start.
Web Design
Another in-demand skill for 2022 is web design. As businesses move more of their operations online, they need websites that are user-friendly and visually appealing. If you have a knack for design, web design is a great career to consider.
Data Analysis
Data analysis is another skill set that will be in high demand in 2022. As businesses collect more and more data, they need people who can help them make sense of it all. If you’re detail-oriented and good with numbers, data analysis could be the perfect career for you.
Software and Technical Skills
While some software skills may seem basic, they will become increasingly important in the next few years.
WordPress
WordPress is a content management system that helps you create and manage a website. While it’s not as popular as it once was, WordPress is still a valuable skill to have. Many websites are built on the WordPress platform, and even having a basic understanding of how it works is very valuable.
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office has been a staple of the business industries for decades now. With no sign of going away anytime soon, Microsoft Office is a great digital skill to have in your playbook.
Google Suite
Google Suite, or GSuite, is an important part of daily business for many companies. Being able to work within digital workspaces and docs, as Google offers, is an important digital skill.
Adobe Suite
Adobe has built some of the most powerful image and video editing software that exists. Being able to work and utilize their software, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc, is a great way to step up your digital skills!
Project Management
As businesses take on more projects, they’ll need people who can help manage them. If you’re good at keeping track of deadlines and details, project management is a great digital skill to have.
Marketing Automation
As businesses automate more of their marketing processes, they’ll need people who know how to use the software. Marketing automation is a complex but important digital skill that will be in high demand in 2022.
These are just a few of the most in-demand digital skills for 2022. If you’re looking to get ahead in your career, start by learning one or more of these skills. With the right skill set, you’ll be well on your way to success! If you’re interested in learning more digital skills, keep an eye on our blog! And if you want help to start your own digital projects using digital experts, contact us today!
Expert Tips For How to Identify Your Target Audience for Small Businesses
As a small business owner, you know that one of the keys to success is identifying and targeting your ideal customer. But what if you’re not sure who that is? In this post, we’ll give you some tips for finding and understanding your target audience. By the end of this, you should have a good idea of who your digital marketing is trying to reach with your product or service. Let’s get started!
What Is a Target Audience?
A target audience is a particular group of people that fit certain criteria to mean they most likely will buy your product or hire your service. These are exactly the people you want your ad campaigns to be placed in front of. We’ll get to the specific categories of criteria a little later in the post!
Advantages of Targeting in Marketing
Knowing exactly who your product or service is aimed at reaching can be critical in maximizing your digital marketing budget. Sharpen your marketing strategies, develop deeper customer loyalty and better brand awareness, attract higher quality leads, and focus on who will most likely give you the biggest ROI. Niche targeting has never been more powerful!
What Are the Types of Target Audiences?
Market categorizing or ‘segmenting’ can break down into 6 basic types: demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioral, needs-based, and transactional.
Demographic – The most popular type of segmentation, this type defines the more literal aspects of who the audience is, depending on a B2C (age, gender, ethnicity, profession, education) or B2B (industry, company size, and position, job tenure) context.
Geographic – Sometimes where someone lives can affect their purchasing choices. It probably wouldn’t be very useful to run Google Ads for surfboards in Scandinavia, right? This could be as general as a continent or all the way down to a specific district or zip code.
Psychographic – Interests, values, hobbies, attitudes, lifestyle. Apple is well known for marketing the idea of minimalism and attainable luxury for the modern, forward-thinking consumer. That’s psychographics!
Behavioral – How has your audience previously interacted with your brand? What is their awareness of your brand? Have they made any purchases from your company already? What about their product knowledge?
Needs-based – This one’s pretty straightforward and also breaks down further into 4 sub-categories: problem-solving (low-carb products for diabetics), emotional (anti-aging skincare products), functional (ride-sharing apps), and value-based needs (products for vegans).
Transactional – You know those offers for free shipping on orders over a certain amount? Or those ‘We miss you – here are 15% off your next order’ emails you get after not shopping at a particular store for a long while? Yep, that’s transactional segmentation.
7 Tips for Identifying Your Target Audience
Now, how to actually figure out who fits into those targeting types…
Audit Your Current Customer Base
Look at who all has already bought your product or service. What do they all have in common, or maybe what’s different among them? Are they all of similar ages or from similar regions? Why did they decide on using your company? Use your social media or send out customer surveys to get started!
Research The Market
Research your market as a whole to find what may be missing. Is there a particular untapped crowd that your company can speak to? Focus there to refine your unique product value messaging.
Study Your Competitors
Who are your competitors targeting? There could be a lot of opportunities to learn from what works and doesn’t work for them. Maybe your competitors are overlooking, again, an untapped crowd or marketing channel.
Dive Into Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a savvy marketer’s secret weapon for all the insights you can gain into your site visitors’ habits and interests, how they’re discovering you, and what they’re engaging with most.
Build Personas
This step is for after you’ve done your initial segmentation work. Take all that great data you gathered and use it to create identities for your customers. Maybe base them around familiarity with your product crossed with the general demographics of your audience to then target how you speak to their more specific needs. We at Agency Partner Interactive recommend crafting 3 to 5 different personas.
Rethink the idea of “Everyone”
It’s impossible to actually appeal to every single person – not even puppies or pizza can do that – but the idea can still lead you to a useful mindset! “Everyone” really can just mean you have multiple audiences and may need to approach each with a different type of marketing. Odds are there will be lots of overlap, too!
Evolve Evolve Evolve
Understand that this is a never-ending process. People change, markets change, needs change, your company will probably also change. Be ready to refine and optimize and re-refine and re-optimize your audience targeting so long as you’re in business.
It’s clear that knowing your target audience is essential for small businesses. By understanding who your ideal customer is, you can create a more effective marketing strategy that reaches them where they are. You can also tailor your products and services to better meet their needs. If you’re not sure how to identify and segment your target audience or need help reaching them, contact our team of experts at Agency Partner. We’d be happy to help you develop a plan that targets the right customers and helps your business grow!
No matter the size of your business, it’s always important to make sure you’re using all the tools at your disposal to attract customers. One of the most effective ways to do this is through PPC advertising. But if you’re not seeing the results you want, don’t worry – there are definitely ways to improve your performance! In this post, we’ll outline some tips for boosting your PPC campaigns.
Set a clear goal
Unless you know where you’re going, it’s hard to know how to get there. Make sure you’ve set clear, measurable goals in order to strategically and effectively optimize your PPC campaigns. Depending on the intended impact, some PPC goals to set could be:
Getting traffic to your website
Improving sales
Gaining subscribers or downloads
Always keep your goals realistic, too. Success can be very motivating, but only if it’s actually achievable!
Strategize using high-performance keywords
Finding the right keywords can make or break any campaign, including PPC, and the most important keywords have a high CTR or ‘click-through rate.’ Thoroughly check their performance on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) platforms like SEMrush or Moz.
Bonus tip: Maybe your users live in a different part of the world than where you’re based. A VPN can help you reroute your searches to include the right regions for your needs.
Boost the quality of your keyword score
Loading your campaigns with all the keywords you possibly can may seem like a good idea… but unfortunately, it’s not. ‘Keyword stuffing’ as it’s known is prioritizing quantity over quality. Refine what you include to reach a better, more targeted audience to make your efforts efficient.
Consider if your ad copy truly supports the keyword objective and clearly speaks to your customer’s pain points.
Combine Similar Conversion Events Into A Single One
If multiple PPC events can be combined into one, you’re both streamlining the process AND refining machine learning. Whichever PPC platforms you’re using will be much better equipped for delivering your ads at higher optimization. More singular data for conversion = better conversion results.
Add Google ad extensions
Attach additional company or product info with ad extensions to help searching users learn more about you.
Manual ad extensions can be customized with site links, your location, reviews, contact info, etc.
Automated ad extensions work, well, automatically and can dynamically include previous visits, consumer and seller ratings, structured snippets, etc.
Create a list of negative keywords
Negative keywords are a good thing to have, we promise! Say you are selling ‘brand new’ TVs, so you wouldn’t want your ads to show up as a result for someone searching for ‘refurbished’ TVs. This list helps keep your PPC targeted to your most relevant click and conversion opportunities, thus further maximizing your campaign budget.
Take advantage of remarketing
Instead of looking at a high bounce rate as defeat or frustration, look at it as an opportunity. This is just a sign to implement remarketing tools which send a follow-up ad via cookies to potential customers who have already looked at your site or product. It’s a very cost-effective option that has a proven history of higher ROI (return on investment).
Some ideas might be
Try A/B testing on lead magnets
Promote to users based on YouTube usage
Utilize your CRM
Boost your ad copy engagement
All the remarketing in the world won’t do much unless it’s in support of a solid campaign message. Take another hard look at your ad copy. Is it…
concise?
Considering character limits, make the most of your available space with a clear, direct copy about what you do and what it can do for the user.
relevant?
Does the copy reflect the audience segment you’re retargeting? Does it match its attached landing page?
attention-grabbing?
This is the perfect place for high impact, motivating words like ‘discover’, ‘exclusive’, ‘limited’, ‘instant’
coupled with a strong, clear CTA (call to action)?
Tell the user exactly what you want them to do next. ’Shop Now!’ ‘Get 1 Month Free’ ‘Learn More’
Avoid remarketing too frequently
When setting your remarketing ad frequency, be aware of what you set the amount to. If it’s too often or for too long a timeframe, you run the risk of irritating those potential customers. Keep in mind that these remarketing campaigns cannot account for users who follow through offline, like if your CTA is to call your business for an appointment.
With so many factors to consider in optimizing your remarketing campaigns, Agency Partner is ready to help you through every step. Give us a call today for a consultation!
Expert Tips For The 10 Best Animation Apps For Making Eye-Catching Videos
Here at Agency Partner Interactive, we are bullish on video. We all know the marketing power behind video marketing. It’s a powerful tool that can be used by any size business to connect with their customers and prospects in an emotional way, and it is one of the most shared types of content on social media. But, this doesn’t mean you have to hire a production company or spend thousands on professional-level equipment to make high-quality videos for your marketing campaigns. There are plenty of animation apps available today that give you the ability to create eye-catching marketing videos without having to break the bank!
In fact, marketing videos don’t have to be perfect. They just need to get your point across and connect with your target audience in a way that is authentic and relatable. No one wants an overly produced video where someone looks like they are reading straight from a teleprompter. People want authenticity!
There are so many video platforms out there, how do you know which one to use? What’s the best marketing video animation app out there? We have a list of ten marketing video animation apps that will help you create high-quality marketing videos for your business.
From Adobe Spark to Flipaclip, we break down each marketing video animation app and share why it is great for any size company or agency looking to add videos into their marketing deck.
Adobe Spark
If you’re in marketing, there is no doubt you know the powerhouse that is Adobe. Adobe Spark is one of the marketing video animation apps that is part of Adobe’s family. With this marketing app, you can create graphics and marketing videos for your business or brand without needing to know how to use complicated software like Photoshop. It has templates built-in already so all you have to do is choose one, or start from scratch, upload images/videos from your computer, and you’re done!
Adobe Spark has a free version, as well as a premium version starting at $9.99 per month.
Canva
Canva is a great marketing video animation app for creating designs and graphics. It is also free to use, which makes it perfect for small businesses or those on a tight budget. With over 600 templates to choose from and easy drag-and-drop tools, you can create any kind of marketing graphic or video you need without having to hire a designer. With tons of templates, you’re bound to find a design that works for your business, or you can build one from scratch.
Canva has a free version and a pro version for $119.99 per year or $12.99 per month.
Flipaclip
If you like the style of old-school animation or flipbooks, Fliipaclip is a great choice for you! It is a marketing video animation app that allows you to create frame-by-frame animations on your phone. All you have to do is upload some images, or draw them in the app, then share it on your page as a Gif or video!
Flipaclip is available for free via your favorite app store, but has premium features available as well.
PicsArtAA
PicsArt is a marketing video animation app that allows you to do more than just animate. With PicsArt, you can also add text, filters, and stickers to your videos for extra pizzazz! Create your own animated emojis using the Emoji Me feature.
PicsArt is free to download but does have in-app purchases.
Animation Desk
Animation Desk is another marketing video that utilizes frame-to-frame animations. It is available for both Android and iOS devices. This marketing video animation app has a wide variety of features, such as the ability to add sound effects and music, create storyboards, and even collaborate with other animators!
Animation Desk is available for free on iOS and Windows 10 but has a premium subscription as well.
Animoto
Animoto is a cloud-based video creation app that you might be familiar with. It allows anyone to create marketing videos within minutes! With Animoto, all you have to do is select from one of their many templates, upload some images and/or videos, then pick the style of music for your marketing video. You can also change up font styles to match your brand!
Animoto has a free standard and their basic plan starts at as little as $96 a year or $16 a month.
Powtoon
Powtoon is another marketing video animation app that allows you to create animated marketing videos without the need for expensive software. With Powtoon, you can select pre-built templates of animated characters or video templates, backgrounds, props, and much more. Upload your own voice-over and background music for a great marketing video.
Powtoon is free for personal use but has premium subscriptions starting at $228 a year.
Stop Motion Studio
Stop Motion Studio is a marketing video animation app that allows you to create marketing videos using stop motion. It has a frame-by-frame editor with tools for animating objects and backgrounds, as well as multi-layered soundtracks!
Stop Motion Studio can be downloaded on iOS devices free of charge but does have some premium features available.
Blender
Blender is a marketing video animation app that can be used to create both still and animated graphics. It offers an expansive library of materials, textures, and models to use in your marketing videos. With Blender, you can create incredible 3D CG videos. You can also create your own using the built-in tools Blender has to offer!
Blender is 100% free for any purpose, but consider donating if you enjoy the software!
Animate it!
Animate it! is a marketing video animation app that offers a wide variety of features for creating your own marketing videos. With Animate it!, you can create storyboards, animate characters, and props, add sound effects and music, and so much more!
Animate it! is available for purchase on the App Store for $14.
If you’ve tested these apps and need some more support creating stunning marketing videos, contact Agency Partner Interactive today! We have marketing video experts who can help you create the best marketing videos for your business. Contact us or call us today!
Facebook and Instagram’s servers are down for nearly 2.85 billion users worldwide. Facebook CTO, Mike Schroepfer, added the following statement via Twitter:
*Sincere* apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible
Inside Facebook, the outage has broken nearly all internal systems employees use to communicate and work. Several employees told The Vergethey’ve resorted to talking through their work-provided Outlook email accounts, though employees can’t receive emails from external addresses. Employees logged into work tools such as Google Docs and Zoom before the outage can still use those, but any employee who needs to log in with their work email is blocked.
The Verge reports that Facebook engineers have been sent to the company’s U.S. data centers to try and fix the problem, according to two people familiar with the situation. That means the outage, already Facebook’s most severe in years could be further prolonged.
What does this mean for your business?
Having a well-built website that won’t crash is important for sales and customer representation. Depending on when Facebook’s servers will be back up, this could negatively affect their business. Since Facebook went down, its stock $FB has been down nearly 5 points.
Many businesses are scrambling to cope with this potential loss of revenue due to the outage. The best course of action for businesses is to ensure their email and SEO strategies are included in their marketing strategies.
How can we help you protect your sales during outages? At Agency Partner Interactive (API), we focus on a holistic marketing strategy that does not rely on only social media. Having a proper SEO strategy can prevent your brand from losing out on sales or leads when Facebook or Instagram goes down. Contact us now!
Expert Tips For 5 Digital Marketing Myths Debunked
Most modern and online businesses have quickly adapted and took advantage of this fast-growing industry regarding digital marketing. Current marketing strategies like digital marketing have given small business owners and marketing teams of established businesses worldwide.
Social Media Marketing is also one of the most effective marketing strategies in the modern day, and businesses not making use of it will be left behind fast. Marketing teams in businesses should have adapted and allowed budgets to generate leads and sales on online platforms. The reach for meager costs will enable businesses to target the correct people while still in the awareness phase.
However, even with evidence and records to prove this, some individuals remain wary. This article will debunk the five most common digital marketing myths.
1 Social Media Marketing Only Works For Specific Industries
This is one of the most common myths because it’s not entirely true. For example, even though social media marketing may be more effective for fashion and retail companies, major brands in every industry have used this strategy to generate leads and sales.
That means as businesses evolve, so does social media marketing; all industries can use it effectively, so there is no need to avoid it! Furthermore, a study conducted by Gartner predicts that by 2020 up to 30% of top-performing companies will abandon their digital campaigns if they don’t start making changes now.
2 SEO Is Dead
No, SEO is not dead! The reverse could be true. This marketing strategy has been around for ages and will continue to exist because it’s still one of the most effective ways to generate leads and sales online. It may not have reached its peak yet either; many other industries can benefit from an increase in search engine rankings, such as healthcare or education—both ranked among the top 20 largest U.S. industry sectors by GDP contribution (Cleveland).
Modern tools like Google Maps also provide hints on where people live, allowing businesses to target neighborhoods they want to reach out to with specific products/services based on location-based searches (Google Trends). As long as these digital marketing myths aren’t true, SEO will remain a powerful way to generate leads and sales. As long as Google considers SEO an essential part of the ranking factors for businesses worldwide, no one can say otherwise.
3 You Don’t Have To Build An Online Presence If Your Competition Isn’t Online.
This myth is not valid. Even though it may seem like the competition might be ahead of you, they’re still vulnerable to being taken over—because your competitors are also running into difficulties with modern marketing strategies.
For example, Facebook’s algorithm changes in late 2016 that led to a decrease in organic content reach meant small businesses and blogs were left behind without enough budget for increased paid ads (Bates). Additionally, since digital marketing requires constant upkeep and care, so does social media; if neglected, there will be consequences!
Of course, established companies can take advantage of this on their own or hire a Top Digital Marketing Agency in Dallas to do all the work for them. Still, no matter what needs to be done, as long as these steps aren’t followed, someone else could come in and take over before you know it.
4 Mobile Website Traffic Doesn’t Drive Conversions
This myth is also not close to being correct. Mobile website traffic has increased steadily over the years, and in fact, mobile-only users have grown to be a top priority market for most businesses. For example, according to Microsoft’s latest report on global internet usage trends (2016), more than 17% of people only use their phones, which means your business must provide easy access via mobile so they can still engage with you effectively.
This also goes for all those competitors out there; if ignored, this could mean lost opportunities when small moments become big deals—such as someone searching nearby restaurants while hungry and finding yours! These digital marketing myths aren’t true, resulting in decreased leads/sales because mobile website traffic is one of the most critical driving conversions.
In more recent years, statistics have shown that mobile users came close to being 50% of all online traffic, making sense. Smartphones have enabled individuals to browse the internet, similar to a PC, conveniently. So make sure your website is optimized for mobile use.
5 Negative Reviews Will Dramatically Decrease Your Sales
This myth is false, especially for high-quality products and services! The truth is that consumers are more likely to buy from a company they know or have heard of before than if they stumble across it randomly, so in this case, negative reviews can be good marketing because people will listen to you through word of mouth. Negative reviews may also lead to increased sales when handled correctly.
By providing customer service with a smile (and sometimes even freebies!), the unhappy customers could become repeat customers who love your business! This goes back to the importance of social media because now these disgruntled customers might spread their happiness on platforms like Facebook. This means all those new potential leads will come knocking at your door, too. Unless, of course, you don’t have the proper digital marketing strategy in place.
As long as these digital marketing myths aren’t true, SEO will remain a powerful way to generate leads and sales. However, it’s essential not to neglect other aspects of modern marketing: social media, for example! Social media platforms like Facebook are just one aspect that businesses need to utilize to get ahead, or they could end up paying the price.
Literally.
This goes back again to those potential customers who might have been interested in your business but decided against it because you didn’t show them any love on their favorite platform. So make sure all bases are covered with Industry-Leading Digital Marketing Services from Dallas Top Digital Marketing Agency today if you want a steady flow of new leads coming in!
Expert Tips For Guide to Optimizing Google My Business
If you have a business website, why do you need to Google My Business?
Google My Business isn’t a replacement for your website. It’s a summary of your most relevant information so people can find out about you quickly and easily.
Your GMB information includes:
Operating hours
Physical Address
Contact Information
Customer Reviews
Who you are
As a business, you also gain crucial information from GMB – like reviews, messages, customer photos, and insights into how customers interact with your business.
Getting Started with a Google My Business Listing
Do you have GMB? Quickly find out by Googling your business name. If no listing pops up or a listing pops up that isn’t claimed, then it’s time you set one up.
Over 56% of businesses never claimed their GMB account! Don’t miss out on potential customers, and claim your business today!
5 Tips for Optimizing Google My Business
If you already have a listing, log into your account and start Google My Business optimization using these five steps.
Fill Out All Your Business Information Using SEO
GMB optimization begins with filling out your basic information on your Google business page. Carefully add as much information as possible – making sure it’s accurate and up to date. Compare the information with your website as inconsistencies negatively affect your search appearance.
Beyond your basic information, your Google My Business listing includes attributes, a description, and a business category. Fill out these portions according to how you want to be ranked in Google and what search terms you want your business to relate to.
Does your location have free Wifi? Is there onsite parking? Is your location wheelchair accessible? These attributes help your business show up when people search phrases like “Wheelchair-accessible restaurants near me” or “hair salon with wifi.”
Use SEO and keywords to get your Google listings ranked in the most relevant customer searches. Your keywords should include where you are, what you offer, and what makes you unique (your marketable quality).
Keep your information Updated.
Your business listing isn’t a one-time deal. You should continually update it with the most accurate information.
New phone number? Update GMB.
New address? Update GMB.
New product? Update GMB.
Changed holiday hours? Update GMB.
You get the idea. Customers should know your Google local listing is reliable, or else it could negatively affect your business.
Use Pictures
People like pictures. Use them! Over 60% of customers are MORE likely to visit your business if you have an image. Images show you are a real business with live people. This knowledge builds trust in customers and makes them more willing to do business with you.
There are several types of images you should choose carefully and have added to any GMB.
Logo: This image is your face and will show up the most in search results – choose it wisely!
Cover Photo: Summarize WHO you are using one photo to grab people’s attention.
Business Photos: Have fun with the pictures connected to your account. Show friendly interactions, quality products, and relevant images that boost your brand.
Use GMB to Interact with Customers
In a world filled with robots and automated messaging, finding a human to interact within a business is rare. Build a personal relationship with your customers by giving them that human touch.
GMB offers several ways to interact with customers. First is their messaging app. You have contact forms, email, and phone numbers for customers to use. Also, allow people to directly message you through Google to show you are serious about hearing from them.
Don’t just offer that option, but also respond – even if that means adding in an immediate automated response. Then, have customer service answer personally later. That small gesture lets customers know you are listening.
Reviews are another way to reach out to customers. Over 93% of customers will look up reviews online before deciding on a product. What people say about your business matters!
Show you also care what people are saying by responding to each review using your GMB account. Thank the people who are giving you positive reviews using genuine language. If you can add personal details in your response to prove you’re human and not a robot, add them!
You will sometimes get negative reviews. If you don’t get any negative reviews, customers might start to wonder if you’re a legitimate business. Consider negative reviews as an opportunity to showcase another aspect of your business – customer satisfaction.
Apologize to the person who wasn’t happy, and make a public declaration of your desire to right the wrong. Even if that one customer never returns, other customers know that if they aren’t happy, you’re willing to work with them.
Post events, products, and discounts
Use your business as your storefront window. Display highlights from your product lineup, discounts, and upcoming events.
The products and services listed on your page should represent the very best of your stock. Use catchy images and titles. Even if people aren’t interested in your highlighted products, the images can encourage customers to click on your website to see more.
Everyone likes freebies! Coupons and promotions are another way to encourage people to shop. When you walk into a store, how likely are you to walk straight to the bright red sign exclaiming “SALE!”? When people pull up your business, draw them in with sales and promotions.
Display your calendar of events for customers to see right there on Google. Plus, your event will add another element to rank in Google. If someone Googles “free events near me this weekend,” your event could rank and attract new customers.
Make the Most of Your GMB Page
Optimizing your Google My Business listing isn’t an easy task. That’s why you can hire marketing experts to help with your SEO and rankings.
Agency Partner Interactive offers digital marketing services – including Google My Business optimization – through their team of experts that deliver value, accelerate revenue, and increase profits. Talk to a team member today and start getting the most out of your GMB listing.
Expert Tips For 7 Latest Content Marketing Strategies Practiced by Digital Marketing Experts
As a part of digital marketing, content is an indispensable tool that can drive engagement, help to convert leads and make your company more visible to a wider range of people. Good content is considered an increasingly valuable asset by digital marketing experts and companies alike, with over 90% of companies surveyed recognizing it as essential.
Of course, with its importance comes one of the potential drawbacks – if we all know the importance of content marketing strategies, it’s harder to gain an advantage. So what can we do to ensure a better shot at a wider market?
Below, we will analyze seven separate content marketing approaches that digital marketing experts practice and explain how they could work for you. These are the tips that the best digital marketing services in Dallas and beyond are adopting for their own clients, and they can be effective for you, too.
Build a collective of contributors
If you have the one perfect content creator on staff, you can be sure of attracting customers who like the kind of content they create – but that doesn’t do a lot to diversify or grow your pool of leads. It simply delivers the same people each time.
That’s good for customer loyalty, but you need more than that. A wider range of content creators from different parts of your business means more diverse subject matter, a shake-up of writing styles, and the chance to do different things.
You can invite guest writers who are experts in different aspects of your business, customers who have been really pleased by your service, and more creators besides – if they have something relevant to say about your industry, the more, the merrier.
Build a content calendar
It’s useful to have a pattern to when content goes up, what type of content you publish, when, and more besides. For instance, you should have a deadline for submissions that allows time for proofing, editing, and integration before a post goes live.
You can give over different days of the week to different aspects of your business – posts about HR issues can go live on Wednesdays, while Friday can be for content about procurement. Repeat visitors will come back more often if they know when to come back – and they’ll start to gain an interest in aspects beyond their own areas of focus before long.
Look for digestible content.
The experts on the best content strategy in Dallas and elsewhere know that a diverse collection of content is the way to go. Sometimes, people will want to read deep dives on specific topics, while other times, they will want something a bit more punchy.
You can repost (with permission) other people’s content, potentially adding your own introduction to highlight the relevance of what those other people have to say. Instead of posting the entirety of their content, you can include the sections that mesh especially well with what you want to say – and then drop a link to their blog to advise readers on where they can hear more.
Give people what they want.
It sounds simple, but it does need some fleshing out as a point, this one. There are many ways to find out what people want to read on your blog, and you should use all of those ways. Look at your own analytics, and see the search terms people have used to find your site. Look at keyword analysis tools, and see what’s popular as a search term in your niche.
