6 Reasons Why Businesses Benefit From Blogging

Blogging has been around for a very long time, and it has allowed creative and energetic people to have outlets for their ideas. But blogging is also extremely critical to any business that wants to grow and succeed. If you currently do not blog for your business, then let us give you some good reasons why you should start blogging immediately.

Become An Expert In Your Field

Anyone can say that they are an expert in their field, but a blog gives you the chance to show off your high level of industry understanding. With a blog, you can show how broad your intimate knowledge is of your industry, and you can also give your own projections for your industry’s future. Instead of just saying that your company has a deep well of knowledge about your industry, you can use a blog to show clients and prospects just how deep that well really is.

Answer Client Questions

A blog gives you a unique opportunity to interact directly with your customer base and answer any questions or concerns it may have. The difference between a blog and social media is that you can go into detail on a blog, where social media prefers limited interactions. You can use the comments sections on your articles to handle any follow-up questions as well.

Have A Central Point For Company News

Anybody can post almost anything they want on the Internet. With some determination, you could pursue libelous posts and have the person punished. But the Internet is a great place for people to get incorrect and even damaging information on your company. With a blog, you can make it clear that you are delivering official and correct information about your company. You can encourage the media to use your blog as a source of information about your business, and you can clear up confusing misinformation that is damaging your public reputation.

Expand Your Internet Presence

An active blog that you add one or more posts to a day is going to do wonders for your company’s search results in a variety of categories. You should make sure that your blog content follows all of the proper SEO rules, and try to write about a variety of topics within your industry.

Assist In The Sales Process

You can use your blog as a tool for educating prospects and helping new customers to better understand how your company can help them to succeed. You can generate new interest in a product that has been on the market for a while, or give prospects detailed information on how your company’s offerings are compatible with their needs.

Give A Peek Into Your Corporate Personality

A blog is a more informal presentation of information than a website, which means that you can spend a little time introducing some personal elements of your business to your clients. People like to buy from people, and the more your customers can learn about the real people behind the Internet presence, the more interested they will be in doing business with you.

A blog is an inexpensive but powerful marketing tool that can do everything from improve your company’s standing in search engine results, to making you a recognized expert in your industry. If your company does not have a blog, then now is the time to get one started.

5 Guidelines For Killer Product Videos

The Internet is increasingly more reliant on videos, and product videos have become mandatory for any product description for any sales site. When you start putting together your online sales site, you need to have product videos in place to help sell your products. You can make your own product videos if you just remember these five important elements.

Spend Time On The Script

You should never shoot an off-the-cuff product video because you could leave out important information. Instead, you should sit down and create a script that gives every detail as you would like to see it. You should plan out every shot and write every word of dialogue. Make sure you get what you want and leave no room for misinterpretation.

Keep It Concise

Most people will watch a three-minute video if it has information that they really want. When you start planning out your video and writing your script, be sure to keep your time constraints in mind. If the video goes too long, people could miss out on important information as they turn the video off before it ends.

Grab Them Right Away

It is not easy to make a product video compelling in the first five or 10 seconds, but that is exactly what you have to do. You can take the product’s best feature and use it as a teaser for the rest of the video to get your audience interested. A little humor in the beginning might help to engage the viewer, but be careful not to use the wrong kind of humor and turn your audience away.

Get A Good Voice Over Talent

You do not need to spend a fortune hiring an experienced voice over actor to get your videos done. There might be someone who works for your company who has the right tempo and tone in their voice that makes people want to listen. A bad voice over is going to turn people away from your video no matter how good the video may be. Spend time listening to a lot of auditions and choose the voice that has the broadest appeal.

Remember To Focus On The Benefits

Highlighting fun or cool features in your product video is only going to leave the viewer wondering how your product can help their life. Your product video needs to be a series of problem/solution situations where you use the features of the product to solve customer problems. Your audience is going to want to know what benefits the product has for them directly, and that needs to be the focus of your video.

Product videos can significantly increase website traffic and product sales, but only if they are done right. Your job with product videos is to inform and not necessarily entertain. Although a little entertaining in the beginning is going to be helpful, your overall theme needs to be educational in showing the prospect how your product can make their life easier.