With media monitoring tools, you can see what’s a hot topic in your sector right now. And then there are always follow-up posts. If one piece has done very well on your blog before, revisit it and address any potential changes in the topic, answer readers’ questions and develop the theme in a way that drives engagement and leads.
Boost your signal
Once you’ve created and published content, the next thing to promote it for all it’s worth. Tweet about it early in the day – and flag it on Instagram, Facebook, and any other social network you’re on – and then send another tweet related to it in the evening with an “ICYMI” (In Case You Missed It).
Various plugins will automatically Tweet any article you post. However, you may prefer to manually promote new posts on social media as this will allow you to add hashtags, emoji, and anything else that makes your content pop.
Also, if recent events have made any of your content more relevant, call back to it on your social channels – people who are following the trend with interest may become followers of your account.
Spread the word
If your content is good enough, then it may well grace the pages of other outlets beyond your own blog, which is something to embrace. Yes, exclusivity is nice as a way of controlling the way your content is displayed and read.
However, the more people that read it, the better. Suppose it is seen on industry blogs, private forums, and local papers much better. The one thing you must insist on is that your name and business are heavily attached to it when it is published elsewhere. You wrote it, you worked on it, and you should benefit from it in terms of your profile.
Don’t write for you
If you’re a writer, then there are probably times that you piece together bits of content in your head, constructing the guts of a post that sounds snappy and interesting to you. Don’t mistake trying to turn this into a post on your blog because a good post won’t start with a snappy line of content – it starts with an idea.
By all means, if you have a decent turn of phrase in mind, it sums up a moment, or it includes a joke or two that will be well-received by more people than just you, then you can include those throwaway lines. Just don’t build your content around things that have amused you – leave that to Sunday broadsheet columnists. It doesn’t work in digital marketing.
Expert Tips For 7 Powerful Benefits of Using PPC Advertising
Marketing, as you once knew it has changed. TV adverts and billboard advertising is no longer the gold standard advertising method. With the explosion of digital marketing PPC, or Pay Per Click, advertising has become one of the most strategic paid advertising methods available.
PPC advertising is a form of online marketing where you can strategically place adverts online and pay a fee each time a visitor clicks the advert. Essentially you are buying visitors to your website, and its benefits are numerous. Here are 7 of the most powerful benefits of using PPC advertising.
It is quick and relatively easy to set up.
Unlike many forms of digital advertising, it is a quick and efficient way to get your adverts seen, and you do not need a magnitude of technical knowledge. While some forms of digital marketing, such as SEO, require a specific skill set and a lot of dedicated time and attention, PPC advertising can be up and running the same day with just a little input from the development team.
You may need web developers to address the technical aspects such as tracking but other than that. It is a quick process. What is more, Pay Per Click advertising can provide instant gratification. You can start seeing results in days if not hours—quite the contrary to the hard slog that is SEO.
It’s trackable
If you run paid advertising through Google Ads, you can use the Google Ads tool and Google Analytics. These tools allow you to see real-time, useful data and, in turn, remove all of the guesswork. The tools will tell you exactly how many people have seen your adverts and how many clicks and conversations are attainted from your advert.
You will effectively analyze what adverts are achieving the business goals you set out and which ones aren’t. This is a quantifiable insight rarely achieved from more traditional marketing methods such as TV adverting.
It will achieve your business marketing goals.
Speaking of business goals, what are yours? What about your marketing goals? Is it to sell more products? Do you want to raise brand awareness? Expand your potential reach and client base? If you sit down with a digital marketing agency and discuss what you want to achieve from PPC advertising, they can utilize PPC strategies to achieve the goals you want.
Furthermore, given that all data is trackable, you will be able to handle how well the PPC strategies are working for your business or marketing goals.
It is extremely targeted.
You can choose exactly who you show your ads to based on location, keywords, interest, age, gender, language, time of day, or even the device they use. This provides the obvious benefit of getting your advert in front of people who most want to see it, the people who are most likely to take action on your advert and are interested in your offering.
Say you are a Dallas-based business considering utilizing some of the top PPC services in Dallas to further your business. You might have researched the potential options online. As a result of your web-based research, a PPC advertising company in Dallas would be able to target your device based upon your browser history and be able to show you adverts for their services.
The same services you have been considering. They are targeting you based on your location, the keywords you have researched, and the interests shown on your devices. The clever tracking bots know that this is the kind of thing you want to see and will strategically place an advert in front of you. That is the power that PPC advertising can yield.
Another example of its targeting power is the different formats PPC is available in. Perhaps you have customers who commonly leave items in their virtual baskets. You can use display remarketing to encourage the desired action, such as completing their purchase.
It’s cost-effective
Unlike some advertising streams, you only pay a fee when your ad is actually clicked. With traditional marketing approaches, you pay for the service or advertising regardless of the results returned. The fee you pay is called a cost per click CPC, and this can vary hugely. Ranges can be from as little as a few cents to as much as $50. That said, the average fee is between $1 and $2.
The benefit of paying this repeat fee is that your ad will feature in the top spots of the search engine result. It will be the first thing people see and will rank above even the organic results. These top results drive some of the biggest percentages of clicks, so it is a price worth paying.
You are in control
Another one of the powerful features of PPC advertising is the level of control you can exercise. You may need to pause the advertising during busy periods or only run ads at specific times. Say before your latest online course starts.
Pay-per-click advertising is perfect for this. You can have full control over when your adverts run, you can choose the time of day and the days of the week (again, think to target), and you can also turn your ad off as and when you wish.
Moreover, you get full control over how much you spend each day and pay per click. This is a function rarely seen in advertising, and it gives you the ultimate flexibility.
It can help your other marketing strategies
PPC advertising can also help provide metrics to improve other elements of your marketing strategies. If you are utilizing digital marketing to its fullest potential, you will undoubtedly be employing SEO or social media marketing.
By analyzing the analytics provided from your PPC advertising, you will recognize which keywords or identifiers generate results. You will then tailor your SEO, social media marketing, and or content marketing accordingly. Using the relevant keywords, locations, interests, and so on to get in front of your audience on other marketing streams.
This information is invaluable for using digital marketing to your advantage and reaching your business or marketing goals.
Expert Tips For The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages
Every website owner needs landing pages to convert the traffic coming in from ads or call-to-action buttons. Once they are on a landing page, individual users may convert to leads or customers. Therefore, landing pages are an integral part of your business’s digital marketing strategy. This landing page guide will show you how to go about converting traffic to your website into customers.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a web page intended to convert general visitors into leads. Its preparation starts during the website design process with the inclusion of lead forms. Visitors who opt to fill the forms provide contact information, usually email addresses.
The Purpose of a Landing Page
A website has many sections, including the “about us” and “home” pages. These other pages have distractions such as competing links, navigation, and other options. So why would you need a special page with a form to fill out?
With a landing page, you can direct visitors to precisely where you want them to go. In short, the purpose of a landing page is to convert leads into customers.
Landing Page Best Practices
Landing page design is a precise craft that involves specific steps and elements known as landing page best practices. Look at each one of them in greater detail below:
Write a Headline With Clear Benefits
As part of your landing page strategy, you should aim to reduce the bounce rate as much as possible. That means showing visitors the benefit of signing up within the first few seconds. Write a headline with clear benefits since that’s the first thing visitors will see as soon as they “land” on that page.
Write Captivating Copy
Landing page optimization is concerned with clear, concise content that guides visitors to complete the action. You should write content from a second-person perspective with words such as “you” and “your.” A perfect line should go hand in hand with captivating words to support your call to action.
Choose an Appropriate Image
Every landing page should have an image that represents the target audience. In addition, it should convey how visitors will feel after receiving the offer. You may select several images and choose the most appropriate one after split testing.
Place the Lead Form Above the Fold
As part of your landing page optimization best practices, put the lead form in the most accessible location. The visitors shouldn’t have to scan the page to see the form. Instead, they should see the form or a connecting anchor link soon after hitting the page.
Add a Strong, Standout Call-to-Action
A landing page should have a strong call-to-action (CTA) to encourage conversion. Use color contrasting page elements to make your CTA button stand out. Also, clearly state what you expect visitors to do using an action verb like “get it now,” “download,” “purchase,” or “submit.”
Request for Specific Information
Every landing page guide you read will advise you to ask for specific information about your lead and nothing more. That will depend on how much the customer knows you, the position in their buyer’s journey, and the level of trust they have for you. If it is a new lead, an email address and a name are enough.
Make a Relevant Offer
Your landing page is an integral part of your visitor’s journey to purchasing your product or service. Therefore, make an offer in exchange for getting the lead’s personal information. The offer should be compelling enough to extract contact information from a visitor and relevant to the business.
For example, you may offer “10 Benefits of Laptops in Business” because your ultimate intention is to sell a business laptop to the lead. However, an offer about printers will only direct the lead on a completely different path.
Remove Navigation Features
The purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads – period. Competing links such as those to other pages within the website can only be a distraction. Ask your web design agency to remove navigation features and other links that could sway visitors to the main objective – converting them into leads and customers.
Optimize for Search
As part of your landing page optimization best practices, you should include keywords that make it rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). That applies to organic and paid search via Google Ads. It is better than relying solely on social media, email, and other digital marketing methods.
Build a Responsive Page
Every page on your website, including the landing page, should be responsive to different customer viewing experiences. The focus of website design should be to make the entire landing page readable on mobile devices. Consequently, visitors should be able to see the lead form to convert.
Include a “Thank You” Page
You should have a page where you redirect your customers soon after filling the lead form. It may contain a straightforward “thank you” message or an offer you had promised (like a download). The page’s purpose is to interest your lead beyond the relevant content and thank them for their interest in signing up.
Landing Page Design Prerequisites
Landing page design is a combination of creativity, attractive pictures, colors, functionality, and direction. Pay attention to the:
Landing page structure includes headlines, relevant images, lead form, CTA, copy, and description.
Landing page layout, which should have the most important information on top. You should also perform a blink test, use white space, write short paragraphs with bullets, and ensure visual patterns flow to them.
Landing page colors, which should rhyme with the rest of your website color. It should make your brand immediately recognizable.
Landing page images, which should be relevant to the information on the page. It should set the tone of the visitor’s entire experience from beginning to end.
Call-to-action (CTA) directs visitors on what you want them to do. It should have a large button with vibrant, contrasting colors, less than five words, surrounded by white space, and where the reader’s eyes are likely to be.
Conclusion
With this landing page guide, you should craft highly converting pages that compel visitors to provide contact information. Of course, it would help if you worked with the right web design agency and content writers to implement suggestions on the checklist above.
Expert Tips For 10 Clear Reasons Why You Need Digital Marketing
It doesn’t matter the industry you’re in; the common goal in all organizations is growth. Not all companies have the marketing budget to do print advertising, radio adverts, or TV advertising. But that doesn’t mean that you have to throw in the towel; digital marketing has become the pioneer in brand building. Here are 10 reasons to prove why:
1. Budget Fit
Of all the sorts of advertisements available, digital marketing is the most affordable option. Even if you outsource to a Top digital marketing agency or an Agency Partner, it will come out cheaper than what other options costs would have accumulated to.
2. Access In the Palm Of Your Hand
62.07% of the world’s population owns a smart and feature phone. That is 4.88 billion consumers who visit social media sites daily, check their emails, and use other apps. Utilizing digital marketing tactics like Email Marketing, Facebook ads, google ads, and text marketing, you build brand awareness subconsciously. At the same time, the magnitude of possible customers browses through their social media and other apps.
3. Adjustable
Because you are not stuck in a medium to a long-term contract on a traditional advertising campaign, changing an ad that performs poorly is instant. There is no need to wait out the agreed-upon expiration period because there is none with digital marketing. You need first to establish the best creative way to market your company digitally.
These can include email marketing, social media posts, and banner ads. Suppose you find a particular digital marketing strategy works better than the rest. In that case, you can pump more resources in that avenue while canning the rest.
4. Brand Awareness
Since lockdown, online shopping trends skyrocket due to the sheer convenience and safety. Using google ads and Facebook ads, you appeal to these customers and build your brand awareness in the process. You can also utilize Affiliate Marketing to help boost sales further.
5. Mixed Media
Digital marketing thrives on using mixed media to deliver and promote your product or services. Not just using the standard text and picture, it incorporates more visual material like videos and audio. Youtube, Facebook, and other social media apps’ popularity are all due to their capability to connect its consumers through mixed media.
Using mixed media makes it easier for your customers and potential customers to understand what you want to say and your product. Advertisement using mixed media has a higher success rate than more traditional methods. Using social media marketing with mixed media will make your customer experience memorable and help build your brand awareness in the process.
6. Relations
One of the big misconceptions is that you will lose important input from your customers should you use digital marketing. On the contrary, it’s easier for your customers to interact with you and engage with them continuously, thus building and strengthening your relationship and credibility. Various methods can gather the data and messages, like the comments section, blogs, newsletters, and reviews.
Using these tools can quickly alleviate misconceptions and answer frequently asked questions about your product. Showing your customers your willingness to interact with them will establish trust. And using their suggestions or dislikes in the comments, you can alter your product. Marketing the new, improved product will be more accessible and better accepted by your customers because they feel that you respect what they have to say.
7. Monitor To Evolve
Digital marketing allows you to become a Big Brother, but in the best possible way. The use of cookies will enable you to see which blogs, content, review, and other methods your customers read or watched before purchasing your product or service.
Studying this data, you can make a more conscious decision on which marketing method is the most appealing to your customers and which isn’t. Logically, you will then boost these social media marketing methods and instead remove the ones that don’t work to free up more resources to concentrate on better projects.
8. Be The Expert
Because digital marketing makes it easier for you to communicate with your customers about your product, you can start leaving your mark as the expert on your industry and product or services. Answering questions quickly, writing content and blogs to highlight the pros and cons of your product, and even doing podcasts will grow your trustworthiness with your customers. Your customers will then instead come back to you for further knowledge and before buying your product.
9. Social Media Influencers
Partnering with a social media influencer has become a fast-growing trend in the digital marketing area. These are individuals who are highly active social media users. They have already established their credibility with their thousands or even millions of followers as one of the experts in their particular industry. Social media influencers include actors, actresses, athletes, musicians, highly successful business people.
But not all of these influencers come from the silver screen or Forbes 100; many influencers are ordinary everyday people who are ambitious and work hard to obtain their credibility. Influencer Marketing is well worth investing in, but you need to ensure that the influencer aligns with your industry and has the same target market.
10. Rank Higher Than Your Competitor
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the digital marketing strategies. It all revolves around where your company’s website ranks when keywords are being searched. Why is this important? Pretty simple, human nature dictates that we usually gravitate to the first 5 options when presented with multiple choices. So if your company’s website doesn’t rank even on the first page of the search engine, then the chances are that there will not be much traffic directed to it.
Therefore, you need to optimize your Off-page SEO, which is external signals and links, as well as your On-Page SEO, which is all about your website and where it ranks. The better your Off- and On-page SEO ranking is, the more traffic it will divert to your website. The more traffic it gets, the more sales you can make. But most importantly, the more credible you will be.
Digital marketing is all about influence and credibility to boost your company’s sales. It’s the new area in advertising which is faster, better and can reach more customers than you can fathom. Suppose you don’t already have a digital marketing team busy increasing your brand awareness and rankings. In that case, you are already losing money and customers to your competitors. So get in the race fast!
Expert Tips For 7 Keys to An Effective Facebook Ad Strategy
The complexity of Facebook advertising can seem overwhelming, especially if you are an agency partner fairly new to the methodology. You know that your digital marketing ads should be optimized somehow, but with so many options and dropdowns presented to you, the path to successful ads is somewhat unclear.
This article demystifies the process for you and gives you some helpful advice!
Facebook advertisement has grown quite sophisticated over the years and can provide your brand or business with excellent opportunities for high engagement and conversions.
Understanding the key elements of an effective Facebook digital strategy gives you a solid road map to follow, keeps you focused on your objectives, and maximizes your marketing budget. Read on for the seven keys to an effective Facebook Ad strategy!
Know your target audience
You’ve heard this a million times, but that’s only because it’s so vital to effective Facebook ads! Understanding your target audience is the starting point for effective Facebook ads since it optimizes other aspects of the strategy and sets your campaign up for success.
Begin with a broad overview of your target demographic, including age, education, income, and family life. When you have this information, you can start to detail their online behavior and interests. This is your buyer persona that will massively increase engagement and lead generation.
Your Ad objective
On the Facebook platform, you have a choice of ad objectives. These are more than simply a way to focus your campaign and arrange your thinking. Facebook objectives influence the way your marketing budget is spent.
Examples of Facebook objectives include brand awareness, traffic, post engagement, video engagement. The reason why Facebook objectives are so important is that they determine how your budget is spent. If you choose a “traffic” objective, for instance, you pay based on clicks. Conversely, if your objective is “video,” you pay based on the number of 10-second views. Of course, having an objective also helps to focus your campaign, but it’s much more than that.
Focus on audience pain points
This is where your audience persona starts to pay off! Obviously, you won’t appeal to everyone; that’s not the point. Instead, you want to zero in on a particular target customer and show them how your product can fix their pain point.
The better you understand your target audience, the more precise you can be regarding pain points. But it isn’t only about demonstrating how your product works and why they should invest in it. Working with pain points and your target audience also helps you decide on display criteria such as graphics or video. The format of the ad must also appeal.
Use Ad Funnels
Facebook Ads offer so much in terms of audience segmentation and targeting. One essential element is Ad Funnels. Ad Funnels allow you to appeal to various target audiences at different stages of the customer journey. If no one has heard of your brand before, you can engage them with brand awareness. Similarly, you can meet long-term customers at the interest or consideration stage.
To use Ad funnels effectively, you will need to set up a series of campaigns. All this might seem like extra work, but you significantly improve your chances of engagement and conversions when you target customers at the right stage.
Be smart with bidding.
Bidding is a crucial part of your Facebook ad strategy! It is often viewed as an afterthought, but in reality, it strikes a balance between your campaign budget and your engagement levels. Carefully optimize your ad bidding, and Facebook will automate your ads to get the highest placements.
You can choose between a cost cap or a bid cap. A cost cap is normally set at $0.34 per click, and you can choose a daily budget. This helps keep your campaign costs under control. Additionally, you can choose “target bids” that use an average bid amount. So if Facebook thinks it can get you a higher placement, it will spend a little more.
Optimize mobile Ads
Not surprisingly, the majority of audience engagement on Facebook is through mobile! This means that your ads must be optimized for mobile if you want them to be effective. Mobile ads are short and snappy. In contrast to desktop ads, they only give you three lines of copy before the “continue reading” option.
The first thing you want to do is front-load your ad copy to give readers a clear idea of your product and what it does. You only have three lines to do this. The other thing you need to keep in mind is the image size. Pay close attention to the dimensions so your ad is not awkwardly cropped. Preview everything before you commit to the ad.
Split testing
Split testing is a handy feature of Facebook ad strategy that should be used throughout your ad campaign. Split testing allows you to test various audiences against your ad objective to see how they perform. Carry out this process throughout your campaign to optimize for the best results.
Facebook split testing is exceptional if you want to test a single element of your campaign – such as images or copy – against different audience segmentations. Since this is what you are primarily interested in doing anyway, Facebook allows you to closely align your ads with the demographics and expectations of your target audience.
Final thoughts
Facebook ads have followed Google ads in its approach to Ad marketing, one reason it is so effective. Like Google, Facebook marketing allows you to segment your audience and target specific demographics and particular stages of the customer journey. This significantly increases engagement and conversions. To ensure your Facebook ads are effective, it pays to understand the key elements of their Ad strategy and optimize yours according to the available functionality.
Facebook currently has 2.8 billion monthly active users making it still the world’s largest social media platform.By using Facebook marketing experts and utilizing the power of their digital advertising methods, you can engage with target customers more effectively and grow your audience simultaneously with a Fb ads strategy.
Expert Tips For 10 Important PPC Trends to Watch in 2021
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the easiest and best ways to promote a product or service. If this is your goal, your strategy for launching your campaign and maintaining conversions for your product or service needs to be a good one.
You need to know all the new trends that are cropping up that will affect your PPC performance. Many new trends are cropping up, and you need to be aware of them to make your campaigns successful. Here’s a look at some of the major PPC trends of 2021.
Limited Data
Google has put a limit on how much search data you can access. There is also a plan underway that will affect how tracking cookies work. Without data, it can become difficult to know what is working and not working in your campaigns.
Limiting your knowledge will help Google gain more profit, so it is unlikely to change its strategy anytime soon. You will need to learn how to adapt to it.
Buyer Journey Is Important
More than ever, you need to understand the buyer’s journey towards conversion. It would help if you focused on what your target audience wants and needs. This means you need to spend time getting into your buyer’s heads. This will help you to find out how they buy, when they buy, and why they buy. You may have to lean more heavily on social media platforms to find out more about your target audience.
Automation is King
As a PPC marketer, you need to be aware that Ad platforms such as Google are trying to take away a lot of your previous control. As the use of AI becomes more pervasive in the ad industry, you can expect more automation. It would help if you got comfortable with how Google automation systems execute your PPC campaign in 2021 and beyond successfully.
Diversify Your Ad Platforms
You’ve probably heard it said not to put your eggs in one basket. When it comes to PPC, you will need to make sure that you diversify where you spend your money as much as possible.
Other Ad platforms will allow you to collect the necessary data to be properly informed and make wise decisions when paying for your PPC Ads.
Get Data the Right Way
With all the global data privacy laws that have now been put into place, there are greater restrictions on how cookies can be used in browsers. You will need to maintain the privacy of those who browse your website more effectively by informing them how you use cookies and for what purposes you use them.
Since so many marketers have been dependent on cookie-driven targeting, they will need to look in other places to get the information that they need. This means that new solutions that do not rely on cookies will have to be developed. To this end, it will become more important to develop first-party data capturing solutions.
Instagram Will Bring Opportunities
Instagram has recently announced that it will be monetizing videos and reels. They have already rolled it out on some selected accounts. Given the recent announcements by their CEO by the end of 2021 going into 2022, you should see significant opportunities for advertising on Instagram.
Make sure that you are ready for this new advertising opportunity when it lands.
Know Your Audience Intimately
As discussed previously, you need to know your target market a lot more and understand their preferences and behaviors. You can’t just rely on what you have observed through data. It would help if you focused on getting real human feedback. This will help you to make choices that are in line with your objectives for your PPC campaigns. This will mean you do not just depend on what Google’s recommendations on scores tell you to do.
Ramp Up Your Ad Content
The message you bring across to your audience in your ad campaign needs to be more enticing than ever. You need to ensure that your message connects in an emotional and personal way with your audience. This means that you will have to get more creative when doing your Ad copy.
People buy from people they trust and feel an emotional connection with. The creativity you used to connect with your audience will give them that emotional connection and make them feel as if they can trust you. You need to produce high-quality content that will grab attention.
Do Continuous Testing
Since you will not have as much data as you had in previous years, you will have to do a lot more testing than you ever did before. You may think one way is working great, but you must split test your PPC strategy. You may find that other ways work even better. Always be willing to push the envelope and see if you can do better.
Mobile Is More Important Than Ever
When it comes to your PPC strategy, it is not just about how much you know your audience, how much data you have, or how much money you have to spend. Your users’ mobile experience has with your landing pages, and your content has got to be superior. This is because more than ever, people are browsing on their mobile phones.
Desktops and laptops are not used for browsing websites nearly as often as mobile devices. When you are creating your website landing, you need to ensure that you visit it on mobile. Pages created on desktops and laptops can look great on that device but may not provide the best experience for our users when on mobile. This can severely hurt your PPC campaigns.
Implement the Trends
To ensure you reap all the rewards you can from your PPC campaign, it is best to stay on top of all the latest trends. When you do this and take the time to carefully look at your current strategy and plan how to implement any necessary changes, you will find more success with your campaigns.
Expert Tips For 5 Steps to Building a Successful Organic Traffic Pipeline
When you have a website of your own, it can be hard to get noticed at first, and you might need to employ some methods to help you gain more traffic. It’s not always easy to gain the traction that you’re looking for, but there are several ways you can improve the traffic that comes through your website. Whether you do it through search engine optimization, audience engagement, or other methods, there’s something out there that fits your model and goals! So what can you do to ensure others are reaching you before other sites like yours?
If you’re going to work on the amount of organic traffic you have coming through your site, it will take a bit of work. That means making changes to your digital strategy and possibly even reaching out for a helping hand. You never know what tools might be useful for you when improving your site’s traffic, so you should consider using what you have available to you. It will take time, but the results will be noticeable once you start to employ these different steps for building your organic traffic pipeline.
Researching popular searches
If you want to draw more people to your site, you need to know that people are more commonly searching. If your site commonly has titled pages that don’t often align with what people typically search for, it’s going to be hard for them to come across what you’ve posted. If you want people to stumble across your website, then you need to make sure that there are pages for them readily available for them to find. Because of the way Google works, for example, will display the results based on the keywords that the individual searches. The individual will then be shown the most relevant results for them – so if your posts have those keywords more commonly displayed, you’re going to be higher up in the results.
If you’re going to find these keywords, you should take some time to look into what people are searching for. There are several sites out there that will show you how often people search for certain things, and you can pick based on their rankings what you want to use. Using this information, you can easily gain more traffic on your site. Just make sure you make appealing pages and posts that use those keywords, and you should notice a difference.
Make use of long-tail keywords.
No matter what you’re writing, bringing in organic traffic can be quite difficult, and you’re going to want to use search engine optimization to help with it. This can be done with a question or a phrase that you’re specifically looking to answer. If you don’t know what long-tail keywords are, it’s a phrase made up of multiple keywords and is more specific. While that might not sound like a great idea, adding a more specific keyword format will allow you to target the demographic that you’re aiming to more accurately. For example, if you’re looking to attract people with singular interests, a long-tail keyword might be exactly what you need for your page to show up for them.
Work on your headlines
Improving your traffic doesn’t just require great content, but you’ll need to make sure you make it as appealing as possible. It’s important that you’re making the best titles you can, as drawing people in is going to take a little bit of persuasion. Your title should be something that they can’t miss or something that they have to know about. Let them know that your content is important for them to learn about and something that they would be missing out on if they were going to ignore it.
You can improve your titles by looking at your competition. It can take a little bit of time to develop something at first, but it will be second nature! If you have a post that’s due to come up, you can research what other people have used as the title for similar pieces and come up with something that’s simply more interesting than theirs.
Create more openings to your site
Not all customers that visit your site have to come straight from Google, and through the use of off-page SEO, you can make your site much easier to access your audience. Having links to your site hosted on other pages from third-party websites can be a great way for you to gain traffic from those sites. For example, if you have links to your site on a website that gains a lot of traffic on its own, you might find that having a well-placed link can help you significantly.
Any certified SEO expert will tell you that it’s worth your while to have those external links to your site, as you’re relying on the popularity of another site to help improve yours. The numbers are more or less guaranteed, so your ROI isn’t so much of a gamble.
Be consistent
If you’re going to bring in improved organic traffic to your website, then consistency is important. Bringing in returning customers requires working on your audience engagement, and you’re not going to be able to do that if you’re not frequently uploading content that’s worthwhile. If you can consistently upload and share interesting and helpful things for your audience, you can greatly improve your customer relationship.
If you find yourself running out of content, it’s time to spend your time doing your market research. You don’t have to upload everything straight from your mind, and sometimes making something special requires that extra inspiration! Look at what your competitors are sharing, and let it inspire you.
It might be hard to maintain your organic traffic pipeline, but it’s worth it if you’re trying to improve the number of people visiting your site. Without those viewers, your posts and pages are for nothing.
Expert Tips For Top Social Media Trends the Pandemic Gave Us in 2021
We are now halfway through 2021, and life is just now getting back to normal. Living life remotely for over a year impacted the way we live our lives, and it even changed the way we use social media.
When we started using social media in a new way, new trends emerged. The trends started by the pandemic are still enjoyed by many, and brands are strategically finding ways to leverage them to improve customer relationships and experiences.
When we were all stuck indoors, online shopping skyrocketed, and social media giants like Facebook and Instagram made it possible for users to shop directly from the app.
When we had to hold off on some of our favorite hobbies and past times, we found entertainment in new ways. That’s when TikTok became everybody’s favorite distraction.
To see family and friends, we had to connect virtually. And those who wanted to be in front of a larger audience went on Instagram Live. That’s when live streaming became a hot trend and a new feature for many social media apps.
And finally, the pandemic brought hard times. We weren’t able to comfort each other in the ways we wanted to, so we had to adapt in new ways to show compassion. People saw the value of creating meaningful content online and how we support one another virtually.
We have become so accustomed to these trends that we began to see the value in them, and we’re not ready for them to go away. These trends are changing the way we use social. And it’s also changing our expectations of brands and how they connect with us. We see the value of growing connections because that is something we had to do this past year.
Today, we will be diving deeper into how these trends came into fruition and how you can leverage them for your brand.
How the pandemic birthed Social eCommerce
When we were stuck indoors and unable to visit our favorite stores, we adjusted to new ways of buying the items we needed. Amazon was at its prime – no pun intended.
Social media giants like Instagram and Facebook saw the growing demand for buying items online, and they wanted to join in on the party. Instagram launched its ecommerce feature in March of last year when the pandemic hit, and it’s been history ever since. Instagram tremendously restructured the mission of their app, bringing more attention to the in-app shopping features. As Adam Moserri stated in his recent video, the pandemic shifted how buyers shop, and they are working on learning towards this trend.
How you can leverage this: If you are a brand with ecommerce capabilities, and your audience is on Instagram. You NEED to consider getting an Instagram shop. Imagine how much revenue you are missing out on without it? Instagram is the perfect opportunity to visually show your product, connect with your audience, and sell all in one app! And the best part is buyers can directly make the transaction from your store on the Instagram app. It shortens the sales process and lessens the risk of lost a lead or abandoned cart.
The Rise of Video and Creator Content
Lo and behold, the rise of the video came to be. TikTok became the latest social media giant, bringing millions of viewers captivated by the hottest trends and most creative content. With all the extra time we had on our hands and stalls of our favorite hobbies, we found new ways to get entertainment in 2020. With all the extra time we had on our hands and stalls of our favorite hobbies, we found new ways to get entertainment in 2020.
The video made us feel stuck with us, and it continued to be one of our favorite distractions as we continued with our daily lives. Video is holding record statistics of engagement because audiences stay on the apps longer, continuously absorbing every pleasurable video.
And as for the latest TikTok update – TikTok will be testing 3-minute videos. It will be interesting to see how creators will utilize this new feature and how this could affect other video dominating apps – like, I don’t know Youtube?
How you can leverage this: Concept different ways you can create video content for your brand. Some topics can be the story behind your brand, tutorials, or any other subject where a video can be fitting. Make sure whatever you are creating tells a story and will be visually captivating. Make sure whatever you are creating tells a story and will be visually captivating.
Livestreaming and How it Can Build Relationships
At one point in 2020, live-streaming was huge. Celebrities were unable to tour and do concerts, so they opted for another way of connecting with audiences through live-streaming.
Brands caught wind of this trend quickly since it allowed them to connect with audiences in real-time through the live chat feature on the live streams. Q&As and live tutorials were a few of the many conversations brands had with their audiences.
How you can leverage this: If you are searching for ways to make meaningful relationships with your audience, consider doing a live stream. Livestreams can bring more authenticity to your brand because you can connect with audiences visually and see their live chats coming in. This also allows you to understand your audience’s wants and needs and possibly their current perception of you.
Ensuring Your Content is Meaningful and Holds Value
And with the hard times the pandemic brought, people began to see the value in the physical connections they previously had with others. Since we transitioned to connecting virtually, people were reading deeper into the messages on their timeline and what it actually meant.
For example, with the social movements in the last year, many brands knew that to be perceived as the humane and caring brands they claim to be, they had to post content that showed they supported the cause.
This sparked the social shift that content had to deliver a message and speak to others rather than some unoriginal marketing post to earn more revenue.
How you can leverage this: If you want to grow a deeper connection with your audience, take the time to create a message that is meaningful and will positively impact your audience. People are scrolling through social media for a reason. They are looking for something that will inspire them – try to be that one post that leaves a good impression and makes them act on it.
Agency Partner lives in the digital world, and we know the digital landscape changes by the minute. If you have any questions about influential social media trends and tactics, contact Agency Partner, and we will reach back to you as soon as possible.
Expert Tips For 5 Important Digital Marketing Tactics in 2021
With the digital world constantly evolving, marketers are continuously challenged to stay updated with the latest marketing trends. A good percentage of our jobs consist of learning the new updates and seeing how it affects our current marketing strategies.
In this blog post, we will be sharing 5 digital marketing tactics that have emerged in 2021. Although these marketing tactics aren’t necessarily new, marketers are looking at these tactics on a deeper level, learning the science behind them and how they can use these updates to their advantage. Below is a list of tactics that we will be discussing:
Influencer Marketing
Mobile-First Marketing
Local SEO
Personalized Content / Audience Segmentation / AI
Voice Search
With the advancement of technology, marketers are becoming more knowledgeable on ways they can reach their consumers and telling them what they want to hear. Even though the constant transformation of the internet can be draining, its development has been beneficial.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has always been a traditional marketing tactic. The concept is simple. Someone with strong influence shares your product or service with their audience, and in return, you can gain more awareness from the promotion of your product. With the growth of social media each year, the impact of influencer marketing has become exponential.
TikTok, for example, is the newest venture when it comes to influencer marketing. TikTok has been very successful in being a video-based app. Audiences are entertained for longer periods of time and stay on the app longer, giving marketers more exposure opportunities. The influencer marketing tactics on the app have been so successful that software marketers now use them to recruit influencers influential to their target audiences.
Instagram is another powerhouse in influencer marketing. Recently, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, shared that there will be changes in the way users use the app. Video and shopping content will be prioritized, minimizing the visibility of photos posted by family and friends on the timeline. As you can imagine, influencer marketing will be used more frequently with these updates.
Mobile-First Marketing
Mobile-first marketing has been taken into more consideration by marketers in recent years. Many are starting to understand that the majority of online traffic derives from mobile devices, which means your content must be optimized for mobile devices for users to engage with it.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, you risk the chance of quality leads leaving your site simply due to user experience. Marketers now understand the importance of mobile and how their content strategies must be based around it before executing.
Local SEO
SEO (Search-Engine Optimization) is becoming a more respectable piece in marketing. With the development of the internet, a website’s quality score plays a big part in measuring its success. Google will not make it easy for websites to gain traffic if it sees no relevance in it. Google’s priority is the user.
They want more people to use Google to solve their day-to-day problems, and the way they are accomplishing that is by updating the algorithm to improve user experience. Google wants to make it easier for users to quickly search for something and find a solution to their problem. If your content is not answering a user’s question, your site will have a lower SERP (Search Engine Results Page), and it may never get found or clicked on.
Local businesses have recognized the importance of SEO, and without it, they don’t stand a chance against the competition. Local SEO is essential because local audiences have a higher chance of conversion, and as a local business, you want to be present when that user is ready to make a purchase.
Google My Business has helped many local businesses get listed on Google result pages. Utilizing keywords like your city name and services will make you more relevant, and it will higher your chances of appearing on a higher Google result page.
Personalized Content / Audience Segmentation / AI
Creating your content based on your target audience has always been a marketing best practice. And thanks to the growth of artificial intelligence, personalizing content has never been easier. Audience segmentation is the process of dividing your general target audience by traits and attributes.
The segmentation helps marketers create and tailor content that will specifically market to that group. And with the help of artificial intelligence, marketers have understood their audience’s wants and needs on a deeper level.
For example, if you are an ecommerce business, you can tailor your audience’s content by their shopping habits. A frequent buyer can receive a different newsletter from an infrequent one, and each of their newsletters will be customized to what each buyer wants to see.
Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more advanced, and it allows marketers to use it to their advantage that goes beyond just email personalization. The data supplementation from AI software systems is skyrocketing, and it will enhance our marketing strategies as we continue in 2021.
Voice Search
Search engines and other applications have introduced voice typing features to enhance user experience. It makes searching a lot easier when it is hands-free. Marketers had noticed that when audiences used this feature, the keywords used are different from their regular typing. Due to the difference in vocabulary, SEO specialists consider how this will affect their SEO strategies.
Conclusion
Digital marketing has advanced within just a few years. Marketers must consistently stay on top of the latest trends to ensure their digital marketing tactics are executed successfully. Even though some of the tactics mentioned above aren’t necessarily new, they have evolved with the advancement of technology.
Agency Partner lives in the digital world, and we know how the digital landscape changes by the minute. If you have any questions about cutting-edge marketing tactics, please get in touch with Agency Partner.
Expert Tips For Top 10 SEO trends you need to know in 2021
It’s time to empower your website & brand with proper SEO-Optimization. For starters, search engine optimization is the most critical aspect of digital marketing for any online business in these times. Every web designer or digital marketer should understand SEO, how it works, and how the traffic potential it can generate for a brand’s website.
SEO has two main goals. The first is to help you understand what users are searching for online so that you can create high-quality content to satisfy their intent. The second is to help you create a website that search engines can find, index, and understand its content.
The most important SEO tasks have to do with identifying what users are searching for related to your products and services, creating content that will make users happy, providing the right signals to search engine crawlers, and algorithms through various SEO techniques.
In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to attract potential customers to your website. But here’s the thing: you need to use it in the right way. According to stats, there are an estimated 3.5B searches on Google each day. But while only 0.78% of Google searchers click on results from the second page, the #1 result in Google’s organic search result gets an average CTR of 31.7%.
The important part.
Many brands and businesses know — or maybe think they know — that they need SEO for their digital brands and websites and the benefits they will receive from that SEO expedition being implemented on their behalf. But in reality, things are way more complex than people think.
SEO in these modern times requires clarity and proper strategic implementation to help your brand leap. With Agency Partner Interactive, you can get the key insights about the best SEO trends and SEO Tips 2021 and use certified SEO experts to curate your SEO digital strategy that performs off the charts.
Focus on the user & the search intent.
In 2021, it’s time to focus on the user and the search intent. While this is barely a new trend or concept, it’s important to refocus every year because searcher intent and behavior change, especially after the year 2020, when so much rapidly changed due to the ongoing pandemic.
Hiring an expert.
Search Engine Optimization requires a lot of time. Apart from this, you must be aware of the current trends, algorithm changes, and strategies. Today, many marketers are aware of the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization.
Therefore, they can perform the optimization of their website themselves. However, most of them go on this adventure without being aware of the basics. This is where they end up making grave mistakes. If you don’t have the right skills and tools, we suggest that you hire the services of a professional instead.
Believing in unrealistic promises.
If you are going to hire a professional, make sure you go with one that uses safe methods. There are no shortcuts when it comes to getting your website ranked. Remember that you cannot trick major search engines, such as Google, to gain better rankings for your desired keywords. Today, search engines are brilliant.
In other words, you should never try to cheat the system, or you may get penalized. So, you may want to hire a provider that makes realistic promises.
Check methods.
Before you go with a service provider, make sure you know the method they will use. What you need to do is follow only white hat practices. On the other hand, illegal SEO involves tips and tricks that violate search engine guidelines, such as keyword stuffing, buying backlinks, exchanging links, and hidden text.
Although you can get quick gains through illegal SEO, you will be taking a lot of risks. So we suggest that you follow only white hat methods to improve your search engine rankings. This includes updating your website with quality content and optimizing the content for search engines.
Don’t ignore the google algorithm changes.
Today, search engines are changing their algorithms to improve the way websites are ranked. The idea is to identify cheaters that manipulate the system. Over the past five years, Google algorithms have gone through many major changes, so Google follows a different method of ranking websites these days. With that in mind, you may want to follow the recent updates if you want to achieve great results. If you don’t have the time to read about this change, we suggest that you hire the services of an SEO expert.
Opt only for the precise keywords.
Lastly, one of the most common mistakes is to follow non-strategic keywords when it comes to SEO. You may not want to waste time optimizing your content for the wrong keywords. For example, you may not want to use overly competitive keywords. Instead, it would help if you used low competition keywords to get a lot of traffic.
Consider personalization.
According to statistics, at least 70% of customers that buy online are drawn to personalization on blogs and sites. For instance, when someone buys something from you, you may send them an email with their name in the email. The good thing is that personalization is not a costly or complicated process. The whole purpose of personalization is to make the buyers realize that you value them.
Visual search features & YouTube SEO.
According to statistics, visual search is quite effective these days. What do we mean by “visual search”? Let us explain: If a user clicks a product photo of their choice, websites such as Pinterest and Google show the buying options right under the picture of that product. That way, the buyers have the ability to buy the product by simply clicking the photo. Through this method, YouTube videos provide one of the most engaging platforms available for consumers.
Post video content.
Video content is quite popular on social media platforms, such as Facebook. If you look at consumer statistics, you will know that 52% of buyers feel more confident when buying products after watching a video. At least 68% of buyers like to watch short videos to find out more about products instead of reading long articles, manuals, or infographics.
Utilize Google My Business.
Google My Business helps small business owners stand out in search engines. Whether through a search result or a maps query, over five billion searches are made each day globally through Google. That means that a large audience can find your product or service quickly and easily. Not only does it increase your visibility, but it’s also a free way to optimize your website for local search.
Your SEO experts in Dallas.
Agency Partner Interactive (API) is the best custom web development and design agency in Dallas, TX, providing the best YouTube SEO, off-page SEO, on-page SEO, and SEO strategy solutions — all geared to perfection.
Let us show you how to convert your visitors into lifelong customers with custom, perfectly suited web features. We can help your website be a true source of business intelligence, your sales machine that never sleeps. What are you waiting for?
Let’s go the distance through precision SEO solutions with Agency Partner.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Top 10 SEO trends you need to know in 2021” instead. Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Agency Partner is pleased to announce that it has been honored by UpCity as one of the top 400 service providers in the United States and one of the top 20 digital agencies in Texas.
UpCity is a business marketplace that utilizes a proprietary “Recommendability Rating” to assess B2B web design and digital marketing agencies based on customer reviews, project success rates, the impact of their business solutions.
“Here at UpCity, we are always very proud to announce our Excellence Award Winnings. We are fortunate to work with the best, most trustworthy partners across the U.S. and Canada,” said UpCity SVP of Product and Marketing Heidi Sullivan.
UpCity is an online marketplace that helps businesses find B2B service providers they can trust. UpCity’s Local Excellence Award winners are proven digital agencies that have proven themselves as the most reputable, capable business service providers in their respective markets.
As a company, Agency Partner Interactive specializes in helping businesses create impactful online experiences. Whether the team is devising technology or digital marketing solutions, the project solutions teams work tirelessly to help businesses accelerate growth and add efficiencies where they otherwise do not exist.
“This is our second time to be granted this honor, and it is a great feeling that our team very much deserves,” said Muhammad Younus, CEO of Agency Partner. “We work tirelessly to help our clients achieve specific, measurable business goals and we look forward to ‘one-upping’ ourselves time and time again. It’s all about continuous improvement.”
About UpCity
UpCity helps businesses find service providers they can trust. Our Marketplace creates and empowers successful relationships between businesses and service providers from marketers to accountants to HR professionals. We provide transparency and insights to dramatically improve the B2B partner selection and purchase experience.
Over 225,000 businesses visit UpCity each month seeking services from over 35,000 providers in over 600 cities in North America. UpCity helps partners in the Marketplace grow their business and build their digital recommendability.
When you think of the internet today, you think of “social media,” don’t you? They weren’t always so interchangeable. One came before the other, but one forced the other to evolve. And with that, so did we.
Current Social Media Platforms in Order of Popularity:
As of Jan. 2021, according to a report published by Statista, Facebook alone recorded at least 2,740,000 active users. Not far behind were Youtube and WhatsApp, with Messenger, Instagram, and WeChat trailing behind. Tik Tok ranked seventh.
Where we can now find limited storage online for free due to services like cloud computing, there was a time when intellectual property as we know it, used to be stored somewhere physically, and there were costs associated with that, too. So much has changed since. Our livelihoods and businesses now depend on social media as a tool to keep bread and butter on the table, especially evident after the year that we just had.
This pressure to hop on the bandwagon that is the internet today has only grown since it’s debut, and it’s not stopping anytime soon.
Last it was recorded, about five million people were actively using social media, and that number continues to rise at exponential rates.
But, fret not. As your friends who keep constant watch over the digital market, we’ve compiled a list of tips, tricks, and tools for making social media work for you. Before we go on to overwhelm you with the facts, allow us to first remind you that everyone, every company, every small business that influences us today, had to start from somewhere.
Where to Begin:
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be everywhere at once. Start with where you are and with the audience you have today.
Say you’re on Instagram and it’s where you’ve found the most potential thus far, develop that before you branch out and add another network under your management. Professionals will go ahead and secure usernames and URLs in advance to not have to deal with the hassle of obtaining them later on. It’s also good marketing as it shows consistency across platforms.
Some general rules to keep in mind (maybe your bylaws, too):
Do Not: Treat people as leads.
Do: Yes, you want the close, you want the deliverables, the hard sell, but don’t miss out on the social aspect of social media. People hop online to take a break from their day, to find inspiration in a quote, a meme to share with loved ones.
Think: How are we engaging with our followers? What tone do we have online? Is there a big holiday coming up that we can prepare content for in advance, maybe a “Happy #NationalBringYourCatToWork Day?” tweet for the Twitter feed?
Do Not: Leave leads unattended.
Do: Follow through on the conversations you’re having. Socializing is important, but so is the service you’re providing, and studies show that 71% of users are more likely to buy from a company following a positive online experience. The whole appeal behind social media is the instant gratification that it delivers; you don’t have to wait to hear back from your audience. Set up a poll, they’ll tell you exactly how they feel and how they want it. Study those interactions.
Consumer data adds to any company’s intelligence, especially if they can make sense of it.
Think: Are we user-friendly? What’s our response time online? Where are we getting the most impressions for? Where are we seeing the least amount of engagement? Should we be allocating our resources elsewhere?
Do Not: Post to post.
Do: Create S.M.A.R.T. goals.
Social media can feel like a chore to the best of us, especially when we’re scrambling at the last minute for content or guilt-posting for not being active enough. And the smaller you are, the more hats you might find yourself wearing at work. Sales and general business goals are good to keep, but neglect creating a social media strategy and you’ll feel disconnected, unaligned with your goals.
Posting for the sake of posting is like shooting in the dark, but having a SMART outcome in mind will help keep you on track to achieve your desired goal.
Think: Do we have a digital marketing strategy in place? How much time can we afford to put aside for social media use each day? Is there a minimum and maximum we can set for day-to-day interactions? For example, one might choose to devote 15 minutes of their day to like and respond to 10 comments in total, with 5 re-shares spaced throughout. Is there a system here that I’m missing, that I could maybe automate for ease of use in the future? Would templates come in handy here?
These are all great questions to have answers to, especially as resources tend to trim down the smaller a business goes.
When was the last time you clicked on ‘Page 2’ of a Google search? Exactly. The web has a variety of algorithms at work, all unique to the browser or search engine you have running, not to mention that those backend formulas are also constantly undergoing updates.
Think: Are we using the right hashtags? Is our meta data clear and concise? Have we claimed our Google My Business (GMB) listing yet? What’s our page download speed looking like? Can we do better?
Next, as promised, the toolkit!
“A big business starts small.”
-Richard Branson
Since small businesses come in different shapes and sizes, each unique to the solution they’re offering, it’s only fair that we offer a few selections for you to explore in case one or even two out of four of our options don’t fit. Frankly, the internet is full of amazing resources just like these ones, but we hope this serves as a place for you to start…
We’re also on standby if you’d like to chat! Okay, here we go:
For Content Inspiration or Social Media Monitoring:
Most of these programs come free or low-of-cost, so they’re perfect for entrepreneurs with a tighter budget, but as your business grows, you might find that these tools no longer deliver due to their limited capabilities. At that point, it might be time to look at marketing ROI instead.
As always, we’ll be here for that conversation. In the meantime, feel free to explore our resource pool here.
DesignRush Names Agency Partner Among Top B2B Consulting Agencies
Top 25 B2B DIGITAL AGENCIES IN WORLD ANNOUNCED FOR 2021
NEW YORK (PRWEB) FEBRUARY 23, 2021 – Best Business Consulting Firms According to New DesignRush Report
The consulting industry is expected to increase 2.3% in 2021 in the US alone. To help businesses find the best partner in this growing industry, DesignRush has released the list of top-ranking consulting companies.
As a major part of a client-driven industry, consulting agencies constantly strive to predict, adapt and enhance the clients’ needs. In the aftermath of the global pandemic and anticipated economic recovery, the consulting industry is expected to increase 2.3% in 2021 only in the US. To help business
DesignRush, a B2B marketplace connecting brands with digital marketing experts, has released the updated ranking of the best consulting agencies worldwide.
1. Think PR – thinkpr.dk
Expertise: Business Consulting, Creative Agencies Services, PR and more
2. InData Labs – indatalabs.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Marketing Analytics & Big Data, IT Services & Consulting and more
3. JaxonLabs Brand Innovation – jaxonlabs.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Strategic Planning, Social Media Marketing and more
4. moblers – moblers.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Product Design, App development & testing and more
5. Agency Partner Interactive
Expertise: Business Consulting, Brand Strategy, Content Marketing and more
6. The Analyst Agency – theanalystagency.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Market Research, Digital Marketing and more
7. Performix Business Services LLC – performixbiz.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Website Design & Development, Mobile App Design and more
8. Neurony Solutions – neurony.ro
Expertise: Business Consulting, Website Development, eCommerce Development and more
9. Adience – hello-adience.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Market Research, B2B Digital Marketing and more
10. HotPMO – hotpmo.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Outsourcing Software Development and more
11. EXTROVERT – extrovert.gr
Expertise: Business Consulting, PR, Advertising Agency Services and more
12. Newfound Marketing – newfoundmarketing.ca
Expertise: Business Consulting, Web Design, eCommerce Development and more
13. Mod Girl Marketing – modgirlmarketing.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Web Design, Digital Marketing and more
14. Joel Bell Industrial Design (JBID) – joelbellid.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Product & Package Design, Graphic Design and more
15. The Source Approach – sourceapproach.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, eCommerce Development, Web Design and more
16. Dos Mundos Creative – dosmundoscreative.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Advertising Agency Services, Video Production and more
17. Creamy Animation – creamyanimation.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Creative Agency Services, Video Production and more
18. MOPA – mopa1.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, PR, Package & Product Design and more
19. Nika – nika.agency
Expertise: Business Consulting, Branding, Web Design & Development and more
20. Masclicks – masclicks.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Web Design, eCommerce Development and more
21. Hot Dog Marketing – hotdogmarketing.net
Expertise: Business Consulting, Creative Agency Services, Video Production and more
22. Reputation Rhino – reputationrhino.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, PR, Web Design and more
23. Slice Design – slicedesign.co.uk
Expertise: Business Consulting, Graphic & Package Design, Web Design and more
24. Bewe Srl – bewe.it
Expertise: Business Consulting, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing and more
25. Simplus – simplus.com
Expertise: Business Consulting, Salesforce Consulting, Software Development and more
Brands can explore the top business consulting firms by location, size, average hourly rate and portfolio on DesignRush.
About DesignRush:
DesignRush.com is a B2B marketplace connecting brands with agencies. DesignRush features the top agencies around the world, including the best Digital Agencies, Logo Design, Branding, Digital Marketing, Website Design, eCommerce Web Design Companies and more.
As a company, Agency Partner Interactive specializes in devising technology and marketing solutions that help businesses accelerate top-line growth in addition to improving profitability. From basic web and app design to executing digital marketing with the power of artificial intelligence, the Agency Partner business team works with Dallas-based startups, SMBs, and has the capacity to serve full enterprises.
The home service industry is ultra-competitive. Whether you are a repair person, plumber, HVAC technician, electrician, or any other expert in the field, the business competition –nationally, regionally, and locally is endless.
In this fight for recognition, the marketing strategy you choose for your business is crucial—the more active the approach you choose, the better.
One of the best, most versatile, and cost-effective strategies you can use for online marketing, especially for home service companies, is pay-per-click or PPC.
In this post, we will discuss some of the most useful PPC strategies for home service companies.
What is PPC?
Pay-per-click is a form of Digital Marketing. You can create ads for your business, bid to display them in search results for specific keywords and encourage people to convert into leads.
The way it works is straightforward. Your listing comes up through chosen keywords before the organic search results on a search engine’s results page or appears on that engine’s vast network. When a user clicks on your listing, you pay the search engine a small fee for advertising.
PPC can be challenging to get started, especially without the help of a specialized PPC Agency. However, once you have begun a well-organized PPC campaign, it will quickly become a vital aspect of your business.
Google ads
Google is the giant, So obviously, it’s an excellent place for your business’s PPC campaign. Google ads bidding system approach to PPC is pretty simple: companies and advertisers bid for keywords when users search those keywords, Google shows relevant ads, the more you play, the higher your ad will appear in search results, and it’s cost-effective because if your ad is not clicked Google does not charge you.
Google’s the more you play, the higher your ad displays approach is appealing because it allows businesses of all sizes to compete for advertising eyeballs. – in the home services sector, this is important.