Tips For Personalizing Your Email

Email marketing is an effective way to get a lot of information to your audience in a format they are familiar with. The problem is that predictable marketing emails that have earmarks such as an overly formal subject line are getting ignored. One way to increase the interaction you have with your audience is to find ways to personalize your emails without making it look patronizing. There are plenty of ways to do this, and they can all be very effective at increasing your email success rates.

Include Their Name

If you include your recipient’s name in the subject line and a couple of times in the content, then you are going to pique their interest and get more emails read. Once again, this move can seem patronizing if you put the name in too often. But it can be extremely effective if done in moderation.

Include Other Personal Information

The point of personalizing emails is not necessarily to make the reader believe that you sat down and wrote the email. In most cases, your readers are going to assume that they are getting some sort of marketing email piece. But if you include more than just their name, then you will make them feel more engaged with the content.

For example, setting up your email template so it includes mentions of the recipient’s company, the street the office is on, and maybe a personal bit that can be applied to every recipient would help add more appeal to your emails.

Diversify Templates Based On Funnel Position

One mistake most companies make is sending out the same message to every prospect or customer. A prospect who you have had several conversations with and is higher up in your funnel is not going to be affected by an email designed for people who are new to your company. You need to have a different template for each level of your funnel and engage prospects in a manner that will get them interested in what you have to say.

Try Local Images

If your marketing piece lends to the idea of using local images, then that can help to engage your audience further. For example, emails sent to Buffalo prospects would get a Buffalo-related picture while the same content sent to Boston prospects would get a Boston-related image. A visual tag that your prospects will recognize can help to increase the likelihood that they will read your content.

Try A Variety Of Calls To Action

When you create different templates for different positions in your sales funnel, then you are adding strength to your content. But you can also change up the calls for action in all of your templates and find out which types of calls are more effective. You should always be experimenting with your emails to see what type of content is most effective, and changing up calls to action is a good idea.

Email marketing is effective when you take the time to try and make a connection with your audience. Personalizing emails is one of the more effective ways to get your audience interested in your emails and increasing the rate at which your emails get read.

Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Performing

You have tried everything you can think of and a bunch of things you read about to get your website to produce web traffic, but nothing is working. Your traffic conversion rates are terrible and your daily number of visitors is well below expectations. You need your website to generate revenue, and there are some very good reasons why it is not performing as you had hoped.

You Need A Digital Marketing Firm

In order for your website to meet your production goals, there is a long list of details that have to be attended to on a daily basis. If you are trying to attend to those details on your own, then that is one of the reasons your website is failing. You need to invest in the services of a professional digital marketing company if you want your website to bring the best possible results.

Following Old Rules

Since 2012, Google has changed its algorithms which changes the way in which your website needs to be programmed. If you are still using keyword strategies from 2000, then that is part of the reason why your website is failing. If your website is not utilizing any of the new methods for generating traffic, then that is another reason that your website is not performing up to par. When Google makes algorithm changes, it expects websites to be updated and follow suit.

Google Penalties

In your zest to get your content appearing in certain types of searches, you decided to load up your content with specific keywords. To help your cause, you went out and purchased links that are guaranteed by the company you bought them from to generate traffic. Unfortunately, those two actions are two of the most common reasons that websites get Google penalties. If your website is currently under a Google penalty, no one will see it in any search results. You need to contact Google to find out if your website is in a penalty and then hire a professional marketing team to get you out.

Your Links Don’t Work

Every once in a while, Google and the other search engines will randomly scan your website to see if your internal and external links work. If those links do not work, then your website is knocked down a few levels in the search engine results. There is software you can buy that will quickly scan your website and alert you to broken links, and it is software you should be using every week.

You Have No Site Map

One of the quickest ways to boost the SEO power of your website is to add a good site map for users to utilize. At the same time, a quick way to have your website drop in the search results is to not have any kind of site map at all.

Your company website is one of the most important marketing tools your business will ever have. If you are not investing plenty of resources into making your website as effective as possible, then you are not doing everything you can to grow your business.