Say, for instance, you are a plumber; if you plan your campaign strategically enough, you should be able to get your ad placed relatively high in search results. Combine a good PPC campaign with excellent customer service and five-star work, and your business will be off to a great start.
Facebook ads
Facebook ads like Google is another giant. Facebook alone provides tons of users for advertisers to target.
Facebook is well known for offering all of the data it collects on its users. The information includes age, gender, location, job, income, hobbies, and more. Instead of targeting keywords like Google, Facebook ads target interests and demographics.
Not only are Facebook ads affordable, but the platform allows you to choose all of the demographic factors that you want, choose from a variety of ad styles, and fill in the blanks.
If you’re in the home services industry, the ability to have almost limitless ways to target prospective customers is something you should want to take advantage of, and it’s affordable.
Plus, you can use Facebook’s platform for advertising on Instagram since Facebook bought Instagram a few years ago.
PPC is flexible and quantifiable
Advertising in a newspaper at one time was the most cost-effective, efficient, and reliable method of getting your branding across to prospective customers. These days that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Newspapers are not only wildly outdated but placing ads in newspapers has proven to be wildly inefficient in large part because there’s no real way to measure the success or failure of your ad.
Pay-per-click provides you with immediate metrics, is flexible enough to allow you to make changes once the ad has launched, and is adaptable based on your budget and business flow.
If a particular ad isn’t performing, change it.
You can also pause or stop a PPC campaign altogether if the business gets a little hectic or needs time to adjust.
Strategic negative keywords
Including negative keywords – words you don’t want to trigger your ad is a great way to make sure you only bid on the keywords most relevant to your business and to the desired search results you want to yield.
For example, if a person searches for “cheap area plumbers,” they are probably not likely to convert into a well-paying customer.
So, unless part of your marketing strategy is Joe, the plumber who will fix your toilet’s slow flow for very little dough, you might want to include the word cheap as a negative keyword so you can exclude those unintended customers.
Picking Great Keywords
The linchpin to PPC advertising success is selecting the right keywords and targeting your messaging to what people are searching for online.
Be strategic about the keywords you choose. Choosing the first keywords that come to mind may be easy to do. But your keywords are what is going to drive those prospective customers to your website.
Think about what makes you unique, what section apart from your competitors? The phrase “mean what you say, say what you mean” applies here. Think about your business, which you envisioned your business serving when you started it, and speak to those with every keyword you choose to use.
PPC experts are just one call away
At Agency Partner, we understand the ins and outs of PPC. We also understand how vital and beneficial it can be to your home services business. As we discussed earlier, the home services industry is brutally competitive. The competition you are up against nationally, regionally, and locally is not lost on us.
PPC home services advertising is the perfect tool to help you compete with the big companies on the block.
Our team of experts has years of experience getting you the organic search resultsyou want. With our team working for you, you will generate leads and one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways possible.
If your business is in the home services sector and you want more leads, higher and more consistent conversions, and simply smarter digital marketing, give us a call now.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “PPC Strategies for Home Services Companies” instead. Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Expert Tips For Google Penalty and How do I Recover?
Just like your parents used to punish you for doing a crappy job on the dishes, or your English teacher gave you a zero after reviewing your term paper and realizing you copied it off the Internet, Google also gives penalties to websites.
A Google penalty, in essence is a punishment given to a website containing content that does not align with Google’s marketing practices.
Types of Google Penalties
Routine algorithm updates intended to reward high-quality websites that have good content and legitimate SEO practices are commonly confused as Google penalties.
Although algorithm penalties do occur, a routine algorithm update can easily be mistaken for a Google penalty because algorithms rely heavily on calculations and rules to deliver the desired outcome – not allowing for much gray area.
Manual penalties – often easier to identify because they frequently come accompanied by messages from Google to your webmaster account happened typically after Google has flagged something, usually content or a backlink, and Google decides to manually apply a penalty to your website’s rankings.
Common Issues Websites Receive Penalties For
Suspicious links – because Google uses backlinks as a way of tracking quality control for websites that will penalize you if they believe the link on your site was paid for or is believed to be a part of a link scheme.
One example of this would be low-quality, hidden, or keyword-rich links embedded in a site’s widgets.
Because backlinks are so specific, penalties for these are often limited to specific pages rather than an entire website.
Low-quality content – obviously Google wants to provide their users with the best information and experience possible. If your content does not add value, is run-of-the-mill, or believed to be a duplicate from another site you can expect a penalty.
To help avoid the trap of crappy content being on your website, invest time in thinking about what makes you unique and sets you apart from your competitors.
Ask yourself: what is my unique selling proposition?
Try to avoid content that is easily or automatically generated, and if your site allows for guest posts, carefully review their content because if it doesn’t add value you probably don’t need it.
This type of penalty is severely detrimental to your website traffic. This is usually a manual action accompanied by a message from Google indicating “thin content.”
Recovering from a Google Penalty
Just as with many other issues in life you can’t resolve an issue until you completely identify and understand what the issue is. This same logic applies to Google penalties. Before you can begin to recover from a Google penalty you have to understand what type of penalty you’re dealing with.
As mentioned earlier, you need to distinguish whether you’re dealing with a manual penalty one triggered by an algorithm, or is there even a penalty action present?
For instance, if you noticed a recent decline in your website traffic, you need to do some digging to figure out the cause of your traffic decline. Because for each cause of a penalty there are different resolution processes.
Identifying Manual Penalties
To check if you have been hit by manual action, you need to go to Google Webmaster Toolsand check your notifications. If Google has taken manual action against your site, you’ll be notified about it clearly in your notifications and oftentimes they will give you the reasoning behind the action.
Identifying Algorithmic Penalties
While identifying manual penalties is a pretty easy and straightforward process the same cannot be said for penalties caused by algorithms.
Because algorithm related penalties don’t come with a notification from Google you will have to do a lot of your own research to isolate the issue if you suspect you have been hit with a penalty.
Take a look at the entire span of time for which your website has declined in traffic. Make a note of it and see if Google announced any algorithm updates that correspond with the timeframe you’ve isolated.
Be mindful that each update comes with its own set of changes so you will need to know how each update is different so that you don’t waste time looking for things that may or may not have been affected.
Is your Website Optimized Properly?
Not every decline in website traffic can or should be attributed to a Google penalty.
If you notice a decline in your website traffic and have done some digging but still can’t figure out what’s going on, it could be because your digital marketing strategies are no longer effective and need an overhaul.
Whether you have been hit by a manual penalty from Google or one triggered by a routine algorithm update all hope is not lost.
Agency Partner and our team of digital marketing experts can get your website back up and running again – better than ever.
Drop us a line and let’s figure out the best course of action for you today!
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “What Is a Google Penalty and How do I Recover?” instead. Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Expert Tips For How Much Should You Pay A PPC Agency?
Let’s be real, search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial component of modern marketing. But while rising up the ranks and getting to the top of the search results list may be vital to your success, it takes time. Sometimes six months or more before you start to see a return on your investment.
Thankfully, there is a more immediate option that can work on its own alongside strategic SEO. It’s called Pay-Per-Click marketing (PPC).
What is PPC Marketing?
Pay-Per-Click marketing is exactly what it sounds like. It is a form of Digital Marketing in which you pay a given PPC Agency per click you receive.
The way it works is straightforward and simple. Your listing comes up through chosen keywords before the organic search results on a search engine’s results page or appears on that engine’s vast network. When a user clicks on your listing, you pay your PPC Agency.
How Much Should You Pay a PPC Agency?
Before we answer the “how much” question, it’s important to be familiar with the different pricing models that PPC management agencies use for billing.
Here’s a brief overview of the three most common PPC pricing models:
Percentage of Ad Budget Pricing
If you’re shopping for help with PPC, you’ll probably see a lot of agencies using a “percentage of spend” pricing model. Under this model, clients pay agencies a predetermined percentage of their spend on the ads that the agency is tasked with managing.
Good for: Companies with a larger or growing ad spend, given the percentage reduction that comes with a total budget increase. Many agencies that use this model will require minimum spending.
Not great for Smaller companies with tiny budgets. Minimum spends are often associated with this model, so if your budget isn’t big enough, you’ll likely be stuck with some hefty fees to make it worthwhile for the agency to work with you.
Management Fee + Percentage of Ad Budget Pricing
Many marketing agencies will charge a management fee to cover overheads related to the PPCad campaigns they’re managing for clients.
Like the first example, this pricing model also uses the percentage of ad spend as its baseline, just with an additional fee.
Good for: Customers who want transparency and ultimate ownership of their accounts.
Not great for Very low-cost accounts. Very small businesses are best served with automated platforms for which a pure percentage of spend makes sense.
Flat Fee Pricing
Some agencies will charge a flat, pre-determined fee after settling on a scope of work and calculating the static costs related to managing the client’s PPC campaigns. Some businesses prefer the straightforward nature of this model, so long as the activities and services included in the scope are clearly defined.
Good for: Relatively static campaigns and clients who want fixed expenses each month.
Not great for Dynamic campaigns. Many businesses are seasonal and/or use specials to drive business. In these cases, both the management burden and the ad-spend will need to be more flexible.
Now that you know the different types of PPC models answering the question of how much you should spend on a PPC agency is simple, how involved do you want to be?
Are you a small-to-mid-sized business decision-maker who simply wants to see a lift in inbound leads from activities like PPC?
For decision-makers on this scale, the minute details can be tiresome and pull you away from more pressing concerns.
If this is the case, a pricing model based on a percentage of your ad budget probably makes the most sense.
But, if you’re looking to tinker and get hands-on with your PPC ad budget and campaign, you’ll want to look for agencies that itemize their services so you can carefully manage your budget.
Examine your business model, think about your personal preferences, and how aggressive and hands-on or conservative you want to be.
The choice is solely up to you.
As the old poet and philosopher Titus Maccius Plautus once said, “you have to spend money to make money.” Most important, as with most things in life is communication. it is crucial that you as the decision-maker and the PPC Agency.
You choose are on the same page.
Ensure that your goals and overall marketing objective is clear and understood by everyone involved. Without proper communication PPC and any other marketing will be ineffective.
Marketing is challenging, it takes specialized knowledge and expertise to build a campaign properly targeted to your audience. Let Agency Partner help you now and get the arrow pointing up on your website traffic, clicks, and conversion rates.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How Much Should You Pay A PPC Agency?” instead. Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Expert Tips For How to Use Facebook Ads to Generate Mortgage Leads
The world of marketing has changed dramatically over the past two decades in large part due to the growth and development of new technologies and new marketing platforms like Facebook and other social media networks. In the age of digital communication, there is a myriad of ways marketers can get their message in front of potential customers browsing the Internet for information or simply to pass time.
One effective and efficient way to market directly to your target audience is through using Facebook Ads. Facebook’s popularity and influence have grown exponentially since its inception in February 2004. According to statista.com Facebook had 2.7 billion active monthly users in the second quarter of 2020, and the numbers are expected to increase as Facebook expands its social networks into the realm of e-gaming with live-streamed competitions and more between friends.
Businesses of all shapes and sizes but especially those in financial services such as Mortgage Brokers and Lenders that choose to embrace technological advancements and platforms like Facebook and Facebook ads have the opportunity to acquire customers with efficiency and in massive numbers, due to the sheer number of Facebook users, those ads will be visible to.
You also have the option of paying for your Facebook advertising on a CPM (cost per mile) basis wherein you pay for every 1,000 impressions (appearances) of your ad irrespective of the number of clicks they get.
Facebook Ads work on an auction basis whereby the amount you bid per click or per 1,000 impressions will affect how often your ads are shown.
Advertisers on Facebook can generate the ads themselves through the Facebook self-service interface or can hire the services of a Facebook Ads manager.
There are different types of ads available on the Facebook Ads platform and these enable advertisers to choose whether they want to promote their Facebook page, individual posts on their Facebook page, or their own websites.
Ads can be made up of images, text, and video and they can appear in people’s newsfeeds or, on desktops, as ads in the sidebar.
Alongside ads appearing on the main Facebook site, ads can also be set to appear on Instagram – a Facebook-owned platform, and within Facebook Messenger.
Pinpoint Your Target Audience
Facebook Ads are so effective because they allow you to target people based on a variety of factors such as location, age, relationship status, occupation, hobbies, interests, companies they follow, income level, parental status, and more.
This precise level of targeting is made possible because Facebook collects a tremendous amount of data about its users from the information they disclose in their profiles and from analytics on user behavior.
The precise advertising Facebook ads offer is particularly useful for mortgage brokers and lenders because it potentially allows you to target customers in the optimal demographic for interest in purchasing, thereby increasing overall chances for conversion.
For instance, if you as a mortgage broker or lender wanted to target women in their late 20s and 30s, who lives in Dallas, Texas, have a degree, and are currently in a long-distance relationship, Facebook Ads allows you to do that.
While the level of precision targeting Facebook offers is good, mortgage brokers will need to constantly adapt their approach, tailoring it specifically for different types of potential buyers. For example, a more experienced homebuyer may already have a great idea of what they want and therefore need very little help or guidance. On the flip side, a new home buyer may need more guidance from a broker so advertising for these clients may need to be more in-depth.
Social media in general and Facebook ads specifically are great tools of marketing, advertising, and exposure when used properly.
North Texas-based company, Agency Partner can help you activate these tools and put them to use in the most effective and efficient ways for your business.
Retargeting and Facebook Ads
Consistent and persistent marketing on sites like Facebook is absolutely necessary for today’s technological age because not everyone who visits your site the first time will submit an inquiry.
With the use of Facebook Ads retargeting tool Agency Partnercan help you stay in front of people who fail to convert on their first visit to your site – even if their first visit to your website was not as a result of clicking on a Facebook ad.
Multiple Communication Methods
Facebook is like Voltron, it has so many individual pieces and moving parts that can be manipulated to precisely the right angle. But it’s when all of those parts come together that it’s most effective.
Don’t be afraid to use multiple communication channels. Not everyone likes filling in online forms and not everyone enjoys talking on the phone. Some people like texting and some don’t.
People communicate in a variety of ways these days, so you’ll increase the chances of your Facebook Ads being successful if you offer a variety of ways for people to engage with you once they’ve clicked through from Facebook to your website.
Do Facebook Ads Really Work?
Yes.
Facebook Ads offers a great way of generating mortgage leads for your business. Combined with the expert knowledge of Agency Partner, you can use Facebook Ads to potentially identify your exact target audience by a variety of metrics, tailor marketing campaigns specifically to all or a piece of that audience, and put in front of the marketing materials that will speak directly to what that buyer wants – contacting them in a variety of ways: social media, text, email, and more.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Use Facebook Ads to Generate Mortgage Leads” instead.
Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Expert Tips For How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate
If you look at Google Analytics, you can see the number of pages your website visitors have viewed after visiting a specific page on your website. The percentage of website visitors who viewed only a single page then left your website for good, make up your bounce rate.
On the Internet, we should expect some percentage of our website visitors to bounce. After all, sometimes people click on a link thinking it’s one thing, but it’s actually not what they wanted. But if you have a high bounce rate, such as a bounce rate over 70%, you really need to think about the digital marketing efforts you’ve deployed to drive viewers to your website, and the content you create for them to find.
High bounce rates are one of the reasons our agency works with so many clients on website optimization and refocusing digital marketing efforts. Companies like yours want to drive quality leads to their websites and increase their conversion rates. However, for one reason or another, they’re driving traffic to their website that bounces. If you have a high bounce rate, here are some website optimization tips to reduce your bounce rate and boost your conversion rate.
Reduce Your Bounce Rate By Keeping Your Digital Marketing Campaigns Targeted
Digital marketing campaigns can drive a lot of leads. But sometimes, overzealous digital marketing means you drive too many low-quality leads.
Think about this example. Let’s say you make work boots to be used on construction sites, in factories, and in other rugged, outdoor job sites. You have a product line that has extra lining and is perfect for outdoor workers who live where temperatures drop dramatically in the fall and winter. As you’re creating your Google Ads campaign for this shoe line, you may think about including the keyword “Boots for Fall.” But doing so would be too broad of a term, especially considering that boots are very fashionable in the fall season and you could inadvertently drive people to your website looking for boots to complement their outfits, not outfit them for their cold field environment. Instead, you need to include targeted terms like “rugged,” “outdoor,” “job site,” and “construction” to better drive high-quality leads to your website who are less likely to bounce and more likely to boost your conversion rate.
SEO Web Content Can Help You Reduce Your Bounce Rate
SEO – which stands for search engine optimization – is extremely important in driving organic traffic to your website. If you aren’t incorporating relevant keywords tied to your company, products, and brand in your web content – including your websites and blog posts – you aren’t going to get discovered by the people who are really interested in what you have to offer.
One of the most important things you can do during website optimization is to update your web content for SEO purposes. To do so, you can:
Rely on your most popular Google Ad keywords and incorporate them into your web copy.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find new relevant keywords to incorporate into your content.
Leverage a third-party paid solution for keywords discovering and planning in your website content.
Does this sound like too much work for you to handle in-house? Don’t worry! As a digital marketing agency, we perform SEO website optimization and both find the best keywords for your websites and blogs and create that content, too.
A/B Test Your Web Content to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
As a digital marketing agency, we can’t stress enough just how important it is to A/B test your website. This sort of testing helps you identify the best combination of text and images that work for your website’s design. No matter how creative or on-target you think a new update might be, you don’t know how it’ll perform until it’s up and live.
But if you wipe the slate clean by pushing out new content and abandoning your old content, you run the risk that your new content won’t resonate, and will cause your bounce rate to jump even higher!
Instead, we always recommend you make incremental website changes and A/B test them to see whether the old, or new, performs the best. When it comes to website optimization to reduce your bounce rate, performance isn’t necessarily a conversion but is actually a decreased bounce rate when a viewer lands on that page.
Improve Your Websites Speed to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Today’s Internet users are impatient. Did you know that 53% of mobile website users will bounce if it takes more than three seconds for your website to load? Google knows this too (it’s their statistic) which is why website loading speed is factored into their search algorithm that ranks search results. So, by increasing your website’s load rate, you’re killing two birds with one stone – you’re appeasing impatient mobile searchers and improving your search engine rankings.
The Google Page Speed tool helps you optimize all your landing pages for high-speed loading. Following best practices for image optimization and caching can help shed time off your website’s loading speed, too.
Use Social Proof to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
If a new website visitor has never heard of you before, they may be skeptical about your product or brand. Sure, you say it’s great, but what do other people have to say about it?
This is why social proof – such as testimonials and badges from organizations you’re a member of or awards you’ve won – is so important. In fact, research shows that 84% of today’s savvy Internet users trust the recommendation of an online stranger just as much as they trust a recommendation from a friend or family member. That’s how important it is to include social proof on your landing pages.
We Can Help You With Website Optimization
Whether you’ve tried optimizing your website to reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversion rate and are spinning your wheels, or you don’t have the internal resources to take on this project yourself, we’re here to help. As a digital marketing agency, we know how to create compelling web content that will keep visitors on your website and trigger them to convert. To start a conversation with us about your company’s needs, call us today at (214) 295-5845.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate” instead.
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Expert Tips For How to Improve Your PPC Landing Pages
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is now more proliferate, and more relevant, than ever before. Whether you’re advertising on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, or another platform, you want to make sure you’re doing everything possible to make your PPC landing pages provide your leads with the right information and the best user experience that’s possible.
As a digital marketing agency that works with a variety of brands on PPC advertising, we help companies in several different industries with landing page creation and landing page optimization. Keep reading for our best tips for optimizing your PPC landing pages, including things you can do right now to improve these important aspects of your PPC campaigns on Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads.
1- PPC Landing Page Speed Matters – A Lot
According to the latest Google statistics, 50% of all search queries happen on a mobile device. Do you know what else Google is reporting? Mobile searches completely abandon a website – including several PPC landing pages – if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Just 3 seconds? That means losing your potential next customer can happen extremely quickly.
To make sure your page speed is fast enough for today’s mobile web searcher, consider the following landing page optimization tricks:
Don’t overload your PPC landing pages with images. Focus on one clear image – that loads quickly, of course – that conveys your message to viewers.
Test your mobile speed score before you finalize a PPC landing page. It’s better to learn now than later that you need to go back to the drawing board.
Keep your designs simple and easy to load. Don’t waste valuable page speed on loading an intricate web design for PPC landing pages.
2- Design First For Mobile, Next for Desktop
Even though half of all Google searches still happen on desktops, you really should be designed with the mobile viewer in mind first. And this is whether you’re performing landing page optimization for Google Ads, Bing Ads, or Facebook Ads.
Think about it this way. Your PPC landing pages are being designed by digital marketing professionals who have large screens for their laptops or desktop computers. That means, when they’re designing and testing PPC landing pages, they’re getting the full view. But how often do you test your PPC landing pages on your iPhone or Android phone before you publish them? Be honest, it’s okay. We’re here to help, not to judge.
You see, responsive design is so important, it should be the first thing you test for today and most likely in the future.
If you’re not considering how your pages view on mobile devices when you’re performing landing page optimization, you’re leaving out 50% of your viewers. Make sure your hero image, key message, and any CTA are easily viewed above the fold on multiple different mobile devices before you push a PPC landing page to go live.
3- Focus on Quality, not Quantity
Some PPC advertisers are all about conversions. They want to increase their conversion ratio as much as possible. However, if you only focus on conversion, you’re forgetting about what’s even more important – converting qualified leads.
Think about it. Which would you rather have your sales team follow up on – 100 leads that found you but aren’t necessarily interested in your product or service, or 10 leads who were pre-qualified through your detailed lead capture form? The answer is obviously the latter.
This is why we never recommend you deploy certain landing page optimization techniques that other digital marketing agencies might suggest, such as slimming down your lead capture form to be as small as possible and still fit into your company’s sales funnel.
Trust us, qualified leads who are truly interested in your products will take the time to provide the additional information you request. And by filling your sales pipeline with qualified leads, you’re best utilizing your internal sales resources.
4- Simplicity is Key
Minimalism is in, and definitely far more than keeping your home easy to organize.
One of the best landing page optimization tips we can offer you is to keep your landing pages simple. Too much information is overkill and can overwhelm viewers. Your landing page sweet spot is when you give viewers just enough information to entice them to either keep searching your website or fill out a lead capture form so they can be put into your sales funnel. Never list all your product details on your landing pages – that’s far too much information for a PPC ad clicker to see upfront.
5- Use Personalization Wisely
Personalization is changing PPC advertising. But you don’t want to go overboard with personalization in a way that makes viewers have data privacy concerns.
Some ways that we recommend you use personalization on your landing pages include:
Display different images for male and female viewers that A/B testing has proven to be effective.
Use localized images based on the searcher’s geolocation.
Constantly be A/B testing your personalization options to see what choices are best.
6- Don’t Forget The Little (and Tried and True) Aspects That Have Been Helping for Years
Because aspects like personalization are new and exciting, it’s easy to think that older landing page optimization tips are no longer relevant. Think again. You should be taking advantage of:
Metadata and title tags.
A/B testing of forms.
A/B testing of content style and length, including paragraphs, bullets, and more.
A/B testing of different taglines.
Additionally, all PPC landing pages should have an easy way to get to the rest of your website. In fact, Google will ding you if your landing pages don’t have this “escape hatch.”
Do You Need Landing Page Optimization Help?
As a digital marketing agency, we help a wide variety of brands with their PPC advertising, including landing page optimization. Whether you want to be working with PPC experts like us, or you simply don’t have the internal resources to perform this task on your own, we’re here to help. Call us to get a conversation started at (214) 295-5845.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Improve Your PPC Landing Pages” instead.
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Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a must in today’s day and age, especially on Google. With Google’s algorithm constantly changing, you simply can’t rely on organic traffic alone to give you the leads or sales your company needs.
For this reason, many companies like yours use PPC digital marketing platforms like Google to promote their business. But creating a compelling ad for Google – even if it has a high clickthrough rate – simply isn’t enough. You need optimized PPC landing pages for your PPC ads to make sure you get the desired 1:1 conversion ratio for every person who clicks your PPC ad.
Continue reading to learn what we as a digital marketing agency suggest every PPC landing page contains, including what it shouldn’t have.
Our Digital Marketing Agencies PPC Landing Page Must-Haves
As a digital marketing agency that has helped several businesses create PPC landing pages, here are our recommendations for your own pages:
PPC Landing Pages Need Their Messages to Match Their Ads
When a web searcher clicks on your PPC ad, you’ve already got them interested and engaged at the messaging you used in your ad. To get them to convert to a lead or a sale, you need to make sure your PPC landing page’s message matches that of the ad that enticed the web searcher, to begin with. Your PPC ads should never direct web searchers to your homepage or another page on your website, but rather a specially designed PPC landing page that contains the exact same messaging as the ads that directed them there.
Don’t Include Links to Other Pages on Your Website
The goal of every PPC landing page is to get the person on the page to convert to either a lead or sale, depending on what your call to action (CTA) is. To make sure this happens, you don’t want to link to any other pages or materials on your website that could cause your PPC ad to lead to a bounce.
Make Sure Your PPC Landing Pages Have Impactful Headlines
One of the tenets of digital marketing is to use words wisely. You want the headline – which will be the first thing your PPC ad lead sees when they are directed to your PPC landing page – to be impactful. Remember to use message matching, and when it makes sense, use action words to keep your lead captivated on your product or service.
Add a Tagline That Supports Your Main Message
A tagline is your opportunity to add more messaging about the benefits your product, service, or brand can offer your PPC ad leads. Taglines should be succinct, but meaningful. It is okay, however, for your tagline to have slightly more text than your PPC landing page headline.
List Out Your Product’s or Service’s – Not Just Its Features
While it’s important to include product or service details or technical specifications, you need to write this information in an engaging way. Our advice is to list them as benefits, and not just features.
For example, if you’re creating a PPC landing page for a 60” TV, don’t just list “60-inch TV” as a bullet on your page. Instead, use impactful copy that conveys the benefit of the TV size, such as “Large 60-inch TV that lets you see your favourite shows and sports in full detail.”
Show Symbols of Trust
Since your PPC ad lead is a paid lead, it’s pretty safe for you to assume that he or she wasn’t thinking of your brand, product, or service when entering his or her web search. Your PPC ad lead was looking for options and recommendations and may have never even heard of your business before. For this reason, it’s important that every PPC landing page includes symbols of trust, such as:
Security symbols, such as from McAfee, if you sell a software application.
Customer logos, especially from customers recognizable in your industry niche or household names, if you can get permission to use them.
Testimonials from happy customers – just make sure to keep them short and sweet. Long, paragraph-form testimonials may be easily skimmed over for PPC ad leads.
Award badges for any award your company has won, such as from professional organizations and publications.
Membership badges, if your company belongs to any industry-recognizable professional organizations.
Certification badges, which are especially important for service-based industries.
Transparent language about your company’s policies, including your privacy policy and whether or not you share lead or sales data with 3rd parties, return policies, and so on.
A free trial if you offer a software product.
Press mentions, especially in mainstream or leading industry publications and websites.
Make Sure You Have a Clear CTA
Every PPC landing page needs a CTA. It’s well known in digital marketing that PPC ad leads are more likely to take the next step when they are asked to do so. You need to keep this message clear, though. Don’t have multiple CTAs, but just one. Depending on the product or service you offer, your CTA may be to make a purchase, download a trial, download a lead magnet like a whitepaper, or something else.
All PPC Landing Pages Need a Lead Capture Form
If a PPC ad leads lands on your page – and even follows through on your CTA – you’re doing yourself a major disservice if you don’t have a lead capture form on your PPC landing page. A lead capture form allows you to identify the person who has come to your page, obtain his or her contact information, and add him or her into your marketing funnel for either remarketing if the lead didn’t convert or to send supplemental or support materials such as emails about your product or service.
All PPC Landing Pages Need a Compelling Image of Your Product in Action, or the Conveying the Benefits of Your Service
People are visual, and you need to appeal to your PPC ad leads’ desires for images on your PPC landing pages. If you’re promoting a product, then choosing an image is typically easier. You want to include an image of your product in action, especially showing it offering a benefit, if possible.
If you are a service-based industry, you want your PPC landing page image to trigger positive emotions related to your brand. Think about the types of images you typically see on a financial institution’s website, for example. Since most people are managing their finances for the benefit of their family’s well-being and future, banks’ websites often contain images of families, especially with young children, to elicit an emotional response from the webpage viewer.
We Can Help You With Your Digital Marketing Needs
As a full-service digital marketing agency, we’ve helped several brands create PPC ad campaigns and PPC landing pages that have matched messages. If you need help creating PPC landing pages to get PPC ad leads to convert, we’re here to help. Simply contact us at (214) 295-5845, sales@agencypartner.com, or fill out our online contact form.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “What to Include on a PPC Landing Page” instead.
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Microsoft is in negotiations to buy TikTok’s American possessions. After discussions with the U.S. president, Donald Trump, last week, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft has been given six weeks to work out a deal that satisfies the Trump administration and shareholders in Chinese parent company ByteDance. In an official acknowledgment that Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is in negotiations with TikTok, the company issued the following statement:
“The discussions with ByteDance will build upon a notification made by Microsoft and ByteDance to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The two companies have provided notice of their intent to explore a preliminary proposal that would involve a purchase of the TikTok service in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and would result in Microsoft owning and operating TikTok in these markets. Microsoft may invite other American investors to participate on a minority basis in this purchase.”
The Value Of TikTok
This is where the problem begins. What is covered by the term ‘Amercian’ business and how much is it worth? It is impossible to say how much ByteDance is worth globally. However, at the end of May, it recorded a number of private share transactions that are not transparent but led Bloomberg financial wires to report that the company had an estimated market value of $100 billion. According to the report, which cited people “familiar with the matter”, the valuation was built on the expectation that TikTok — one of the company’s main offerings — would keep attracting advertisers as the social network continues to expand, particularly across a young adult demographic.
Equally important was an assessment by Andrea Walne, a partner at Manhattan Venture Partners that “the trading of ByteDance [shares] is reflective of the global wave of consumers who agree that ByteDance can displace Facebook as the leading social network.”
If for no other reason than this, TikTok would be an interesting buy for Microsoft and would make it a very strong competitor in a technology market that is one of the toughest to break. But is this really the reason?
Adam Rizzieri is Chief Marketing Officer with Agency Partner Interactive, a digital marketing agency based in Dallas. He believes that Microsoft’s interest in TikTok is largely for the data that is available through social networks and the value that that data could have across the company.
This is not new though. He pointed out that in 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in the then three-year-old Facebook but that Microsoft was too late to the party and only acquired 1.6% of the business, earning it a little over $1 billion after dilution. “Apart from its $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016, it has generally been unsuccessful at launching its own social networks, such as So.cl,” he said. “A move towards TikTok immediately gives it a functional, highly adopted social platform with over two billion downloads in the App Store and Google Play.”
If the sale goes through, Microsoft will also immediately earn revenue on the recently launched TikTok For Business Ads Manager, and in the long-term, the video platform will allow them to compete with Google’s YouTube and Facebook. “On top of that, Microsoft will utilize TikTok’s user data to connect with Gen Z consumers, driving innovation in new software and hardware products,” he added.
TikTok Data for Microsoft
PureVPN is a commercial virtual private network service owned by GZ Systems, which develops security-based apps among other things. Based in Hong Kong it has a foot firmly planted in the Chinese market. Muhammad Mateen Khan, a digital marketing strategy at the company agrees that this deal is about data. “This is the driving force behind concerns from the Trump administration over TikTok’s potential ties to the Chinese government and how that data might be misused,” Khan said.
The data could be used by Microsoft in a variety of ways. The software giant has long used Xbox Live to fuel parts of Microsoft Research for future software and hardware projects, and the usage data helps game developers and Microsoft better understand how people use their Xbox. Understanding how people interacted with and used the Kinect accessory for the Xbox ultimately helped Microsoft develop and improve HoloLens, too.
TikTok could also help correct a Microsoft blindspot and even influence how other software and services are developed inside the company. Microsoft has all the data it needs on business usage of software, but it has not been successful with pure consumer services in recent years, which has left the company with a gap of insight into consumer behaviors.
That is particularly relevant when you consider that many young Americans are growing up in an environment dominated by Android iOS, and Chromebooks in classrooms. With Gmail also dominating consumer email usage and document sharing through Google Docs, it is now possible to grow up in the U.S. without needing any Microsoft software or services. “Microsoft missed the mobile revolution and has been playing catch-up ever since, but it doesn’t want to miss an entire generation of future workers,” he said.
Network Users’ Data
If data is the new oil then the principal reason why Microsoft wants TikTok is to cash in on the bonanza that the social network might offer. In recent years Microsoft’s gap of insights into consumer behavior widened after the company missed the mobile revolution, David Morneau of the Canada-based inBeat.Agency, a micro-influencer marketing agency that works closely with TikToK, pointed out.
Gen Z that represents a majority of TikTok-ers grew up using very little or none of Microsoft’s software. They are active Android and iOS users. They use Gmail, Chromebooks, Google docs in the classrooms. With TikTok, Microsoft gets access to the data that will help make their products more consumer-friendly. “TikTok will open the doors to the world of AI consumer testing beyond the Office and feed Microsoft’s Augmented Reality ambitions,” he added.
What Will Microsoft Do?
So, what will Microsoft do with the data. Among other measures, Microsoft would ensure that all private data of TikTok’s American users is transferred to and remains in the United States, according to a Microsoft statement. To the extent that any such data is currently stored or backed-up outside the United States, Microsoft would ensure that this data is deleted from servers outside the country after it is transferred.
But it is not a done deal yet and there is a long way to go. The statement, which is dated August 2, adds that these discussions are preliminary and there can be no assurance that a transaction that involves Microsoft will proceed. “We do not intend to provide further updates until there is a definitive outcome to our discussions,” it adds.
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world just after its parent company, Google. For more than a decade, YouTube has held a monopoly over global video platforms.
In fact, billions of people use YouTube every day to browse content, ranging from educational videos to entertainment. This makes YouTube an invaluable tool for businesses to promote their products and services.
Here’s how you can practice effective YouTube SEO tactics to boost the exposure of your video content.
Name Your Video File Using a Target Keyword
Again, YouTube is a search engine just like Google. This means you will have to conduct keyword research to see the keywords your target audience is using to find videos similar to the ones you are creating.
With that being said, there are a variety of YouTube SEO tools you can use to get the job done. Once you have identified a prominent keyword you want to target, you should place it in the title of your video file first.
Doing this is important because YouTube has to process the file information of your video to see what it’s about. Since YouTube doesn’t have eyes to watch your video, adding a target keyword in the file name can help its index bots determine the value of your content.
Hence, avoid standard file names that include underscores and unspecified information. Ideally, a person should be able to see the file name of your video and understand what it’s about.
Place the Target Keyword Naturally in the Video Title
When you conduct a search, the first thing you typically look at is the video title. This is often what determines if a person will click on a video. Therefore, the video title should be captivating, clear, and concise.
Adding your target keyword in the video title is essential to ensure that your video shows up for corresponding searches. However, you shouldn’t put all of your hopes in this greatly affecting the visibility of your video content.
According to Brian Dean, video titles that include a verbatim keyword-only have a slight ranking advantage over those that don’t.
As you can see, including a keyword in your video title won’t give you a significant advantage, but it provides one nonetheless. For this reason, make sure that you insert a keyword naturally in the video title.
While including a target keyword in your video title isn’t the end-all-be-all, it can certainly work effectively if you also write a compelling video title.
Optimize Your Video Description
YouTube utilizes descriptions that inform viewers about what videos are about. These descriptions have a character limit of 1,000. While it’s acceptable to use all of these characters to describe your video, it’s important to realize that your viewers want to see a video and not read an essay.
If you want to compose a long video description, keep in mind that YouTube only shows a snippet of the first two or three lines of content, which is approximately 100 characters. If you write more, viewers will have to click the video to see the full description.
To get the most out of this space, post all of the important information like CTAs in the first lines of your video description. As for whether adding keywords to a description matters for ranking purposes, Brian Dean maintains that there isn’t a definite answer.
Take a look at this chart to learn more.
While Dean’s study didn’t find any link between keyword-optimized video descriptions and increased search rankings, he stated that following this practice helps videos show up in the “suggested videos” feed, which can generate a significant source of views.
Use Popular Tags for Your Videos
According to YouTube’s Creator Academy, adding popular tags to videos not only help viewers find quality content, but it also informs YouTube what your videos are about. Tags provide context on how your videos should be categorized.
This way, YouTube can associate your videos with similar ones your target audience may also be viewing. However, make sure you aren’t just adding irrelevant tags to get more views for your videos.
Google can penalize you for this practice, and it’s simply not necessary. Just like in your description, use the most important keywords first. To show up for more searches, you can try using long-tail keywords.
Choose the Best Category for Your Video
Like tags, categories group your video content with other similar content. Once you upload your video, you can click the “Advanced settings” section to choose a category for your video.
Be mindful to choose the category that fits the topic of your video. This will make sure that your video shows up in various playlists and gains more exposure. Selecting the right category isn’t as simple as it looks.
The best way to identify the category for your video is by finding similar creators that upload the same videos as you.
For example, if you’re running a marketing company, you can try to find other marketing companies that upload similar videos and use the same category.
This is a much better tactic than simply guessing which category your videos belong to.
Upload a Custom Thumbnail
On YouTube, thumbnails are extremely important. According to YouTube’s Creator Academy, 90% of the highest-performing videos have a custom thumbnail. Hence, if you want to replicate the same success, you should create an enticing thumbnail that convinces viewers to click on your videos.
There are plenty of online tools that help creators develop custom thumbnails. In fact, it’s easier than ever to create one within a few minutes.
Revamp Your YouTube Marketing Strategy!
Do you need help in directing more exposure to your YouTube videos? If so, give us a call at (214) 295-5845 to speak to a member of our team and learn more about how we can help you today!
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “The Complete Guide to YouTube SEO” instead.
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Local search is extremely important for small businesses. In fact, 80% of consumers utilize local search to find local businesses. This means if your business if your website isn’t optimized for local search, you could be missing out on 4 out of 5 of your potential customers.
Luckily, optimizing your business for local search is a straightforward process. Taking the necessary steps to ensure that your website is found for corresponding local searches will make sure that your business flourishes.
After all, 88% of all local searches result in the web user calling or visiting the business within 24 hours. If you want to learn more about how you want to build a strong foundation for your business, read this guide to achieve more online visibility from local searches.
Fill out the required fields, such as your phone number, address, etc.
Verify the information.
Claim your listing and submit.
This is the most basic step in optimizing your business for local search. Your GMB listing is the gateway where unrefined prospects become loyal customers.
Leverage Effective Internal Linking Strategies
Backlinks are the crux of every internet marketing strategy. Though, internal links are just as important to boost your SEO ranking. Generally speaking, internal links are essential for the following reasons:
They support efficient website navigation
Streamlines website hierarchy and information architecture
Reinforces ranking power and page authority throughout your website
If you ever want to see a prime example of an effective internal linking strategy, visit a Wikipedia page. It’s not a coincidence that Wikipedia pages often rank highly in search engines.
They are highly-resourceful and have countless internal links to aid your comprehension and navigate to other useful pages. This increases the time you spent on Wikipedia, which lets search engines know that the site is valuable.
To the same effect, you should utilize sound internal link strategies to help your site rank sufficiently for local searches.
Optimize all Metadata
Metadata is information that describes other data. This includes URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, and all the like.
You see metadata every time you conduct any type of search. Just take a look at this standard search.
Do you see the headers indicating what each web page is about?
This is metadata.
Do you also see the descriptions below the headers?
This is also metadata.
It’s important to optimize the metadata of your entire website architecture to show up for local searches. The best way to do this is by adding high-volume keywords in the URL, title, header, meta description, and body.
This will make sure that your website is found by consumers using the same high-volume keywords you’re including in your site’s metadata.
Add Location Pages to Your Website
If your business operates in multiple locations, you should reflect this on your website. The only way is to create separate location pages for each city or region you do business in.
For example, if you run a restaurant in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, you need to create different pages for both.
Keep in mind that you can’t replicate the same city pages and change the city names.
This is frankly lazy and Google won’t rank them. Instead, put forth the time and effort to create custom location pages that provide information unique to the city the page is mentioning.
Develop Stellar Local Content
If you want to attract local leads, then you’ll need to develop a consistent local content strategy. Ranking your local content isn’t as difficult due to the low amount of competition compared to worldwide search results.
Therefore, all you need is a great content writer and marketing team on your side to craft stellar local content. For example, if you run a law firm, you can write a post about how readers can select the best firm in your city.
Finally, you can add tons of local keywords. This will help your content rank high for local searches and provide a lot of value to your audience – that’s effectively killing two birds with one stone.
Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
More than half of all online searches happen on a mobile device. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, then you could be running potential customers off before they can even convert.
A website doesn’t appear the same way on a computer as it does on a tablet. Therefore, you will have to ensure that your website has a fast and convenient mobile version.
The important thing to realize here is that your desktop version should still provide the same features as your mobile version. It can be frustrating to be forced to use a computer just because the mobile version of a website stripped certain essential features.
Improve Your Local SEO Today!
Local SEO is vital for the online presence of any small business. Since people mainly conduct business online, building a strong foundation on the internet isn’t an optional task.
If you need help in jumpstarting the local SEO strategy of your business, give us a call at (214) 295-5845 to learn more about how we can help you today.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “A Complete Guide to Local SEO for Small Businesses” instead.
Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Expert Tips on Targeting Business Owners with Facebook Ads
Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. Approximately, 2.89 billion people across the world use the platform every day. This makes Facebook the perfect place to promote your business.
Although Facebook has the most powerful social media advertising platform available, targeting specific individuals can be challenging. For example, if you want to position your ads in front of business owners, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with Facebook’s advertising platform.
Luckily, this platform was built to granularly target specific audiences. Below, you can learn more about how you can align your ad campaign to your target audience.
Is Facebook Ideal for B2B Audiences
For the most part, advertising to B2B audiences is a bit more complicated than doing the same to B2C audiences. This is because people usually don’t have a chain of command and will spend their money any way they please.
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B2B clients have obstacles in the way of making transactions and have to think about the profitability of their business before jumping into a purchasing decision. What’s more, some marketers don’t believe that Facebook is an ideal place to find business owners.
This is because some of them believe that Facebook is only used by consumers or B2C audiences. This could not be further from the actual truth. Business owners are people, and people more often than not use Facebook.
This makes Facebook a great place to find and target business owners. Knowing how to do this is rather simple. Here are five essential tips for targeting business owners with your Facebook ads.
1. Target Business Page Admins
This is one of the easiest ways to target business owners. Generally speaking, nearly all business page administrators are actually business owners. Therefore, targeting these individuals is key.
Unfortunately, many people don’t know that Facebook allows users to position their ads in front of the business page admins. By using the detailed targeting section on Facebook’s ads business manager, you can configure your ads to reach any desired target.
This is a quick way to find a person that owns a business. It will also ensure that you’re putting your ads in front of people that are the most likely to own a business.
2. Target Publications Business Owners Follow
Many business owners follow publications for various reasons. Fortunately, Facebook allows advertisers to target these individuals based on the publications they read.
If a business owner follows a publication with a large readership, you can find this publication on Facebook ads manager, and target people who have an interest in it. Here’s how: The Entrepreneur is read by millions of business owners across the world. It stands to reason that their audience will be valuable in your search for potential leads. Still, to achieve the best results, make sure you are finding publications relevant to the type of audience you’re targeting.
For example, if you want to reach financial businesses, then you should focus on financial publications.
3. Target Audiences With an Interest in Business
One of the best ways to reach business owners is to simply target people that simply have an interest in the business.
This is actually similar to targeting business page admins. When creating a business page, you have the option of highlighting your interests.
Any business that has an interest in the business will be targeted by selecting “business” as an interest in Facebook ads manager.
This will make sure that your ads are diverse and show up to business owners that may have indicated their interest in the business.
4. Target Specific Types of Industries
If you are simply targeting all types of business owners, then all of the above tips will suffice. However, if you need to reach business owners in specific industries, refining your search will be necessary.
Let’s say that you need to reach financial business owners, particularly accountants and investment bankers.
Facebook allows you to narrow down your search to find these individuals based on their profession they have listed on their profiles.
This provides a wide range of options, in which you can ensure that you are targeting the right audience.
5. Target Specific Job Titles
Another basic tip for reaching business owners is to target people according to their job title. For example, business owners normally hold positions, such as “CEO” “Founder” and “President”.
By typing these titles into Facebook’s ad manager, you can successfully narrow your search further to target people that are explicitly running their own company.
To ensure that you optimize your reach correctly, add multiple job titles that business owners might use. This means it will be a great idea to use all possible job titles you can think of that business owners will typically use.
Best Tips to Target Business Owners on Facebook
If you need further insight for targeting business owners on Facebook, then take note of the following tips to improve your campaign.
Mix up your targeting options. Don’t just target people based solely on their interest or job titles. Instead, mix job titles with interests to narrow your search and locate the best people for your campaign.
Look at the audience size.Facebook’s ad platform will always inform you how many people your ads will reach. If your audience is too small, you’ll run out of qualified leads. If your audience is too broad, your mix of leads will be diluted. Try to strike a good balance between your audience size.
Experiment with various variations and audiences.Achieving a successful campaign is all about finding equilibrium. Experiment with different variations and audiences to find out what works better for you. Never stop experimenting.
Make sure your message is sufficient.If you want to generate more leads, make sure your messaging is valuable or appealing to your audience. Usually, underperforming ads miss the mark when it comes to crafting enticing ad copy.
Work With Social Media Professionals – Enhance Your Facebook Ad Campaign Today!
It takes a lot of time and effort to make your Facebook ad campaign profitable. For a free strategy session, contact Agency Partner Interactive today and learn how we can rapidly improve your marketing campaign.
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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is the lifeline of many businesses across the world. In fact, more than seven million advertisers invested 10 billion in PPC ads in just 2017, according to Social Media Today.
Also, PPC advertising remains one of the major generators of one-page conversions. Like any marketing strategy, you must be cognizant of how you are spending your PPC budget.
You can’t mindlessly throw away dollars to an unrefined campaign, and you don’t want to limit the potential of your campaign by not investing in it properly. With that said, knowing how much you should spend on PPC advertising is essential.
This guide will explain key methods for determining the budget for your campaign commensurate the results you’re looking for.
Things to Consider Before Determining Your PPC Budget
Striking a balance between quality and quantity is important for any PPC campaign. However, you can’t do this without first defining the results you need and understanding the characteristics of your target audience.
Ideally, you’ll need to recognize certain qualities about your target audience, which include:
Buying cycle
Visitor frequency
Geographic location
Target cost per lead (CPL)
Lead quality
These are all qualities you must understand about your intended lead. If you’re not yet sure what this lead looks like, you can start by asking the following questions:
What can I afford to spend?
How do I “value” a lead?
What is my website’s conversion rate?
How many leads do I need from my PPC campaign?
Let’s take a closer look at the information you’ll need to be aware of before determining your PPC budget.
How Much Do You Need to Spend to Get Started with PPC?
Once you know the answer to the questions above, you can perform some basic mathematical calculations to help you define your overall budget. Take a look at this image to further understand how this math will work.
Let’s say that you need at least 250 leads per month from your PPC campaign and you have a conversion rate (close rate) of 15%. This means you’ll need 1667 conversions every month to convert 250 leads every month. If your CPL is $25, you can expect to spend $1,388 every month or $41,666.67 annually to achieve this goal.
Is There Anything That Affects How You Value Leads?
All leads aren’t created equal. Some leads will enter your funnel fully ready to do business with you. These are called qualified leads. On the contrary, others will need to be nurtured.
The value of leads will depend strongly on the following factors:
Geography: Are your leads valued more or less based on where they live? Are you willing to spend more money on leads from specific areas?
Bounce rate: How are your leads interacting with your website? What’s the average bounce rate for your website and what do your web users do after they click on your website?
Precedence: What have past qualified leads shown you?
Controlling the quality of leads that are derived from your PPC campaign is simple. You can utilize negative keywords to stop using search terms that don’t bring in qualified leads.
You can also manipulate the placement of your ads and adjust them based on the time of day they appear. Doing this will ensure that you are putting your budget to great use.
For example, if you analyze the performance of your ads during all days of the week, you may see that your CPL on Saturdays is higher than other days of the week, especially for international traffic.
At this point, you should ask yourself, “are the leads I’m bringing in over the weekend worth the increased cost? Should I dial back my budget just a bit? This is where bid adjustments come into play.
Changing the schedule of your ads can help you save money overall, but it’s not the only way. Finding other growth opportunities is vital to saving more money and nailing down your PPC budget.
How to Find Growth Opportunities?
Will increasing your budget result in more leads? How can you define the marginal gain for every cent you are spending? Ultimately, it can be challenging to see how changes in your budget can influence your entire campaign.
Though, Google does offer some tools that can assist marketers in this task. If you’ve used Google Adwords for your campaign, then you’ve likely seen the “limited by budget” notification in your account.
If you have, then Google provides a helpful resource that will inform you just how much more leads you would receive if you increase your budget. Just take a look at this snapshot.
This shows that Google can estimate the growth of your campaign based on your daily budget. For this user, increasing their daily budget will lead to more daily clicks. The user also has an option to set a different budget and see custom metrics for how that will impact the potential of their campaign.
Is There Anything to Consider Before Setting My Budget?
There are various scenarios that can affect your PPC budget, which include:
Search vs. the Display Network
Keyword Considerations
Search Engine (Google vs. Bing)
Device (desktop/tablet vs mobile)
To set the right budget, you’ll need to do some experimentation. Little changes can significantly impact your budget. Therefore, once you understand the growth opportunities for your campaign, you can move forward in increasing or decreasing your budget.
Over time, you can figure out if your budget is efficiently leading to the results you’re after. Finally, you can deliberate with your marketing team to optimize your campaign to reach your objectives.
This is the basis of creating a successful campaign and spending the correct amount of money to do so.
Improve Your PPC Campaign Today!
As you can see, defining an accurate budget for your campaign takes a lot of knowledge and effort. If this is something you don’t have, then contact Agency Partner Interactive today to learn more about our PPC services.
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As we transition to another new, marketing fundamentals and concepts are steadily evolving. Some sophisticated Pay-Per-Click Advertising Trends of last year have become obsolete. Newer ones are developed and are required to be used by marketers of this year.
If you’re not up-to-date on the current PPC Trends of 2020, then you could be falling behind your competitors.
Needless to say, PPC is a cutthroat way of business. You can afford to gain any slippage from your Competitors. With that said, new PPC trends have popped up for the year 2020. Let’s dissect which trends you can include in your Digital Marketing Strategy.
1. Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Ad publishers like Google and Facebook have made it easier for users to configure their PPC Campaigns. With the implementation of both automation and AI, adjusting a campaign has become straightforward in the following ways:
Several monotonous PPC tasks have been automated to streamline configuration.
AI gives users the tools they need to make smarter decisions with their advertising budget.
Altogether, automation and AI lead to a higher ROI for users.
You can take advantage of both automation and AI to achieve enhanced growth of your PPC Campaign and gain increased real estate online.
2. Fewer Organic Search Results
The first page on Google captures as much as 91% of the search results according to Forbes. With that much influence, why do the other pages even exist? You can usually find the information you’re looking for within the first three SERPs.
Marketers are predicting that Google will soon condense their SERPs and eliminate a lot of their pages. If this happens, PPC will become more prominent for marketers. This will increase the competition for the top spot of the SERPs.
In addition, more businesses will begin using PPC to gain more exposure. With that said, it’s important that you hire a proven Digital Marketing Company to give you a competitive advantage over your competitors.
3. Increased Use of Video Ads
According to WordStream, 51% of marketers cite video as the type of content with the highest ROI. For this reason, videos are being featured more as ads on both Google and Facebook.
To mix up your PPC Strategy, try incorporating video ads in your strategy. Before, creating videos used to be a time-consuming and expensive process. Now, modern software has made it possible to create a video with minimal effort and spend.
4. Amazon Paid Ads
Amazon is becoming a popular channel for purchasing paid ads. Why? That’s because Amazon houses more consumers that are ready to buy, unlike Google and Facebook. You can take advantage of Amazon’s audience who are ready to buy now.
This will help you to diversify your advertising budget on three channels and introduce your products and services to a new audience. It may take some time to optimize the correct ad strategy, but there’s no denying that you could set yourself up for future success.
It’s no secret that Facebook has one of the largest captive audiences in the world. With billions of users worldwide, Facebook is an ideal destination for advertisers wanting to spread their message.
Fortunately, Facebook’s advertising platform makes it possible to create brilliant Facebook ads and promote them to wide audiences. It takes a specialized approach to drive your Lead Generation efforts through Facebook’s advertising platform and in 2020 we’re able to reduce advertising costs by leveraging AI to Create Facebook Ads that convert.
Accordingly, below are some Digital Marketing tips you can use to boost your revenue with AI-enhanced Facebook ads.
Eliminate Poor Performing Ads
Many marketers will point out that “You have to spend more to make more.” While this is true to a certain extent, it can cloud your judgment into giving poorly performing ads a long rope.
With AI, you can determine which ads aren’t worth the time of day and eliminate them altogether. This can lead to lower costs and higher ad quality score. You don’t want to spend money on bad ads. AI makes it possible to only spend money on ads worth experimenting on.