Importance Of Having A Strong Brand

When you start working with a digital marketing agency for the first time, one of the first topics of discussion you will have will be about your brand. The marketing experts will do a survey of your brand to see how strong it is and then determine what needs to be done to enhance the power and influence of your brand. But why is your brand so important? Why does it matter so much if your brand is strong?

Enhances Your Marketing ROI

There is a direct relationship between your marketing return on investment (ROI) and the influence of your brand. The ability for your target audience to identify your company logo or recognize your corporate color scheme will add legitimacy to your marketing that you cannot get any other way. When you have a strong brand, there is anticipation for your marketing that will significantly increase your marketing effect and bring you much more powerful marketing results.

Creates A Strong Customer Foundation

When your brand is recognizable in your industry, the most common default reaction to news about your company is positive. In other words, if there is negative news about your company, your organization is given the benefit of the doubt and that first impression is not necessarily bad. The strength of your brand can cause people to disregard bad reviews or even a minor controversy and allow your company to maintain is strong public image.

Anticipated Product Releases

A company with a strong brand is the kind of company that has consumers lining up at retail outlets to buy their products at midnight on the product release date. A strong brand backed up by a reputation for quality products can continue to push revenue growth to areas that you had never expected.

Vendor Relationships

Vendors want to do business with companies that have strong brands. Where other businesses might have to purchase in cash with a new vendor, your strong brand might allow you to set up a credit account, which is much better for your business. Vendors want to have their names associated with strong brands, which is why so many vendors offer strong brands marketing funds to be used for a variety of reasons.

Customer Base Response

That strong foundation of customer loyalty you build with a strong brand can be seen in action when you call on your customer base to help your business grow. When customers create their own communities around your products and want to work directly with you on product development, then you have achieved a level of brand strength that most companies would love to have. Referrals from your satisfied customers can build your business much faster than Internet banner ads, and that is why brand recognition is so valuable.

If you do a search on the Internet, you will find websites that put financial values on company brands. The ability to quantify a brand financially shows just how important a strong brand is to the success of a company. While you are working on innovative products and great business partnerships, you should continue to invest in building your brand to gain all of the benefits a strong brand has to offer.

The History Of Social Media Platforms

Social media is a rapidly growing marketing medium that is on the verge of becoming more significant to the average consumer than search engines. While platforms such as Facebook are not in any imminent danger of putting search engines like Google out of business, it is interesting to note that more and more people do their informational searches on social media platforms these days. How did we get here? What is the condensed history of the social media medium?

The Beginning Of It All

In 1997, the first ever social media platform called Six Degrees was started. It lasted until 2001, and laid the foundation for social media platforms of the future. Users could register to have an account, but even people who did not register for accounts could see and interact with user posts. It is said that the rising popularity of chat platforms helped to bring an end to Six Degrees, but social media was only getting started.

MySpace

The first massively popular social media platform was released in the early 2000s and it was called MySpace. Users seemed to love the idea of being able to communicate with each other and personalize their profiles with pictures and colors. At the same time that MySpace was getting underway, LinkedIn was created as a social network for business professionals. MySpace eventually lost its popularity and has since become a social network for musicians, but LinkedIn remains popular with its original format to this day.

Facebook And Twitter

In 2004, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg released a social media platform he called Facebook, but it only existed on Harvard’s university computer network. It did not take long for Zuckerberg to realize that he could increase the popularity of his website by making it available to the public, so he did. In 2006, Twitter was released with the idea that people could convey their ideas with either images or text messages that were only 140 characters long. Facebook brought the world together, and Twitter became an important source for the latest information for millions of people.

Images And More Images

The popularity of images on Twitter helped to spur the creation of a series of new social media platforms around 2010. Flickr and Instagram got their start at the very earliest point of image-centric social media platforms, and both are still very popular today. The popularity of niche social media platforms such as the image-centric ones inspired other niches such as food reviews, music, and home improvement and crafts.

Today, there are many new social media platforms being introduced that all seem to be breaking down the idea of social media into endless small niches. Over the past few years, the growing number of social media options for users means that social media platforms are starting to develop dedicated target audiences that are making it easier for marketing experts to formulate social media marketing plans that work.

Can Cult Online Brands go Mainstream Without Selling Out?