View Real-Time Results
With AI Technology, you can view the results of your ad campaigns in real-time. This will allow you to see what’s broken in your campaign so you can make real-time adjustments.
In addition, you can also optimize your campaigns to become more efficient to improve your bottom line and achieve more product sales. In the end, knowing the results of your ad campaign at all times is beneficial from a marketing and financial perspective.
Use Split-Testing
Split testing, or A/B testing, is an essential aspect of any Digital Marketing Strategy. Ideally, you’ll want to see which ads perform the best in your campaign.
Often, this determination will come down to a few small factors. Is your ad copy too generic? Do leads prefer to see one specific brand image over the other? Is the phrasing on your landing page too salesly?
These are all questions split testing can answer. With AI, split testing can become more granular, which is great for getting down to the smallest detail of your campaign’s performance.
Get Creative
No matter how successful an ad campaign is, it won’t last forever. Let’s face it – only a few percentage of your target audience will convert. If you keep showing the same ads to customers who already converted and hopeful leads, your audience will soon get bored and tune you out.
AI can predict when your ads are becoming redundant and automatically replace them. Some AI software will even replace your ad with another one automatically.
In the end, your target audience will be re-targeted with a fresh new ad that may be more successful. It’s important to never get complacent in your campaign.
If you are experiencing underwhelming results from your Facebook or Instagram ad campaign, then you need to try a new alternative. At Agency Partner Interactive, we can develop a Facebook Ad Campaign to drive more business for your company.
Do you want to learn more? If so, contact Agency Partner Interactive to speak to a member of our brilliant marketing agency.
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For any Retail Business, physical or E-commerce, Digital Marketing plays a pivotal role in how you’ll receive Leads and generate more Sales Opportunities.
For this reason, you should arm yourself with knowledge on how to build a successful Digital Marketing Campaign.
Digital Marketing is an umbrella term for all Marketing activities done online, from Social Media Marketing to PPC (Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc).
Below, you’ll learn about some impactful Digital Marketing Practices you can use to give your retail business a sizeable boost.
1. Build the Perfect Website
Your website is the gateway to increased sales opportunities for your business. You can’t just rely on your website giving your potential customers information. Your website will ideally have to be built by a professional.
Why? Websites are tools for marketing. Highly-experienced Web Designers can meticulously design a website that convinces your leads to do business with you.
Therefore, if you have a website that isn’t supplying your business with conversions, or if you don’t have one at all, building one should be your top priority.
2. Create an Email Marketing Campaign
Perhaps one of the most effective ways of generating new business is by starting an email marketing campaign. This type of campaign advertises your products to leads that have given you their email addresses.
Successful Email Marketing Campaigns aren’t direct. These campaigns always provide value to the reader, mainly because people have to see the benefit of giving you their email address.
One great way to converting leads through your email marketing campaign is by taking a personalized approach.
With the right technology in place, you can notice if a lead left your website after building their shopping cart.
You can then send them an email to offer a discount to convince them to pursue the purchase. Keeping emails personalized to each individual can increase your conversions and retarget cold leads.
3. Reach Out to Influencers
Due to the rise of Social Media, people with large followings have a massive voice in the marketplace. Their adherents will usually listen to anything they say if the influencer is an authority in their industry.
For example, video game influencers are trusted advisors who guide their fanbase on which video games to purchase. In the same way, you can reach out to an influencer to help cross-promote your products.
Be sure to only partner with an influencer that aligns with the values of your brand. If your company values eco-friendly products, it doesn’t make much sense to work with an influencer who doesn’t care about the environment.
4. Use Facebook’s Advertising Platform
Facebook has built a prominent advertising platform that millions of businesses around the world use. Since the social media network is home to billions of users, Facebook guarantees exposure for your products if your advertising campaign is well-designed.
Fortunately, receiving exposure and wide-open sales opportunities on Facebook has never been easier. If you want to take advantage of Facebook’s advertising platform, or if you need more assistance with marketing your retail out, contact Agency Partner Interactive today!
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Let’s face it – you can’t do everything. No matter how many hats you wear around the office or if you’re a “Jack-of-all-Trades”, this fact remains.
Does this mean that you can’t Scale your Business to Reach out to a Lucrative Market? Of Course Not. Working with a white-label marketing agency can help you scale your business and receive quality white label Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and white label (Pay-Per-Click) PPC Services for your own Customer Base.
However, many entities are hesitant to allow another business to work under their brand. Below are some of the top benefits of partnering with a White Label Marketing Agency.
It’s Extremely Cost-Effective
Hiring an in-house expert can be taxing on any organization. Not only does it require extensive tools and resources to train new employees, but the risks are also still high.
First of all, full-time employees usually command a benefits package (sick leave, paid-time-off, etc). Next, these individuals can quit at any time. In fact, 30% of U.S. companies said that a Bad Hire Cost Their Businesses more than $50,000.
White label marketing agencies are contracted monthly, allowing you to continue with their white label marketing services if you want or sever the relationship if you’re unsatisfied.
You Can Make More Money
Often, businesses start off by providing one or two services. Over time, however, their customer base may explode and desire additional services.
For example, if you’re a Web Design Agency, you may want to expand into Digital Marketing Agency. Hiring a White Label Marketing Agency can help you fulfill these needs so you can ultimately make more money.
You Can Streamline Your Business
Hiring a White Label Marketing Agency is also beneficial towards streamlining many of your business operations. By making this hire, you can simply invoice your clients while the agency you selected does all of the heavy lifting (customer service, emails, onboarding, etc).
It Frees Up More Time and Focus
By delegating your offerings to a White Label Marketing Agency, you can devote your time and focus to central business issues you can work on.
One important area you can focus on is Building your Brand while your White Label Marketing Agency can focus on helping the clients you already have.
You Can Boost Your Team’s Talent Level
According to a study by MIT, 23% of marketers stated that they needed to recruit better talent to achieve digital maturity. This can often be hard for marketers who press their leaders to hire in-house talent.
With a white label marketing agency, you can be certain you’ll receive assistance from highly-qualified professionals.
Instead of spending massive resources in finding talented individuals and training them, you can build off an experienced agency that can benefit your company right now.
Hiring in-house staff can be tricky because you’ll never know what type of person you’ll be working with until they join your team. With a White Label Marketing Agency, the proof is already there.
Therefore, if you want to take advantage of our White label Marketing Services, Contact Agency Partner Interactive Today to learn more.
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Even if you have a successful “bricks and mortar” store, why would you ignore potential customers online? You are in business to make a profit, and you need to reach as many shoppers as possible to accomplish this.
No matter what kind of retail store you have, Digital Marketing should be a component of your business operations. Want to know more? Read on!
What is Digital Marketing?
Marketing is essential for all kinds of businesses, but now it has moved from the more traditional formats such as advertisements, flyers, and billboards to where most people spend a significant amount of time – online.
With traditional methods, there is little to no interaction with the actual customer. Digital marketing opens communication between the retailer and the consumer, initiating conversations with a two-way flow of information.
Methods of Digital Marketing
There are various methods of Digital Marketing, and it may take some trial and error to find what works best for your business. We look at some of the most common ways below.
Online Store
Whether you have a full-blown eCommerce Website with online payments and delivery or a catalogue-style page using click and collect in-store, you must keep the lines of communication open between you and your customer.
Use online forms, texting, or AI Chatbots to answer any questions they may have.
When an order is placed, an SMS or email alert should be sent to the customer with precise details about their order, where to collect it or when it will be delivered.
Regular newsletters or updates on new products or discounts land directly in your customer’s much-used inbox.
Unfortunately, there is a fine line between spamming and emails of value, so exercise caution to ensure client retention. You do not want to lose clients due to over emailing.
It is also crucial to obtain consumer consent to send them emails and offer opt-in/out options to allow control over how much material they receive.
Mobile Promotions
Using SMS or Push Notifications to inform your client base of new products or discounts is an easy way of using digital marketing. Set up your database of consenting clients and send out messages or coupons with special offers for use in-store or online.
Social Media
Nearly every adult on the planet uses Social Media of some sort. Tapping into platforms where your target audience is active gives you the perfect medium to inform, educate, and sell.
Again, caution is advised when using Social Media Marketing as a sales tool. No one wants to be bombarded with advertisements while online. A better way to win customers is to engage with them in conversations about your products or related matters; then they will be more likely to purchase from you in the future.
Digital Marketing is not necessarily a quick way to get sales, but rather it is a method of keeping you in front of current customers and reach more potential customers. It helps you to connect and start a conversation in the hope of leading to a sale.
Start your Digital Marketing Conversation today, get in touch with Agency Partner Interactive and let us help you hit your sales targets.
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Your company is launching a New Product or needs to expand its customer base, so you decide it is time to bring in the big guns – a Marketing Firm. How do you choose which one will deliver your Requirements? What kind of Marketing do you need? We endeavour to answer these, and more questions as we explore how to Hire The Best Marketing Firm or Digital Marketing Agency.
Types of Marketing Firms
These days, in-bound marketing is the most commonly used form of getting people to buy your products or services. It involves engaging potential customers, usually through social media, content, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and branding, rather than searching for customers or simply placing an advertisement.
Most good marketing firms offer all of the above services, but some may only concentrate on one or two aspects. A content marketing agency will likely focus on creating short and long-form content for websites and ebooks as a way of marketing. They may also employ SEO tactics in the creation of the material and will keep in mind your company’s branding, but their focus will be on the writing of blogs, articles and ebooks.
Likewise, a Branding Firm will mostly concentrate on how to pitch your product or service while a Social Media Company will be more concerned with your interactions on Facebook etc, and an SEO specialist will look at your current content to bring it up to standard.
Decide What Your Company Needs
If your business already has clear branding and an active following on social media, you may decide to spend your marketing budget on content-driven material. The saying “content is king” is very true in today’s digitally focussed marketplace. Potential customers have become more savvy and like to learn more about the companies they engage with before they purchase. By adding articles, blog posts or even value-adding ebooks, you give your audience extra and help to build a feeling of trust, especially if you are an authority or thought leader on a subject.
Hiring a Content Agency will provide you with material for your website that will keep your site fresh and impact on your SEO. If the agency can create SEO Content – content containing keywords that make it easier for Google to rank you – then you are more likely to appear higher up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) meaning more people will see you.
Choose the Right Firm
When it comes to choosing the right firm for your company, it is essential to know how much time and money you are willing to commit. Marketing is rarely a fast-acting process. It can take months, even years, to become a recognized company in what will probably be a crowded market.
If you require content or social media posts daily, you might be best to look for a larger digital agency with a team of creators, but if you need to market less regularly, then a small firm or a freelancer might be the option most beneficial to your business.
Whichever direction you decide to go in, bear in mind that marketing is essential if you wish to compete. It is no longer as simple as putting an advertisement on television or the internet. The most successful companies know that people want to engage and be informed rather than receive a sales pitch, so don’t skimp on your marketing budget! To learn more about how to get the most out of your budget, get in touch with Agency Partner Interactive today.
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In 2018, 1.3 million businesses, nonprofits, and website publishers in the United States used Google’s search and advertising tools to generate $335 billion USD of Economic Growth. There is no doubt that Google is the most used search engine and its digital marketing platform houses effective tools for any business. To keep up with the ever-changing digital landscape, try implementing these Google ad strategies to keep your business flourishing.
Mobile-Specific Google Ads
With 72 Percent of the World predicted to be using only a smartphone to access the internet by 2025, if your business isn’t implementing mobile-specific ads, you’re missing out on a substantial amount of traffic. You must make sure that your website is mobile friendly and that both load time and site speed are performing at maximum capacity. Depending on your campaign type, it is possible to format mobile-specific Google ads as images, texts, calls-only or digital content.
Google Ad Extension
Google ad extensions add value to your Google ads and Digital Marketing Campaigns, by including extra information for customers such as location, call buttons and links to particular parts of your website. Ad extensions supplement your ads with a broader scope of immediate information for customers, meaning more exposure and click-through rates for your company. Google Ads choose the extensions used for each individual Google search, but you need to determine which extensions best support your business’ goals and utilize the options from there.
Revisit Conversion and Call to Action
Customers on your Website are at different stages in their purchasing journey and shouldn’t be subject to the same Conversion Action. Chart out the different buying stages and work out which conversion action belongs to each stage. Target your customers’ specific needs, to provide better overall customer experiences, and you’ll likely convert them into repeat customers. Additionally, place your calls to action into your ad campaigns where they make more sense. Then you better understand what and who you are missing and can take action to fill the gaps.
Use Date Ranges to Organize Re-targeting Lists
Ensure your Ad Campaigns work smarter, not harder, by creating ads specific to your re-targeting audiences. Remember that not all visitors should be placed in the same group when creating re-targeting campaigns. Date ranges are a helpful tool when grouping your users into audiences–the user who visited your page two days ago is going to be much different than the one who visited two months ago. The time-frame of when a user last visited, along with how likely they are to convert, should be considered when creating your re-targeting Google Ad, Pay Per Click (PPC), and Digital Marketing Campaigns.
Implement Test Automation Software
Automation is a powerful way to optimize your advertising strategies. Google Ads has a built-in draft and experiment tool that helps you determine if changes implemented to assist in growing your business. It is a powerful, easy way to test a variety of strategies and provides quality data that enables you to analyze results and make informed decisions for future campaigns.
As you can see, there are many tools and simple, practical steps to take to ensure you are optimizing Google Ads, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and your digital marketing campaigns. However, if you would like to speak to a professional, Contact Agency Partner Interactive to discuss strategies and see where you could add value, create efficiency, and drive growth in your business.
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We can all agree that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to getting found online. Writers spend hours researching the best long-tail keywords and getting high-quality back-links. You are publishing well researched, relevant articles and doing everything right and yet; the views aren’t rolling in. Adopting a topic cluster model on your website is imperative to positioning yourself as an expert in your field and increases your chances of getting found online.
What is a Topic Cluster Model?
Websites with hundreds of thousands of monthly views have cracked the newest trend in SEO: topic clusters. But what is a topic cluster?
A topic cluster involves a “pillar” or cornerstone of content. This is content that is written for a fairly high-level keyword. This pillar content is equipped with additional supporting articles that expand on and link to this main topic as well as any other relevant or supporting pages. Just as in architecture, your cornerstone should be substantial and able to stand alone. The cluster content is published to surround the cornerstone and establish your brand as an authority on a topic of your choosing. Below is an example where the keyword, “workout routines,” is the pillar content. The pillar is supported by topic clusters which are more specific breakdowns that expand on keywords that are related to workout routines. In this example, keywords such as “workout routines to lose fat” and “workout routines to get abs,” among the others, are examples of cluster content. In aggregate, the supporting topics create a topic cluster of conversation that all support the pillar content page of “workout routines.”
How Can a Topic Cluster Improve my SEO Efforts?
A search engine’s main job is to deliver results that are relevant to the search query. When a website offers a cluster of related content, search engines use Latent Semantic Indexing to understand the web of interrelated and supportive content. Along with domain authority, high-quality backlinks and long-tail keywords, developing a topic cluster demonstrates your authority to the search engine, boosting your rankings in the SERP (search engine results pages).
Practical Steps to Create Your First Topic Cluster
Creating a topic cluster may seem like a daunting task, but it’s a methodical process that has the potential to yield great results. Follow these six steps to create your first topic cluster.
Choose a Pillar or Cornerstone Topic
Assess your brand and the goals of your organization. Your pillar or cornerstone content should be a topic on which you already have some level of expertise. Use a keyword research tool like “Keysearch” to determine which long-tail keywords you’ll target in your pillar article.
Brainstorm and Research Keywords to Support the Pillar
Once you’ve decided on your pillar theme, it’s time to brainstorm supporting topics that can easily link to the pillar article on your website. It’s important to research your chosen keywords to ensure that people are searching for them and that high ranking is attainable for those keywords.
Update Old Articles
Start with the low hanging fruit. You may already have articles on your website suitable as cluster content. Update those articles to optimize for SEO and to support the pillar article.
Write the Pillar and New Cluster Content
Using the keywords you researched, it’s time to create the pillar and start your Topic Cluster Model content. A pillar article should be broad and long-form, ranging from 2,000 to 10,000 words in length. The cluster content should be shorter posts that give detailed explanations on the subtopics in your pillar article.
Build Your Web by Linking Cluster Content to the Pillar and Other Supporting Articles
You can boost your results on SERPs by increasing the number of relevant internal links in your content. Search engines view links as a relationship, and linking related articles shows those search engines that you are an authority on your pillar content. When linking, use your keyword as the anchor text to further boost your authority on the topic.
Publish and Promote
While Google crawls your website soon after a new post’s publication, it may take three to six months to see results for your SEO efforts. Use Social Media Marketing and Newsletters to give your articles an initial boost in traffic while waiting for your content to rank on search engines.
Understanding how to leverage a topic cluster model to boost your content is imperative if you want to be found online. Now that you know how to build a topic cluster, the next step is to research your keywords, write and optimize your content and watch the traffic that is sure to come your way.
Hiring a Specialist Consultant or Agency is the most efficient and effective way of handling your Website Content. Agency Partner can help because we have professionals who can establish your brand as an authority on a topic of your choosing to drive Targeted and Potential Clients. Call Agency Partner Interactive Today to discuss your project in greater detail.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Basics of The Topic – Cluster Content Model for SEO” instead.
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LinkedIn Lead Generation: 6 Tips for More B2B Leads
Tips From Digital Marketing Experts
More than 255 million adults are living in the United States. Of those, 163 million have a Profile on LinkedIn. Worldwide, professionals join the platform at a rate of two per second for a total of 645 million members in 200 countries and regions. In addition to personal member profiles, there are 30 million companies represented on the platform.
The big question is: “Do LinkedIn members use the platform for buying decisions?” The answer is a resounding “yes!” A LinkedIn survey showed that up to 63% of B2B Buyers used LinkedIn to support their Purchase process in the past year, and 80% B2B Leads are Generated through LinkedIn. If you have a business, it is imperative to have a LinkedIn lead generation strategy. This article will explain the best practices for using your personal and company LinkedIn profiles to capture more leads.
Start with all the Facts
Before you can begin finding LinkedIn leads, it’s important to build a strong foundation – that’s your personal profile. Take the time to completely fill out your profile with employment history, skills, accolades, and education.
This step is so vital, yet it is the most often overlooked. LinkedIn members with complete profiles are 40 Times more likely to Receive an Opportunity through LinkedIn than members with an incomplete profile.
Just like Google, LinkedIn utilizes keywords to show your profile to relevant individuals. Optimize your profile by researching appropriate and specific phrases – for example, a search for “accountant” yields over 6 million results.
Conversely, using the phrase “Certified Public Accountant in the non-profit industry in Dallas, TX” yields only 89 results. Be as specific as possible to get found by the right leads.
Ask for Endorsements and Recommendations
Once you have a complete profile, ask current and past colleagues and clients for their endorsements and recommendations. Before you connect with potential leads, you’ll want to show that you are trusted and competent in your field of expertise.
Build a Company Page
While some LinkedIn lead generation strategies must be completed through personal pages, others require a free company profile through LinkedIn Pages.
Once you have a page for your organization, you can share your employees’ posts and client posts about your company as well as using customize-able call-to-action buttons to encourage participation in specific campaigns.
Be sure to share your company page with employees and current clients through newsletters and other social media platforms to spark the initial growth of your page.
Join LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups are a gold mine for building connections and finding leads. At this time, though, only individuals can participate in groups. (That’s why your completed personal profile with links to your company page is so essential.)
Get creative when joining groups. Join local industry groups, but also research where potential clients are spending their time online and join those groups too. While it’s imperative to join the conversation and position yourself as a thought-leader within the community, it’s also important to refrain from overly self-promotional posts. You may even consider founding a group to position your company as an authority in your industry and capture even more B2B leads.
Set up Laser-Focused Ads
Are you ready to make some connections with prospective leads who aren’t in shared groups or your current network? Utilize LinkedIn’s powerful advertising platform to reach targeted leads through your company page.
Text Ads
Text Ads offer a budget-friendly solution with Pay Per Click (PPC) and cost per impression (CPM) pricing options with no contracts or commitments. With this kind of advertising, you’re only paying for the ads that work. Text ads appear on the right-hand sidebar of the desktop version of LinkedIn to prospects in your niche. Fine-tune your audience by utilizing LinkedIn’s targeting options.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content and direct sponsored content are native ads which employ single image ads, video ads, and carousel ads which appear directly in a prospect’s news-feed. The difference between sponsored content and direct sponsored content is that sponsored content promotes an update that’s been previously posted on your company page – giving it reach beyond your current audience. Any new campaigns must start in your company news feed. Direct sponsored content is an ad created for a specific target group. The creative can be produced and modified without cluttering your company news-feed.
Whether you’re using text ads or sponsored content, track your conversions in LinkedIn’s analytics, or Integrate their Tracking with your own Website.
Use InMail for LinkedIn Lead Generation
InMail is LinkedIn’s messaging service. With their free account, you can only message people with whom you are currently connected. However, for as little as $47.99 per Month, you can utilize InMail to message prospective leads through a robust targeting system. There’s a cap on the number of Sponsored InMail a member can receive, so leads are more likely to be receptive to this type of targeted InMail – especially if you’re offering a product or service that’s relevant to them. When crafting your InMail, be sure to avoid sales-heavy verbiage and offer something of value to the lead.
InMail allows you to personalize pitches, offer a clickable call-to-action, and only delivers when members are active – so you’re more likely to reach LinkedIn leads that will actually see your advertisement.
Do you want to tap into the incredible power and potential of LinkedIn? Agency Partner Interactive can help! Let us assist you in building a loyal following of targeted, potential clients. Learn more about our LinkedIn Lead Generation Service and set up a time to talk through your business needs today.
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If you’re investing significant resources in your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, the worst thing to do is get complacent or gullibly believe that results will always come eventually no matter what you try.
This could lead to you wasting time and money on PPC strategies that just don’t work. Of course, effective PPC strategies take time to develop and produce results (both positive and negative), especially during experimentation.
However, if you aren’t cognizant of using fundamental PPC strategies and building off of them, your campaigns won’t be effective.
To help you maximize your PPC campaign, this guide will outline fundamental PPC strategies and innovative ways you can alter them to obtain steadfast results.
Understand your audience
I know.
Every PPC-related article on the internet will likely tell you that you need to understand your audience for your PPC campaigns to perform better.
However, in Digital Marketing knowing your audience goes beyond demographics. You’ll need to intrinsically understand their shopping patterns, motivations, and reservations before purchasing to craft the perfect PPC strategy.
Depending on your consumer base, whether they’re B2B or B2C, these values will differ tremendously. To give you more context, here is a marketing funnel for both B2B and B2B audiences from TrackMaven. You’re probably wondering what’s the difference between B2B and B2C consumer bases. After all, the funnel between the two consumers doesn’t seem all that different.
Let’s start with B2B consumers. These clients go through a much longer sales funnel because purchasing decisions typically go through a host of executives, who then rationalize the decisions instead of an emotional trigger that results more commonly in consumer purchases.
With that being said, average consumers vary. Some might conduct extensive research before buying a product or service. Some may just purchase from you based on a whim.
Nonetheless, the difference between these two consumer bases should reflect on how you structure your PPC campaign.
For example, since B2B consumers go through an elongated journey to make a purchase, you should provide top-of-the-funnel marketing resources to give them all of the information they need to confer and eventually make a purchasing decision.
Conversely, B2C consumers are attracted to a more straightforward marketing approach. They mainly want to know how your product or service will immediately benefit them. If your campaign reflects this, they’ll usually decide without extensive time and research.
Now that you understand this fundamental tip, here are some actionable ways you can incorporate new PPC methods to give your campaign a boost.
B2B Audience – Market any helpful e-books that will convince your audience that your service will be beneficial to them. Don’t promote anything. These e-books should only highlight the problem your audience has and provide a solution.
B2C Audience – Keep PPC ad copy extremely enticing. Don’t advertise the features of your product or service. Instead, promote the benefits and people will click.
In summary, B2B PPC strategies require you to know much more about your consumer base, while B2C strategies are essentially more product-focused.
Craft the perfect offer
Let’s take a moment to paint a relatable scenario.
An employee of a large consulting firm, Mandy has been tasked with finding the best available lead management software available. Knowing nothing about lead management software, she does a Google search for “best lead management software”, and she immediately sees numerous ads on the results page.
She may click the first ads she sees or some that catch her attention. Ultimately, most of these ads will offer free trials and one will offer a free buyer’s guide.
Which form do you think Mandy will fill out first?
With a buyer’s guide, not only are you more likely to capture a high-quality lead, but you are also providing Mandy with exactly what she needs, a helpful guide to help her navigate through a complicated app.
For this reason, crafting the perfect offer is paramount to the success of your PPC campaigns. Using outdated offers, such as live demos and free trials, will ultimately lead to your offer being rejected, ignored, or skipped over.
This is because there is profound evidence that proves that the alternatives are much more effective. What’re the alternatives, you may ask?
The answer is anything that will provide value to your audience without them being forced to commit.
PPC Hero recently experimented with their B2B audience by using demo videos in their ads. They found that demo videos have much less friction than live demos and free trials, because people may be hesitant to commit or spend time talking to a sales rep.
By adding a “watch demo video” call-to-action (CTA) to one of their core website pages, they received a 122.45% increase in conversions.
Furthermore, if you have prospects landing on your website directly through a search engine, chances are that they’ve never heard of you.
This means that you have a small chance of convincing a potential customer to sign up for a free trial on search terms that most ads are using, such as “best” or “top”.
Because of this, your offer has to break through the reservations a potential customer may have about working with you. The only way this can happen is by creating an offer that your audience can’t resist and won’t immediately commit to.
Doing so will allow them to see what you’re all about and make a decision for themselves.
Calibrate Search and Social Messages
You should never treat social media users the same as search engine users. Although your PPC campaign may exist on both platforms, using the same message will be counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve.
Also, user behavior is vastly different across your marketing channels, so why craft the same message?
Let’s dig a little deeper into the concept.
People go on social media networks to consume content. These people aren’t looking for any salesly or consumer-related. They just want content, whether it’s informational or entertainment-based.
However, those that arrive at your website via search engine are looking for something. They have a need or want, and they believe you can help.
Again, why use the same message on both platforms? The reason this question is being asked twice is that many businesses and marketers fall into this trap in an attempt to streamline their PPC campaign.
Just like how you shouldn’t create the same social media posts on your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, you definitely shouldn’t make this mistake.
For social media PPC campaigns, you’re targeting users based on their demographics, such as their job title in the case of LinkedIn. For Paid Search Ad Campaigns, your ads’ visibility is based on keywords.