You invent the best widget in the world and decide to launch it on your own e-commerce website. You soon start to gain a rabid but small following of people who regularly feed you information on what you could do to make your product and its advertising better. You engage your growing customer base and realize that your fiercely loyal customers are bringing in other loyal customers. Before you know it, you are a cult hit.

What Is A Cult Hit?

A cult hit is something that a small group of people grab onto and usually are not too anxious to share. The prevailing thought among people who like these types of products is that they have found something special, they were instrumental in making that product successful, and they should have a say in how the product grows.

The Problems With Taking A Cult Hit Mainstream

The idea behind taking a cult hit into the mainstream is to add a much broader audience to your enthusiastic cult following. In a cult following situation, most members of your customer base pride themselves on being knowledgeable about your product. When you take that product mainstream, the casual product users tend to clash with the hardcore fans and there is the possibility that you could lose your cult following. In many cases, when a product loses its cult following before it catches on in the mainstream, that product loses its cult following and fails.

Can You Take A Cult Hit Mainstream?

The key to taking a cult hit mainstream is lots of time and lots of interaction between your company and your core fan base. If you try to buy your way into the mainstream with a big IPO or something, then you are all but guaranteeing that you will lose most of your cult following. But if you take everything gradually and make changes that prepare your company for eventual growth, then you have a chance at a successful expansion into the mainstream.

If you get your cult followers involved in your growth, then they feel like they are at the bottom floor of something very important. Instead of bypassing those people who helped to build your brand, you are turning them into brand ambassadors and letting all of those highly enthusiastic and knowledgeable people help move your company into a bigger spotlight.

The path from cult status to the mainstream is a slow and gradual adventure. It is critical that you constantly engage your enthusiastic and loyal customer base, and get them to start talking about your product to others. Let your most loyal customers build secret societies based on your product, because that only increases your product’s mystique and makes the mainstream want your product even more.

But if you go too fast and try to bypass your cult fan base to get to the mainstream, then you could lose it all. You need a highly skilled digital marketing company to give you the guidance you need to make your corporate dreams come true.

What does Conversion Rate Optimization Mean for Marketers in 2019?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) has developed into its own specialty field in digital marketing that is growing rapidly. The field of CRO deals with increasing the amount of web traffic a site gets into buying customers. As you can imagine, this field is of critical interest to retail website owners and its influence on marketing programs continues to grow.

Talking To An Audience

Website owners are constantly looking for more effective ways to convert web traffic into buying customers because this cuts down on the cost of selling. A CRO expert understands what makes users go from browsing to buying, and this means that more CRO experts are working with digital marketing experts to improve the overall customer experience. With the data generated by CRO experts, marketing professionals can determine more effective ways to find new target audiences, communicate with those audiences, and develop more powerful marketing messages.

Simplifying The Process

A CRO expert considers everything that attracts and repels potential buyers when developing their ideas. It has been proven over and over again that a streamlined purchasing process is one thing that keeps consumers coming back to a website. But before the emergence of CRO experts, digital marketing professionals were never really sure what buyers wanted. With the help of CRO, marketers now have a better understanding of how buyers want the purchasing process simplified.

Don’t Forget The Desktop

Since CRO is relatively new, most people assume it only deals with the emerging industry of mobile computing. But any good CRO expert will tell you that consumers want a unified experience with desktop and mobile websites, and consumers want both kinds of websites to be as easy as possible to use. The idea that the desktop is going away is not accurate, and CRO experts are constantly reminding marketers to keep an eye on desktop development.

Maximize Mobile Options

One of the aspects of mobile computing that CRO experts constantly talk about is the lack of modern tools being used in developing mobile websites. Geolocation and the click-to-call marketing tactics are not used as widely as they could be, and that is not making users happy. There are some forms of marketing that users want to see on mobile websites, and CRO experts are trying to educate marketers on what those new tools may be.

The Regional Framework

When a portion of digital marketing spins off into its own field, such as CRO, the detailed manner in which that field is analyzed becomes more intense. Lately, CRO experts have discovered that regional limitations such as laws regarding online retail sales, international shipping issues, and maintaining inventory for customers all over the world is hurting CRO as much as anything else. Websites need to be aware of where their target audiences are located and develop strategies that address regional challenges.