Therefore, people who search for these keywords are actively looking for a product or service, whereas, a social media user is minding their own business looking for engaging Content.
It should now be apparent why offering an educational resource is better on social media, rather than search. Ultimately, your PPC ads on social media should strive to build awareness, through e-books and reports.
Anything that stirs an emotional response will do well on social media.
Meanwhile, paid search ads should get to the point and make an offer. Demos and interactive content are great for these ads because people who click them are looking for a solution to a need or want they have anyway.
If you’re still lost in how you can calibrate your messages across social media and search platforms, just remember this fundamental question.
“Why are my prospects using this platform?”
And, there you have it. You should instantly surmise that Facebook users didn’t log on to be advised to sign up for a free trial of anything. Therefore, create a campaign that centers on driving emotional responses from your target audience.
For example, this video ad from Sephora works because it showcases multiple promotions and piques the curiosity of their target audience.
Do you want to emulate the same success through all of your marketing channels? If so, take a look at this infographic from Orbit Media that details how you should structure both social media and paid search ads.
Prioritize Remarketing
Finally, we’ve arrived at one of the most popular PPC strategies, known as “remarketing”.
Once you’ve got someone to land on your website and they leave without converting, you’d want to bring them back to your site for a second chance, right?
This sounds very much like the concept of dating. However, what if this same person doesn’t convert after a third or fourth time?
What’s going on?
The answer is that you’re probably using the same offer every time. Obviously, if that person didn’t bite on the offer you originally introduced, they won’t budge if you do the same again.
Now, let’s present a solution. First, cut off any leads that just aren’t in your market. Not everyone who visits your website through an ad is interested in working with you.
They may just be curious, found another solution, etc. Therefore, only begin the remarketing stage for leads that have visited your landing page at least twice.
Similarly, you can do the same for leads who left your website in the middle of filling out a form.
Next, segment your leads based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. For example, for leads that haven’t watched your demo video, retarget them with a demo ad.
For leads that have watched the demo video, follow-up and re-target them with a free trial ad. The goal here is to be very specific with your segmentations so you can convert leads throughout your marketing funnel.
In Social Media Marketing, the strategy is the same. If you have received PPC insights from social media users who haven’t converted, you’ll have to understand the proven social behaviors for these users.
This is: social media users are constantly scrolling on their feed and may not want to commit to you just yet. Why?
Because they’re still busy scrolling on their feeds.
With an accurate remarketing strategy, you can send a gentle reminder at an appropriate time to re-engage social media users who have left your site.
Realize Your SERP Potential
There was a promising study conducted by Advanced Web Rankings where they studied the differenced in CTR between ad placements on the search engine result pages (SERP). It’s important to realize right now that PPC success doesn’t solely depend on placement, but rather a myriad of other factors, such as conversion value, budget, competition, industry, geotarget, LTV, and more.
For certain industries, it may be beneficial to bid higher to rank high for productive keywords. However, in competitive markets, your ROI will begin to decline at a certain point using this strategy,
Ideally, it’s up to you to find the right balance for your particular market.
For example, paying a high price for a competitive market like auto insurance may not be profitable, considering how people normally shop for auto insurance.
Similar to B2B Marketing, consumers will readily shop around for auto insurance until they can find an affordable deal for the right type of coverage they’re looking for.
Because of this, a Search Engine user may click on your ad, no matter if it’s first, second, third, or fourth on the SERP.
Regardless of this fact, humans make most purchasing decisions based on trust, and nothing screams trust more than high-ranking websites.
So, the moral of this section is to realize that ad placement isn’t everything for a successful PPC Campaign. Nonetheless, your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Strategy should work together to maximize your CTR and create the perception that you’re a leader in your industry.
Final Words
Now that you realize the fundamental strategies of building a solid PPC campaign, it’s up to you to conduct your own experiments and use your data to create PPC Ad Campaigns that work for you.
Understanding these fundamental strategies and the unique characteristics of your business will help you to achieve long-lasting results, instead of relying too much on online advice and your gut to design your campaigns.
Search marketing is a very competitive game of Marketer vs. Marketer. We know that Google and Bing are continually adjusting their Search Engine Algorithms and the best way to ensure that you are not wasting your time and money is to hire Agency Partner to do it for you. API has experience in managing big Budget PPC accounts so whether you are managing a budget of $5,000 or $50,000 per month, contact Agency Partner Interactive today and let us help you maximize your ROI.
Finding clients as an attorney can be one of the most daunting tasks. You’ve made your checklist －chose a specific area of law, check; went one step further and chose a niche, check; created a website, check. You’ve done the networking, making lists of prospective clients and referrals, you’ve even put up free resources on your website. All of these things are great, but they haven’t really generated much in the way of people calling for your services.
The answer is rather simple to use Online Marketing Strategies, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing. PPC is one of the best ways to get your name out to potential clients. The place to start is with Google Ad Words and Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads, part of the Bing Search Engine Platform). While there are numerous PPC Platforms, these two are the Most Commonly Used by the clients you are seeking.
Navigating PPC marketing can be tricky, but with the right knowledge, you can achieve high visibility on Google or Bing Searches, display effective Ad Campaigns, overcome the challenges and be on your way to an increased client base.
What is PPC for Lawyers?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is Online Advertising that you pay for each time your ad is clicked. The amount you pay per click is determined by bidding in an ad auction with Google Adwords or Microsoft Ads. Basically, you are bidding against other law firms for the use of relevant keywords in your ads. When a search is performed using your keywords, your ad is shown first. It is one of the most effective digital marketing aids to generate clients in a very competitive legal market.
There are several factors to consider other than just paying for clicks and bidding on keywords, in the determination of where your ad will rank. First, you need to conduct research to establish what your keywords are going to be, based on the law you practice and what keywords your competitors are using. Your ad also needs to be relevant to the search queries that your clients are seeking. Keep in mind that the Landing Page is where the advertisement sends the client. The headline needs to be highly specific and relevant to the client’s search, and your landing page needs to have a call-to-action that is clear and also relevant to your client’s search. If your landing page is not applicable and another firm’s is, you could lose that potential client.
Why You Should Choose PPC for Your Law Firm
Marketing for a law firm is not the same as Marketing for other Businesses. PPC ads can significantly help boost a law firm’s client base. Here are three reasons why you should make PPC a key marketing strategy for your practice.
PPC Ads Have High Visibility on Google or Bing Searches
When someone uses Google or Bing to search for an attorney, the top three to four listings are PPC ads from Google’s Adwords or Microsoft Ads. There is a much higher click-through rate for these top ads. Having a PPC ad gives you an advantage and an opportunity for higher visibility by a wider audience.
Your Competitors are Using Them
With so many law firms out there, just having a website isn’t enough. Every time a potential client goes online to search for an attorney in your specialty, they will pull up one of your competitors who has a PPC ad, instead of you.
You need to make sure you show up in their search by using keywords that make you stand out from your competitors.
You Have Control of the Keywords
Keyword control makes PPC ads a core marketing tool for your firm. You chose the keywords and phrases to put in your ads, you have control over your PPC Optimization, and therefore, you determine how you target your clients.
Research and select Keywords, with the help of Google and Microsoft to identify what the right keyword phrases are for you. A few words can make or break a PPC Ad Campaign. If you take time during your ad planning process to figure out what you have to offer and who your target clients are, you can adjust your keywords accordingly.
Knowing your clients makes it easier to implement a PPC Strategy.
Best Type of PPC Ads for Attorneys
There are three types of PPC ads proven to have the best results for attorneys:
Display Ad Campaigns
Google Display Network and Microsoft Advertising Network partner with reputable websites to help you reach a much larger target audience. Being part of a Display Network can also put you in front of clients before they start searching for your skillset. Some ad types work better when you are linked to a Google Display or Microsoft Advertising Network, such as responsive display ads, uploaded images ads, Gmail ads and engagement ads.
Search Ad Campaign
Search ad campaigns appear when a potential client searches for the services you offer. Your ad will appear directly above or below the top-ranking Google and Bing search results. You only pay for this ad when people click it.
Re-Marketing Ad Campaigns
Re-Marketing ad campaigns let you tailor your ads to people who have visited your website at least once before.
Overcoming Challenges with PPC Ads for Law Firms
The one deterrent to PPC marketing is the cost. The ads can be quite expensive. Some of the more specialized legal industry keyword bids can cost over $100 USD per click, costing you thousands of dollars per month. However, because you are only paying per click, the benefits of the higher conversion rate could outweigh the cost for you. The conversion rate for the legal industry on Google can be as high as 6.98%. The bottom line is that PPC ads have been a proven marketing tool to get clients.
PPC marketing is very competitive, and Google and Bing are continually adjusting their search engine algorithms.
The best way to ensure that you are not wasting your time and money is to hire Agency Partner Interactive to do it for you. API has experience in managing PPC accounts. Call Agency Partner Today and let them help you generate the PPC Marketing Strategy you need to grow the client base you want for your law firm.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Does PPC Marketing Work for Attorneys” instead.
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There are several Healthcare Marketing Trends in 2019 which can bolster success and drive conversion for your company. In recent years, advances in technology have caused a shift in marketing methods, which make it necessary to step up your outreach strategy.
Tried and True – Healthcare Marketing That Works
Just because you need to keep up with the times doesn’t mean you need to throw classic marketing out the window. There are many methods that have lasted the test of time and should be maintained as you evolve your marketing techniques.
Old School Marketing Evaluation
Start with an audit of your services and products. This will give you a well-rounded picture of your business, and also help refine your target audience. It’s important to review your business regularly to ensure that you’re on track with your goals. From here you can grow a “patient persona,” which reflects your target audience. This will be a core dimension of your marketing strategy.
Next, answer these questions: What makes my target audience choose my practice to solve their health problems?
How does my website reflect that I am the best choice to address their issues?
These two questions can help focus the messaging and original content on your website. Remember, no matter the original intent of your practice or its goals, you will only gain conversion and clients if they feel like you’ve gone the extra mile to take their Personal needs into Consideration.
People in pain want to know who you are, what you offer, and how you’re going to help them, specifically, right at the Onset of Visiting your site. When trying to find a dentist or a doctor they want to visit or type a question about their specific pain into a search engine, they want a specific answer with clear, concise information.
Today, when most everyone has a smartphone – and yes, there are now more Phones than People in the World – it is absolutely necessary to have a focused digital marketing and content strategy. Ads are a thing of the past with Millennials, a generation that utilizes ad blockers and would rather source content for free. They want to believe that real worth is communicated and vouched-for, i.e., reviewed.
Healthcare Marketing for the Web Browser
Long-Tailed Keywords are going to have the greatest search engine optimization (SEO) impact. Consider content that includes whole sentences or phrases like: the bone in my ring finger hurts or doctor, specialist for holistic acne treatment. You get the picture. When you consider what your healthcare practice is providing, consider specific questions patients have asked in the past; that’s what your target audience is going to google. You want the sequence of words that is going to attract the highest volume response.
Healthcare Marketing for Mobile Phones
Speaking of phones, your website probably needs to be Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) compatible. AMP takes that fancy website you’ve just had us Build and converts it to being smartphone friendly. Websites will not automatically translate what looks great on a desktop.
It may not look the same, or it may be a very basic version for handheld devices. The thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that mobile devices are king. A detailed Study by Google reminds us that roughly 40% of people make searches solely with their smartphones.
The Full Picture – What to Include in Healthcare Marketing
Once you’ve got a sense for your target audience and how you’re going to attract them to your website, you’ve got to keep them there. There are a few things you can do to truly engage your patient base to drive conversion.
Video Marketing
A short 2-10 minute video by a doctor or dentist is a great way to advertise your bedside manner with future patients.
This gives the viewer a chance to draw their own conclusions about the kind of person you are and builds trust that you were willing to put something of yourself out there.
Customer Touch Points and Online Reputation
How a customer or patient interacts with your website is huge. This includes referral sites, back lines, and reviews.
Patients can find services through more than just search engines. It’s important for you to communicate through multiple platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, to keep your name fresh. Your Online Reputation, including links to verified sources, will help improve the validity of your content, which will drive your SEO and search engine results.
Location-Based SEO
Location-relative content is going to be an important driver. It’s not useful if your search results come up on an India-based Google search when your hospital or practice is located in Dallas. Your content needs to be location-specific with language which is understandable to local readers.
Any which way you go, a Call to Action (CTA) is going to be a necessary part of your marketing strategy. At Agency Partner Interactive, we can help improve your website, leveraging modern trends, and help you build a marketing strategy that will include mobile device outreach and long-tailed sentence search results. Give Agency Partner Interactive A Call and let us improve your patient outreach today!
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There’s no point selling the best products in town if your storefront is down a back alley and in a basement. Likewise, the website that showcases your services needs to be easily discovered by those looking for them. With63,000 Searches Happening per Second, Google is the equivalent of the busy shopping mall location that will be seen by your perfect customers. But to get into that sought-after position among the rest, you’re going to need a great SEO Strategy.
This guide to SEO will give you an overview of what that means.
How Important is Google Really?
Whatever you’re selling, people are Googling it. More than half of them will click on the top three search results, and a whopping 92 percent of all people will click a link on the first page. If you’re not on the first page of Google’s SERP, you’re in that basement down the back alley. Investing in a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy is one of the smartest things you can do for your business.
Pay per Click (PPC) vs. Organic Optimization
You could pay for a Google Ads campaign for instant exposure, but it will cost you every time someone clicks through – and will stop working the moment you stop paying. Ranking organically is harder to do but it’s a superior long-term strategy. Once you’re up there, the clicks won’t cost you anything, you’ll reap a higher ROI, and those rewards will last a long time. You can either throw money at a quick fix or invest in a long-term strategy that offers higher conversion rates and lower ongoing costs.
Where do People Click?
The average search engine user is getting smarter about how Pay-Per-Click (PPC) works, and most scroll past the ads, knowing that they represent companies who paid for their positioning rather than leading the industry through quality content. Our eyes are becoming trained to simply ignore PPC results along with banner ads and pop-ups.
Highly ranked organic results suggest you’re an influential player in your field; they receive more clicks and result in more traffic and more sales, more of the time.
Prove It!
Another advantage of SEO is that every aspect of it is measurable. There is a plethora of Easy-To-Use Tools that will help you evaluate where your customers are taking action. Data and statistics obtained from the web mean you can continually evaluate and adapt your approach for optimal results.
What are the Elements of Good SEO?
While ever-changing, Google uses over 200 factors in their ranking algorithms, with varying levels of influence. For simplicity, we’ll divide these into on-page and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is the easiest to manipulate. The factors that improve your position here include:
Off-page SEO can be a little more complicated to manage and deals largely with the “perceived authority” and trustworthiness of your site. It is influenced by:
The number and quality of links to your website;
The diversity, relevance, and authority of linking sites;
User reviews and site reputation;
The age and history of your website; and
Mentions of your brand elsewhere on the internet.
Your Digital Marketing Team
Developing optimal SEO requires Team Collaboration. An SEO team might consist of five or six different specialists working on a single project, and could include a web developer, a web designer, a graphic designer, a marketing manager, content writers and editors, guest blogger outreach managers, data analysts, and a project manager. Everyone needs to be current with recent developments in this field, and working together cohesively.
Sounds Complicated!
Unless this is your area of expertise, it probably is complicated! This is one area where you don’t want to make mistakes, take shortcuts, or hire a cheap SEO rookie that leaves your website damaged from a Google penalty. One bad choice or attempt to cheat the algorithm could send your website’s SEO value plummeting and, like your high school GPA, it can take a lot of time and investment to recover your position once this has happened. SEO costs can vary greatly and there is such a thing as affordable SEO, but don’t fall victim to cheap SEO!
Hiring a specialist consultant or agency is the most efficient and effective way of handling your company’s SEO. If you’re serious about improving your company’s Google standing, contact the digital marketing experts at Agency Partner Interactive to discuss your needs today.
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This article discusses the most important factors in custom mobile business app development, to help you understand the process, and get it all right in the first stage of your project.
Let’s jump right in by setting reasonable expectations to budget your apps’ development costs, because believe it or not, globally, more people own a mobile ‘phone than a toothbrush. While this might be a sign that we need more toothbrushes, it’s definitely a huge opportunity for custom mobile app development for businesses.
A lot of numbers get thrown around regarding the costs of custom mobile business app development costs, the price of building an app, and getting it to market on the Windows, Android or Apple platforms. The question of how much you should invest in building a custom mobile app provokes more questions at the initial stage. Industry surveys point to nearly nothing, over the low six-figures to over 1 million dollars.
The price for developing an app from idea-to-market correlates with functional features and demands of the client.
The ballpark figure that is accepted by the industry at large is between $100,000 and $500,000 USD, but small apps with few features can cost between $10,000 and $50,000.
The cost of keeping your app running each year will equate to 20% of the cost of making the app. This is without factoring changes in trends, new innovative technologies, or major infrastructure issues that could impede the normal running of your app.
This is the Formula to Calculate the cost of making a custom mobile business app:
(App Features∗Time)∗HourlyRate=Cost
This simple, yet realistic formula, can be used to structure your budget: App features can be separated in different complexity levels as we will see later on in this article. Time stands for the time needed to code the features described in the app’s functional scope. The hourly rate stands for the pricing of your developer, developer team or agency.
Another way to understand and manage costs is to break down the level of complexity of the app. Factors would include features from simple, moderate to complex; the costs estimate per hour would fall in the range of $50 and $100/hour –prices vary in terms of technical expertise, experience level and geographical location of the app developers appointed to your project.
For instance, experienced iOS app developers in the US can charge on average $120 – $140/hour, whereas junior developers in Eastern Europe can charge a rate of $40 – $60/hour.
This table from Think Mobiles gives you some estimates on mobile app costs based on varying complexity levels:
Complexity
Features
Time, hrs
Cost $50/hr
Cost $100/hr
Simple
No API integration, no back-end, standard UI components, simple features like email subscription, login, calendar, etc.
400
20,000
40,000
Moderate
Custom UI features, payment features, API integration, headsets and tablets adaptation, back-end server
500-800
40,000
80,000
Complex
Multi-language support, 3rd-party integrations, custom animations, complicated back-end, professional design, real-time features, etc.
800-1500
75,000
150,000
A good way to understand development costs is to look at examples of well-known, popular mobile apps in the world today. If we look at your favorite apps and name three prominent examples the estimated development costs of Whats-app are for instance 750-1000 hours at a realistic hourly rate of $130/hour the costs for building the app in the US are $150,000-200,000.
For Instagram, the estimate is somewhere between 800 and 1200 hours, which adds up to $100,000-150,000 app development costs. Uber is a little more complex as it requires different features for the passenger’s interface than for the drivers` interface with an estimated development time of around 950-1200 hours the total cost results in around $120,000-150,000.
You can play with various app cost calculators on the internet, or get real and sit down with an experienced developer team to find a neat estimate for your budget and future app development costs that reflect your projects aspirations realistically. If you work with an experienced developer team it will help you to look at factors like geography, the newness of the technology, complexity and application size which will factor into the final price.
The Internet is full of articles about freeware and building your mobile app at no cost by choosing ready-made modules. These platforms are usually staffed with ads and are not to be taken seriously when it comes to custom business app development. Projecting a professional and refined image would require you to discard this strategy as an option.
Although there are few inspiring success stories of self-made app developers that turned into huge success stories. Brian Wong founded Kiip in 2010, with his colleagues Courtney Guertin and Amadeus Demarzi. Kiip, is a mobile app rewards platform that lets stores or businesses give real-world rewards for in-game achievements. And Robert Nay developed his first gaming app at the age of 14, a physics puzzle game that has had more than 16 million Downloads, to date.
Although you might have the next supernova business app idea and are on the lookout for investors to cover development costs fully, you need to set your budget first. According to the Code-Mentor your budget is determined by the scope and design of your project. The scope gathers functions, features and the main value proposition that make your app unique, while the design covers Wire Framing, user flow, and prototyping.
Another important factor is the market you choose, either Windows, iOs or Android. Custom business app development costs come with many variables as you will have come to realize at this point.
Going from idea to product, you might want to consider hiring professional assistance who understands the field of app development to make sure that misunderstandings between you and the developer, or developer team, will not become a big cost factor.
And don`t forget good freelancers are usually fully booked at least a few weeks in advance, don`t expect immediate availability or just plan in some weeks in advance on your development timeline. Same is true for the price range of good developers or as Benjamin Franklin put it: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of a low price is forgotten.”
So, you are all set, safe and sound, when it comes to estimating the costs of your app project…
…Ok, sorry if we overwhelmed you here with knowledge in this article, the different variables of bringing your idea to product can be complex. You might want to consider talking to us directly.
Our experienced development team and project strategists can make themselves available to discuss your project in greater detail. To learn more about what makes sense for your business, Contact Us Here.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 29, 2019
Agency Partner Interactive
14681 Midway Road, Suite 200
Addison, Texas 75001
marketing@agencypartner.com Agency Partner Named 2019 UpCity Local Excellence Award Winner in Dallas
Agency Partner honored by UpCity as one of the top 20 service providers in Dallas.
Dallas, TX — On August 29, 2019, Agency Partner Interactive announced the company has been named one of the top 20 service providers in Dallas as part of UpCity’s Local Excellence Awards.
UpCity is an online marketplace that helps businesses find B2B service providers they can trust. UpCity’s Local Excellence Award winners are selected based on the UpCity Recommendability Rating, a proprietary algorithm that measures a provider’s credibility, recommendability, and reputation based on digital signals.
“The strength of our marketplace is built on the credibility of truly excellent providers like Agency Partner,” said Dan Olson, CEO of UpCity. “We are pleased to honor Agency Partner with a Local Excellence Award in Dallas.”
UpCity introduced National Excellence Awards earlier this year and has now launched a local version for the top service providers located in their top ten performing cities which includes; Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego.
As a company, Agency Partner Interactive specializes in devising technology and marketing solutions that help businesses accelerate top-line growth in addition to improving profitability. From basic web and app design to executing digital marketing with the power of artificial intelligence, the Agency Partner business team works with Dallas-based startups, SMBs, and has the capacity to serve full enterprises.
“It’s an honor to be included in this award,” said Muhammad Younus, CEO of Agency Partner. “As a company, we spend our days working to help our clients attain that next level of growth. In addition to feedback from our clients, awards like this help us to step back from our day to day and recognize how all of our individual contributions come together to make something truly impactful.”
About UpCity
UpCity helps businesses find service providers they can trust. Our Marketplace creates and empowers successful relationships between businesses and service providers from marketers to accountants to HR professionals. We provide transparency and insights to dramatically improve the B2B partner selection and purchase experience.
Over 225,000 businesses visit UpCity each month seeking services from over 35,000 providers in over 600 cities in North America. UpCity helps partners in the Marketplace grow their business and build their digital recommendability.
Apple is one of the largest tech companies in the world. When they announce new products, it is a two-hour production and the world takes notice, because everything you know about Apple can change in those two hours. Apple unveiled a new version of its iOS operating system in June, and the future of iOS just got better.
Alongside the update to iOS 13, they are also giving iPad its own operating system, iPadOS. That’s right; the future iPad will no longer be iOS. This new operating system is exclusively designed for the iPad tablet. Proving that not only does Apple set trends, but it also chases them. iOS 13 is a huge overhaul to iOS, and it is packed with features making it faster and more efficient than ever before. These new features will make it more convenient to do business.
When the new iOS 13 and iPadOS are released this fall, what will that mean for your business practices?
Key Performance Features for Your Business
iOS 13 and iPadOS have much to offer businesses. These features – detailed below – are the key performance features for your business.
Privacy and Security Features
Most apps and services today require users to create a profile or log in with a social ID. Apple’s new privacy and security features protect user’s data and connectivity usage. These include background tracking notification, weak password warnings, and a new sign-in feature that protects your employee’s personal information in a convenient and data safe way.
The privacy feature called “Sign-In With Apple” allows you to sign in to apps and websites with your Apple ID or a unique random ID via the click of a button. Your Apple ID will confirm your identity via Touch or Face ID and quickly log you in. When apps require your name, any personal information or an email address, Apple won’t provide it unless you give it permission. It then takes this security measure one step further. You will have the option of how you want your email address shared with an app, site, or service developer. Apple can now generate a unique, randomized email address which will forward messages to your real email address.
What makes this feature even more attractive to your business is that companies can create and manage employee’s Apple IDs separately from their personal IDs. This is especially useful for companies with BYOD (bring your own device) policies. This helps to separate personal and business data, eliminating data privacy issues when it comes to mobile device management concerns.
Improve Workflow and Hands-Free Operations with Siri
Siri gets improvements across the board. Siri shortcuts are now built into the device and will suggest personalized shortcuts for simple tasks, instead of having to download them in a separate app. This same feature will also make it easier to set up custom routines and interact with third-party apps.
The new voice system smoothes out complex words and sounds more natural. Also, new to Apple AirPods, Siri can now read messages as soon as they come in and you can reply immediately without having to stop what you’re doing.
This will help improve business workflow. These new Siri improvements make it easier to communicate via your devices with clients and staff.
Better Battery Life
Apple is finally bringing its popular Dark Modeto Apple’s iOS mobile devices. Not only will this give you new dark backgrounds and notifications across all your Apple apps, but this feature will increase battery life and offers battery management options – your apps will download faster than ever before. It is a definite plus if you have remote and field-service employees.
Faster App Updates
iOS’ performance boost features 30-percent faster unlocking with Face ID, a 50-percent smaller app download, and a 60-percent smaller app update – all working to remove the hassle of keeping business devices up-to-date.
iPadOS Features Increase Productivity
The iPad gets all the same changes you will have on iOS 13, plus additional features just for the iPad. Surprise, iOS 13 turns your iPad into a laptop replacement. By pinning a few widgets to your home screen, you get some pretty helpful new additions to your iPad.
iPadOS will give you better file management capabilities by using external hard drives. Your business will get SMB support. Not only will you be able to share iCloud folders, but you can also share files, folders, and printers used by other systems besides Apple.
You will have the capability to zip files into a folder, making it easier to send them via email. Uncompressing the content of zip files into an expanding folder with access to the files just got easier too. These file management features will make remote working on an iPad a breeze.
Using Mac apps in side-by-side views gets a huge improvement, with Slide Over and Split View features. Now your iPad is performing like a desktop. Need to see multiple screens? No problem. You can also drag content from one app into another and still easily slide between apps. These iPadOS features are another plus for multitasking.
Along with the major features we’ve listed, here is a list of other features that will exponentially improve your business practices:
You can download fonts directly from the App Store onto your mobile device.
There are new gestures for navigating and manipulating text.
When calling a business that offers business chat, your device will offer to start a business chat so you can interact from a text message instead of through a phone call.
You can add attachments, like documents, to events you have scheduled in the calendar app.
Apple’s Smart Lists will group your reminders in a schedule so they are ready when you need them.
Supported Devices
Not sure if these iOS updates will work on your device? Here is the full list of supported devices for iOS 13 and iPadOS.
Apple did not announce an exact release date for iOS 13 or iPadOS. But a mid-September release, just ahead of the year’s new iPhone is predicted. There may also be additional features as Apple is known to hold out on releasing the details of some key features until the next iPhone launches.
As always, Apple is focused on performance improvements and enhancements of its products for consumers, alongside improving productivity and workflow for businesses.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “What iOS 13 and the new iPadOS means for business” instead.
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How many times do you pick up your phone to search the web for information? In fact, you are probably reading this article on a mobile device right now. Using your mobile device to access information has become the norm. In order for your company to be competitive, you must be found on Google’s search results.
Mobile-First Indexing and Google Results
Mobile-First Indexing is Google’s process of using the smartphone agent in their Googlebot web crawler to scan your site and index it’s content for the search engine. It uses this as the starting point to help mobile users find what they’re looking for in a format that provides the best mobile-friendly experience for the user, and–if it is a great site and experience–increases your ranking on Google.
Historically, Google used the desktop version of a site’s content when evaluating if it matched a user’s query. Now, the mobile-first version of your website will be considered the primary version on Google. You should know that there is not a separate index for mobile-first scans; if the content on an old site is relevant, it will continue to be returned on the SERP.
It is time to let go of the past. Now it is necessary that your online footprint is equal across both the mobile and desktop versions of your website. You should already be writing and designing content (including text, images, videos, and links), structuring your data and meta-data (titles, descriptions, meta tags) and experiencing your website so that it is mobile-friendly.
What Does This Mean for your Site?
As of July 1st, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new (or previously unknown to Google Search) websites ready for the Googlebot indexing scan. For older or existing websites, Google will continue to monitor and evaluate websites based on its best practices.
If you are an older website, once Google sees a site is ready, it will designate the site as ready for mobile-first indexing and it will notify them of their readiness through its Search Console.
If you’re a new website, you don’t have to do anything. New sites are already showing users and search engines the same content on both their desktop and mobile devices.
Evaluate Your Users Experience
Just because your old site or your new site is ready for mobile-first indexing, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to evaluate your user’s experience.
First, Google has provided an easy tool to test and see if your site is Mobile-Friendly. You just have to insert your site and Google will give you the information you need to fix it. If you need more guidance, Web Grader has a great tool that evaluates your site and gives you detailed information on how you can make your site user-friendly.
Second, pick up a mobile device and check out your site from a user’s point of view. Write down ways you think will enhance the user’s experience based on the information that you are trying to relay.
Here are four steps to help you enhance the user’s experience:
Keep it simple
Mobile sites don’t need as many bells and whistles as they did in the past. Keep only the website elements you truly need. Ask yourself if each element is really necessary. If not, get rid of it.
Conveying your message
Make sure your message and Call to Action (CTA) are easily understood. Check text links and forms to make sure they work. Create easy-to-use buttons for connecting to other pages. Check that your forms are easy to fill out on a mobile device. Consider using mobile-friendly CTAs such as SMS text messaging and live chat.
What about SEO?
Instead of solely looking at keyword synonyms you have to start thinking about the whole mobile experience. Look at the problem a specific search query is trying to solve, and then craft a content-based response that is appropriate for that query.
Make the necessary changes
Now you are ready to make the necessary changes to create a user-friendly site for mobile-first indexing. If all of this is overwhelming, and you’re feeling unprepared to tackle mobile-first indexing on your own, get help from a Professional SEO Team.
There’s no question that mobile devices have changed the way we deliver information. Now that Google has rolled out mobile-first indexing for all sites, it is time to make sure you have a website for the devices people are using most. So, evaluate your site and implement the necessary changes to make it user-friendly. Mobile-first indexing is just an additional way that Google is addressing the needs of its, and by extension, your audience.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “What is Mobile-First Indexing?” instead.
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Website’s Visitor-To-Lead Conversion Rate Using SEO and Other Essential Strategies
Tips from Digital Marketing Experts
Focusing your attention on the type of visitors you want to attract to your website is a major part of increasing your visitor-to-lead conversion rate. Making your site a haven for warm leads is essential to your success. Concerns regarding the quality of your leads should be just as high up your list of site goals as the focus on the foot traffic. Quality and quantity are a non-negotiable, interconnected, dynamic duo.
User Experience (UX)
Your site needs to be stylish, approachable and trustworthy–just like your favorite leading lady or leading man in that iconic role you love. A clear and uncluttered website, with a focused call-to-action, interactive content, aligned branding, and intuitive design principles, will make your site visitor more likely to achieve conversion.
Removal of all friction between the customer and your goal action for them is equally important. While it is tempting to add in lots of additional products and ideas, as they cruise down the home straight to take your desired action, it can create unexpected hurdles and the last thing anyone wants is a disqualification as your ‘near conversion’ flounces off the pitch in disgust and frustration from what should have been a simple process.
Value Proposition
Here we are, down to the nitty-gritty of the sales pitch. However, this isn’t any old school sales patter. Give them absolute clarity of vision. This is the real deal of why your customer should invest their financial and social resources on your product or service. You are sure to be the savvy and practical answer to their specific problem, because they found their way to you, and because you are investing the best of yourself in what you offer. So tell them that. Offer valid reasons, a solid value proposition, why they need you and your brand.
Improved SEO
Where is a discussion about web marketing without a reference SEO? It is truly the roadmap for all serious entrepreneurs and businesses. Without it, you have little-to-no direction, and no-one can find you. Yet with it in hand, the landscape opens up and opportunities abound. Make sure all of your SEO keyword opportunities are maximized and updated regularly. Without this essential box ticked, all those lovely organic searches with strong purchase intent will breeze past you from the half-way line.
Multiple Personas
Facebook has the data, you have the creativity and vision, and so, with a decent dollop of analytics, you have a pretty solid team. Focus on the capacity to visualize the personas of the people you want to turn from cold visitors to warm leads and conversions. These personas will be able to show you how best to interact with your real-life site visitors.
They will also show you who the real visitors are. Not the expected, not the projected, but the real. You might find that a different, broader version of a non-traditional demographic than expected, is engaging with your brand. Rather than trying to corral the people you think ‘should’ be there, you are then in the enviable position of being able to tailor your style to suit them, encouraging an ever-rising conversion rate.
Website Experiments
As the saying goes, there are so many different ways to skin the proverbial cat that you won’t be able to please all of the people, all of the time. But with a keen eye on your analytics and a bit of experimentation, you will be able to find out what the majority want and tailor your sales plan and web site to fit those expectations. You are also best placed to utilize chatbots when you have deduced your best visitor personas and are in experimentation mode, ready to gain and utilise even more analytics. Try different marketing channels, and audit different aspects of your sales conversion funnel, especially if your analytics look rough in one area. Test what works in reality, not just in theory.
It’s what we all strive for, and with a few adjustments to your processes, you will see that your time poring over statistics and analyzing data has been well spent. This is something that will need to be done regularly to keep the flow of savvy, focused-on-the-next-big -thing customers engaging with your site. After all, this is a process, a journey.
It is never static, and it is never done! Keep kicking those conversions!
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Score Big With Your Website’s Visitor-To-Lead Conversion Rate Using SEO and Other Essential Strategies” instead.
Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Just when you think that Facebook has been toppled from its social media top spot, a review of the actual reach and capacity of this mammoth of the social media world has everyone sitting up and considering how to maximize their ad strategies.
Facebook has one of the world’s largest user base with 1.62 billion subscribers and 2.41 Billion Active Users in the second quarter of 2019. It is one of the most engaged, so why take a page from its playbook? After all with numbers this big, it is all about making the best use of them.
So take notes, get your ducks in a row, and your game plan sorted, because this juggernaut is here to stay, and you need to be on board. But don’t worry, we have all the tips to help get you sorted out with a solid Facebook Ads Strategy, so you can sit back, and watch your conversions soar.
Duo, Trio, Quad
The first consideration, and it’s a major one, is to keep Facebook and Instagram working in tandem because they are one-and-the-same behind-the-scenes–a fact is often forgotten–so keep this pair collaborating to your benefit.
Think, ‘integrated ads strategy’ with Instagram, Facebook, and all the other platforms out there. An omnichannel experience is what both you and your customer need. This is a bottom line, non-negotiable. Your marketing plan must be seamless and holistic.
Experiment with ‘Bots’
With Ad Bots becoming more sophisticated and normalized, now is the perfect time to experiment with computer-generated marketing. The tech itself is nothing to be afraid of, how it’s employed and with what tone, is the issue. ‘Engagement Baiting’ by fishing for swipes, taps, and reposts is right out in 2019. Instead, you want to develop long-term engagement–life-long customers who are much more likely to convert.
While you are in experimental mode, get creative, and then test everything. Send out an engaging, and meaningful post or blog to assess the interest. It’s much more cost-effective than a full-blown analytics campaign.
Video is King
Long Live Video. Businesses love Facebook Video Ads. Use it to drive conversions but ensure the focus is to empower your customer with a side order of Brand Integrity, and the development of trust. People are likely to buy from companies they have positively encountered on social media, so consider creating or developing your brand identity from an anchor or hero Video for maximum impact.
Retargeting from long-form ad engagement video followed up with a ‘call-to-action’ via short video ad, post, email, tweet, etc, is much more likely to get a new convert. It is also easier to then expand the information to ‘lookalike’ audiences, speeding up the turnaround process and reducing costs.
Nano, Niche, and Micro
We are in the time of the nano- or micro-influencer. There has been a shift from celebrities delivering information to niche experts whom we can trust, people with whom we can identify. They are less distant, more relevant, and certainly more approachable. Align with one of them, and it is a short skip, and a jump, to getting the conversions.
Are You Responsive?
To say that you have a ‘Responsive Website’ which is not enough. You have to prove it. Multiple devices are here to stay, and your site must show all the fancy whistles and bells on each and every one. Ensure that every type of media will run efficiently on desktop, tablet, mobile, Android, and IOS. The last thing you want is a block to your customers’ conversion where they throw their hands up in disgust, and leave the site, never to return.
Multiple Persona
Facebook can link you up with any demographic or niche you can imagine because it has so much info on all its users and the algorithms to sift it. Forget about an ‘app for that’, Facebook can help you find your niche group and target them through its persona-driven data. Think about maintaining diversified and comprehensive ads which target different personas, but don’t just make assumptions on who they are, get the stats and work from that.
Contextual Content (and lots of it)
Get creative with ‘life events targeting’. Facebook knows when the wedding is, or was. So consider how the market can drive itself by targeting upcoming anniversaries and events. Being narrow in focus can mean increased costs (CPMs) but being specific, relevant, and targeted means being able to tailor the marketing, increasing the chances of conversion. Staying broad offers a lower cost, a more ‘vanilla’ approach, and a reduced, individual appeal.
Looking For Love
Consider yourself to be looking for the customer that represents the real deal, full-blown, lifetime love–not some fly-by-night fling or disposable fad. Developing this relationship will increase their Lifetime Customer Value (LCV), and you’ll likely to get repeat conversions. You will also get the power of ‘word-of mouth’–if one friend has a good experience, then all the friends know about it–hey presto, warm leads.
Remember, 55 percent of people bought something Online After seeing it on social media, with Facebook and Instagram taking up the top spots for driving product discovery. You just cannot afford to ignore this duo.
If you need help navigating the FB-IG building blocks to build, a solid, long-lasting plan for your business, contact us at Agency Partner Interactiveand talk with a Professional Digital Marketing Strategist to get your ad empire growing so you too can tower over the marketplace!
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How To Build A Solid Base, One Brick At A Time” instead.
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When creating a business website, your pillar content is going to be the main, broad topic of your website. The topic can be anything: real estate, shoes, perhaps software. The pillar is the businesses underlying sales objective.
Creating a successful website requires a strategy. At the foundation, your pillar is your SEO keyword or keywords. It is the topic your customers will use when performing a search–a search that should lead directly to you.
Pick a Content Topic
Pick a topic which is relevant to the consumer. Try not to be too specific or too broad at this stage. You should consider how much your audience cares about the topic, if it ties to your services, and if it has a good search volume.
Your main topic can have with sub- or “specific” topics branching off from this central theme and are relevant to your pillar content.
Create a Pillar Strategy
Once you’ve identified your topic and subtopics, you need to create a table of contents – a list of all relevant information regarding your SEO content. This is the place to identify your overall objectives and goals.
Consider who the audience is, why are they looking for this, and what they need to know. How is your information going to serve them better than what they can find elsewhere?
Content Outline
You need to create website building steps so that you have a process. Your outline is effectively going to be your to-do list. Your outline should, roughly, include landing page, menu with subtopics, subtopics pages, payment platform, contact page, and customer service pages. Next, add to that list your editing process steps.
Edit your Content
It’s important to build this time into your to-do-list, as this is the refinement that elevates your content from decent to great. Editing steps should include narrative flow, format, editorial style, and grammar and spelling. That means you should edit your entire web content four separate times, focusing on each editing method separately, to ensure your content is perfect.
Set deadlines for each step of your outline. This will give you a structure and a timeline to follow. It’s important to keep in mind that during the content creation stage that the content does not have to be perfect. It just needs to be created. You’ll refine that content during the editing stage. Where that may seem like doing double the work, the truth is that focusing on one thing at a time will keep your mind clear and your deadlines approachable and attainable.
You’ll likely be communicating with a team of designers and content writers at this point and it’s important to remember that communication is key. Whether it’s questions or obstacles, you should establish a respectful and approachable rapport with your teams. They need to feel that you are available and willing to talk about the process.
Content Design
Lastly, you’ll want your team to implement the design, such as images, video, color, and font – all the additions that make a website engaging and friendly. This will improve your dwell time with customers and help improve engagement and conversions. Agency Partner has 10 years experience creating and implementing pillar strategy and will provide you with the expertise to get your website launched successfully.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Building SEO Pillar Content” instead.
Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Between the brackets, there is a whole new world that, once uncovered, will unlock many doors for marketers with a basic knowledge of HTML. You can use your coding knowledge to create a variety of headings, format paragraphs, line breaks, lists, and to set up your photos for SEO detection. So prepare to dip into the seemingly secretive world of coded meanings and symbols as we present some basic HTML tips for Internet Marketers.
HTML for Internet Marketers
Any owner of a website or blog will profess that working with a developer is helpful when getting your content live, yet having a basic knowledge of HTML will save you from always having to dial 911 for assistance. Learning this skill is a liberating and empowering move in the tech-intensive world of today. Tip: When using HTML commands, most “opening” tags have a corresponding “closing” tag that nearly matches. The difference is that the closing tag is always preceded by a slash. This tells the computer where to start a command, and where to end the command. Pay close attention to the examples below.
Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are transporters, one click on a hyperlinked image, word, or sentence and you’re taken to a different document section, an entirely new website, or to begin a download of a PDF or ebook. Hyperlinks shown in blue underlined text, called anchor text. The essential key is an opening <a tag and the hypertext reference (href), as shown here: <a href=”https://www.destinationURL.com”>click this link”</a> The result: Click this Link Arguably, the most important hyperlink is the one that takes your customers to your website so you’ll want to memorize this: <a href=”https://www.agenypartner.com”>agencypartner</a> The result: Agency Partner Interactive. Now, simply replace the anchor text with your URL.
Paragraphs and Spacing
The popular paragraph <p> tag is placed at the beginning of, you guessed it, a paragraph. Its closer is the </p> tag. This tells the computer where the paragraph starts and where it ends so it can format it accordingly: <p>Place your paragraph content between these tags.</p> You may find times when you want to reformat elements within the paragraph. <p>To shorten a line of text, enter a line break like this.<br> The content will continue on the next line.</p> To increase the space between lines, say to double-spacing, change the opening paragraph marker to include a line-height command: <p style=”line-height: 2;”>This will double-space all the lines within your paragraph. You can set this to 1.5 for less space, to 3 for more, etc. Note that this HTML command will only work on the specified paragraph. If you want to use it for multiple paragraphs, you will need to use the line-height tag on each.</p>
Headings
These eye-catchers are reasonably easy to code and are very important in catching the attention of search engines. They begin at <h1> and move inversely: as the numbers increase, the headings decrease in size:
<h1>Big, Bold and Beautiful!</h1>
<h2>Resize your headings with ease</h2>
<h3>Discover the How-To</h3>
Lists
While they utilize the same format and are both flanked by list-item tags: <li>. Bulleted and numbered lists have additional tags used at the start and finish of each list: <ul> will give you bullets while <ol> is used for numbered lists:
Bulleted
<ul> <li>bullet 1</li> <li>bullet 2</li> <ul>
Numbered
<ol> <li>number 1</li> <li>number 2</li> <ol>
Images
Often, picture sizing and image resolution can be troublesome. A good tip is to resize your pictures before uploading. This also maintains proper proportions. Labeled images containing keywords have a better chance of being noticed in search results. And, in the off chance that a picture doesn’t load at all, the “alt” text at least provides the user with a better description than “jpeg10678”. <img>src=”https://agencypartner.com”alt=”place alternative image description here”> These tools and basic HTML knowledge are resource savers. A solution that would have taken you hours to discover, are now be easily visible and the glitch resolved with these simple, must-know coding tags. Consider your virtual toolbox upgraded!
For new websites and web redesign projects alike, the website kickoff meeting is the crux of the working relationship between a client and the website design agency.
Essential to the web design process, this kickoff meeting is the ideal opportunity to identify the high-level scope of the web project and discuss the needs of its stakeholders. To keep everyone focused on the goal and unified in purpose, adequate preparation is crucial. For the most part, the following eight questions are a great foundation for building the website kickoff meeting agenda. By all means, these don’t cover everything, but they help share the basics!
Not sure how to begin? Contact our award-winning team today and we’ll walk you through the process.
If it isn’t already clear, let’s just reiterate that this website discovery meeting is the time to explore the tactical roadmap and determine any limitations that may affect the project.
To avoid any future surprises, be sure to invite all the right people — not only the top tier management but everyone who has a stake in the project. If there is anything that you want to include in the meeting agenda, ensure that your project manager has it well ahead of time, and the topic will be integrated into the agenda of the meeting.
So let’s get to it. Here are eight questions you may be asked during the course of your website kickoff — complete answers to these will maximize the value of everyone’s time and ensure a productive, long-term partnership.
Common Website Discovery Questions
Website redesigns: “What on your site is currently working?”
Most businesses redesign their website once every two to three years, so periodic website redesigns are very normal. Before jumping into this type of project, there is a great deal of benefit to assessing what has been working about your site, and what you would like to see it do differently or better in the future. Asking this will elicit what isn’t working as a matter of course but this question will start the process on a positive note. If any existing user data, such as Google Analytics engagement metrics are available, the team should see that! In the not so distant future, we expect to see high volume websites change their design, dynamically, using artificial intelligence!
Website redesigns: “What do you most want to change about your site?”
Think: “what do I need more of from my website?” Whether you need to boost more sales to your eCommerce site or you’re looking for more phone calls or form submissions, use this as an opportunity to dream big for a couple of minutes. The free flow of ideas should paint a picture of the overall vision, company direction, and tone and style of the target goal for phase 1 of the project. Save the practical issues for later. This is just about establishing a vision and honing in on what the immediate and long-term return on investment should be.
All Web Design Projects: “Who is your site’s target audience?”
We want to align with all, not part of the website’s target demographic — sidelining anyone is a missed opportunity from the outset. Understanding the needs of the client and how to improve their customers’ experience is the heart of the project, essential to client satisfaction and positive outcomes.
All Web Design Projects: “What is your business goal?”
This is probably the most important question for any website development plan. Are you trying to sell something? Create a sticky site? Or generate leads through an email or newsletter? Find out what the client wants each visitor to do. Knowing the answer will determine the best way to engage customers and spearhead the web design process.
All Web Design Projects: “How would you describe your company?”
These answers will help to establish tone and voice and allow you to build a site in conjunction with the client’s brand. Answers such as, “fun” and “corporate” will determine what the website presentation should be–bright and lighthearted, or serious and direct.
All Web Design Projects: “What is your most important benefit?”
Remember, customers are interested in benefits— they don’t care much about the features save for how it solves their “problem.” Try to get the client to answer this question in less than three seconds. This will tell you what deep impressions they have about the company (service or product). Exploiting the customer benefits (and indirectly, the product features), the website should grab the site visitor’s attention.
All Web Design Projects: “How do you fit into your market?”
Who is the competition? Do you have any alliances? Understanding the successes and failures the competition will provide a wealth of knowledge about the market. Likewise, you may be able to build on the strengths of alliances that stretch the reach of your initial audience. Together, the perspective from these sources will help you discover gaps or identify new opportunities.
All Website Projects: “Within your market, what is your favorite and least favorite site, and why?”
This is a really quick way to discover what inspires your clients. How do their favorite sites look and feel? What is the user experience like? With a little research, you can determine what compels users to return to these sites–what’s engaging and what’s not.
This may also be a good time to address your clients’ expectations so knowing what they like personally and professionally will ensure you deliver a project that they truly feel comfortable with and that does what it needs to do.
Project Gold
The website kickoff meeting is the opportunity for you to show that you know your stuff. It’s the time to educate the team, develop a cohesive plan, and inspire a: “We Got This Covered” attitude. It’s a process that will pay dividends in the quality of the web design process, the working relationship, and, ultimately, the work produced.
Now that you know what to ask in a website kickoff meeting, you can use these questions to guide your client to a definitive plan. Are you building your own site? These questions will help you solidify your goals.
Still need some guidance?
Contact our professionals at Agency Partner Interactive today to see how we can help you realize your dream website. For no obligation and at no cost to you, we’ll lead you through a 1 hour brainstorming session. Click below to get started now.
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When you are trying to make sure your website is SEO friendly, it’s imperative that you’re on the ball from day one.
Due to the competitive nature of ecommerce, SEO is the critical component needed to raise your website from mediocrity to meticulous. Why? Because the keywords identified by search engines will drive customers to your website. Being a heavy hitter with your SEO means that search engines will place you near the top of the search engine results page (SERP), thus increasing your website’s sales rate.
Maintaining high-quality ecommerce SEO also means that targeted, organic users will easily find your website amidst the plethora of choices. If your ecommerce site SEO is up to scratch, you will appear on the very first page of Google searches. But if you really want to step up your game, you should be aiming for the top three results. At Agency Partner Interactive, we have compiled a list of techniques to whip your website into shape!
Let’s Get this Ball Rolling
Transforming your ecommerce site into a front-runner starts with keyword optimization. These highly targeted keywords need to pay homage to your niche. A good starting point includes using Moz’s Keyword Tool or Google Adwords to research words commonly used in online searches.
Researching your competitors is beneficial for several reasons too. You might feel they are out of your league at the moment, but it’s certain they are using tried-and-tested SEO techniques. There is no shame in borrowing from the best. Also, they may be your competitors, but a strategic collaboration can help you to generate more interest in your website so bear this in mind–a few shared links can go a long way.
When optimizing your own keyword roster, be careful not to be too general, as your website will undoubtedly rank lower. Creating Long-Tail Keywords will almost definitely improve your SEO rating.
Raise the Bar on eCommerce SEO Descriptions
You need to optimize your meta description–the short description shown directly below your page title in the SERPs. Although Google itself doesn’t read this, your customers will. This information is all they have on your site, barring the title and URL, before they decide whether or not you have what they need–so make it concise, clear, and relevant. Your product descriptions will also benefit from a second wind, so research similar products and use them as a guide, but be creative and make yours unique.
Mobile Optimization is a Slam Dunk
As most people use their smartphones to access the internet today, it’s crucial that you swing for the fence here. Make sure your ecommerce site is mobile friendly and you will likely see a boost in your SEO ratings. Before going live, test and retest every page on your website with various smartphone brands. Most importantly, ensure the checkout experience is as convenient as possible.
The Ball is in Your Court
The aforementioned tips are based on years of experience that we have gathered here at Agency Partner. They represent some of the most common tactics used on the web today. You may come across some sticky tricks but some quality research and perseverance will pay off in the long run. However, should you feel the need to chat with an expert, ecommerce SEO is an Agency Partner specialty and we are more than happy to help.
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Why eCommerce SEO Matters” instead.
Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
Web design should be classified as an art form in its own right. Just like any other creative work, a website conveys a brand message, communicates with an audience, and on occasion, provokes thoughts deeper than the Mariana Trench.
In the ocean of consumerism, it is vital that your customers experience smooth sailing from the second they embark on your ship. Not only do you need to captain your website like a fish to water, but additionally, you need to be aware of the web design mistakes to avoid.
Bugs naturally occur in website development and too many of these rogue waves could result in a permanent wave goodbye from your customer base. However, if there are any vessels you need to keep at bay, it’s web design mistakes that can harm your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So if you want to have a whale of a time online, try to adhere to the following tips to avoid rocking the boat!
Is Your Navigation Completely Off The Map?
Ahoy there matey! If you want to really make waves in your industry, you need to make sure that your navigation is simple and straightforward. Reusing tried-and-proven attributes, like the placement of common navigation buttons, is the easiest way to keep things simple.
Running a tight ship here is one of the first things you should consider when building your website. People expect things in an instant, so if it takes too long to find something on your website, your customers are likely to abandon ship. But navigation is just the tip of the iceberg!
Make Sure Your Pages Aren’t Packed Like Sardines
Take a look at all the big fish in your sector and you will quickly realize they are averaging around 300 words per page. Another web design mistake to avoid is too much content. There is a lot of power in whitespace. Pictures and videos can add variety to your website, but use these sparingly. Too much will take longer to load and may even confuse visitors. Keeping your Web Design Responsive and ship-shape will help to Increase your SEO in the long-run.
Stem the Tide With a Good Call To Action
A call to action, or CTA, is simply prompting the user to do something–sign up for an email newsletter or take a simple quiz. From these actions, you’ll gather information about your users. These are your leads.
Without a good call to action, your revenue is going to be a drop in the ocean compared to what it should be. An effective call to action will ensure your conversion rate remains high and creating one is like shooting fish in a barrel. Keep it concise and make sure it tells your customers exactly what to do.
Note These Web Design Mistakes to Avoid Because There Are Plenty More Fish In The Sea
If your SEO is currently drowning under a Tsunami of bigger fish, then it may be time to rethink your Web Design Strategy. As far as the customer is concerned, there are plenty more fish in the sea, so your SEO rating has to be a Great White. You don’t need to find any port in the storm, just implement the suggestions that we at Agency Partner Interactive have made and watch your website splash its way to surf heaven. The world really is your oyster!
Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Web Design Mistakes That Can Harm Your SEO” instead.
Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!