The field of CRO will only grow in 2019, which is good news for digital marketing experts. The more information marketers have regarding consumer trends, the easier it gets for those marketers to develop effective marketing programs.

Five Key Considerations for Implementing AI Personalization

Online users have come to expect that their experiences with consumer websites will be personalized to make everything more relevant to them. Artificial intelligence (AI) has allowed marketers to anticipate the individual needs of each consumer and then develop marketing campaigns directed specifically at individuals. It all sounds great, but there are some extremely important considerations to keep in mind if you want to get AI personalization right for your online customers.

Start With a Good Foundation

The temptation for most companies is to check out what the competition is doing and they trying to top that. But it is important to remember that Google, Facebook, and a lot of other large Internet platforms are also offering personalized experiences using AI, and those larger platforms are going to offer a broader experience because they are dealing with broader information. You should check out how everyone is using AI and then create the best experience for your customers and not for someone else’s audience.

Offline Must Work With Online

When you offer a personalized experience for your users online, you need to have the right kind of offline support to make that experience robust. Utilizing AI to wow your customers is only effective if all of your support systems work and your customers can benefit from what you are creating.

Offer Relevant and Timely Content

There is only so much AI can do when it comes to helping to personalize a user’s experience. If the only content a system has to work with is outdated and irrelevant, then the experience is not going to be that great for the client. It is critically important that any AI personalization experience uses updated material and stays in line with current consumer trends.

Don’t Give Away the Farm

Pre-fabricated marketing messages mixed in with personalized content are going to be an effective way to get your message out to your clients and the messages of your sponsors as well. If you try to personalize the entire experience, you take away from the effectiveness of focused marketing. You need to decide which elements you are going to personalize and then maximize those elements with good AI.

Learn as You go Along

An AI personalized experience is just like any other marketing campaign in that you collect data on its effectiveness and make changes based on your findings. You should never consider your AI experiences to be finished products. You should always look to improve and make them not only more effective at selling products, but better for the users.

Giving online users personalized experiences is becoming an expected part of online marketing. Users are expecting to see banners that are designed specifically for them and marketing information that follows their buying trends. But it is also important to temper your AI personalization and learn to improve as you go along instead of trying to do it all at once.

How to Get Clients by Growing Your Business Network

For any business, word-of-mouth advertising is extremely powerful for bringing in new clients. There are plenty of ways to pay for word-of-mouth advertising and paying for it is just as effective as growing your own network. But an organically grown network is going to give you a more hands-on approach to growing your business through the power of referrals.

Creating a Business Network

A business network is simply a collection of people you meet in your daily travels that are interested in growing their business and helping you to grow yours. Your business network will consist of anyone you meet because you never want to limit your range of influence to just one industry. To create a business network, you carry business cards wherever you go and swap cards with people as you meet them. You keep their contact information and use that contact information when the opportunity is right.

Using Your Business Network

As you are talking to someone you just met, they might mention to you that they need a plumber to fix a problem they have in their home. You give them the contact information of one of the plumbers you have in your business network and strongly recommend that your new contact call your plumber. You should also make sure that your new contact mentions to your plumber that you said to call. Over time, these referrals create a constantly-growing network of business contacts that will help grow your business.

Online Business Networks

Creating business networks online is just as powerful as the networks made up of contacts you meet face-to-face. Social media is an excellent place to start building your networks because of all of the groups and communities each network has available. You should also look into professional organizations that have online message boards and other ways to network with people online. As you grow your online network, you would utilize it the same way you would use your business card network.

Mixing Networks

At some point, you will want to find the social media profiles of your business card contacts so you can connect with them online. But it is important to keep your business card and online networks separate to prevent you from making incorrect referrals. For example, a local small business owner you meet would probably benefit better from the local accountant you know instead of the one you know several states over.

Business networks are essential to any growing organization. It is important to constantly connect with people you can refer to others to help enhance your credibility and, eventually, grow your own business as well. The larger your networks and the more active you are with them, the more you will consistently add to your customer base and improve your overall revenue.