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Points that Ecommerce Developers secretly confess

Points that Ecommerce Developers secretly confess

Categories
Ecommerce

Prime importance is given to Ecommerce developers and actually they really are worth it. Every piece of art, we mean coding that they do is important hence we do value their skills. But, talking to few of them recently I stumbled upon a rock bottom secret. Not every developer is happy with their coding, sometimes they expect to code something and it showed something better and sometimes vice-versa kind of stories. Usually developers have standard processes and they follow techniques that help them do their jobs well. There are some whimsical ways too that they work in, some like quite places while some can code while they are in a musical. The ultimate aim is to get working what is needed.

Perfection! A possibility?

Perfection is just a word per se, we may believe but it really is. I must state that developers are pretty much-obsessed people. The very character of them nudging and queuing every portion of their program shows how important coding to them is. It often happens that developer may develop some piece and it is not at all similar to what the client suggested. This is a very frequent phenomenon. Somehow, it becomes difficult to do software building that is needed by some other person. The causes are sometimes unknown, but two common reasons are communication gap and not having resources.

The gaps occur when there is not enough information available or the data is not supportive, it is flawed in nature. Lack of resources is another forefront reasons, we may have much of time, money and people but some things are just lagging. The time is of course limited and some features simply do not work. Hence, developers often feel that perfection is impossible.

Time Constraints

This is the most common reason for all of us and coincidently with the developers too. No matter how much time we have it on hand; there is always a time scarcity, a resource that is so valuable. As one gets closer to the deadline, a particular feature is rushed upon, the development portion becomes difficult, and budget is uncontrollable, sudden bugs come up, change in feature request by client often leads to elongated gaps.

There are several of these scenarios that may let one think that there is severe lack of time. Every scene has different issues and hence it all can be solved in different ways. It is always a good idea to showcase and tell clients the feature that would go good with the said request.

Surprising Code acceptance

Sometimes, the reasonable happens with the unreasonable. And this is so common with developers. Often we encounter our own flaws and we know somewhere within what will work and what would not work and still it worked. This can show a very good surprise for the developer but can equally lead to negative impact too.

This phase often comes with reporting the bug. The client may report a bug that is fixed by someone and so developer would never know what was the actual program and treats it as a bad bug report. So best idea here is to do the testing for some extra time and clarify what is the problem and where is the problem. There are no successful systems that haven’t had any bugs; the most successful company processes may have bugs. So it is perfectly normal to have bugs.

Points to ponder if your Conversion rates are falling!

Ecommerce businesses are all about market credibility and marketers well know that no one is going to hit the pod in the midst at least for some months. But, if the markets are targeted properly the response could be overwhelming and sometimes even with bigger instincts the results can be underwhelming. Most times the buying decisions are held subconsciously in the mind, so brands should take care of those things in mind. UX is the first and foremost thing a brand should pay strong attention to for its impacts your business sales tremendously. Stated below are few of the pointers to look for:

  • Deficient Visual layout – Having a good site layout is one of the most important necessities for the site to look appealing to people. Visual colors help attract attention and elements like color, positioning of the products, shapes, sizes and more. The landing pages can be organized to give a strong impression to users of the website. Given below is an example of MailChimp’s Homepage:

    Send Better email

    The above image clearly represent, where the user attention might go to. Some color options help customers to easily know what the site page is all about. The landing page goals are directed towards brands goals hence the actions can be taken accordingly. Following is one of the landing pages of the brand:

    Truckers

    The below image grabs attention of the users where the brands want to highlight their selling proposition:

    selling

    The above image clearly depicts where the highest engagement may attract the attention. The only demerit of this page is there are no actionable buttons where the users could click and get conversions. There are different online tools that help to identify and scan the visitor’s patterns. The landing pages should be designed keeping in mind the objectives of the landing page

  • Undecided Value proposition – Brands should know there is no immediate selling, the brands USP is created to entice buyers into buying the products. Customers are looking to buy goods that are unique, hence idea for brands is to demonstrate their products with its usefulness and how it can be better opposed to other brands. A value proposition for the brands means to identify the need of the product, presenting the solution, showing the difference, providing the proof, etc.

    Accounting

    The homepage is dedicated to express the brands value proposition, the industry is dedicated to show common issue that brands and customers usually face.

    Heres

    Industrial case-studies conducted by Invesp states how a well-craft value proposition can help to increase conversion rates by almost 90 percent. Ecommerce has a huge market and greater competition.

  • Below average checkout process – Checkouts are the most important milestones when it comes to selling. This is the stage where customer finally buys your items and checks out. The abandonment rates are pretty high standing at an average 76.8 percent last year. The reasons behind abandoning the cart could be many:

    Reasons for

    The ultimate goal is to make the checkout process for customers as easy as possible and eradicate loopholes. The longer the checkout process, the longer the chances for customers to reconsider the buying and abandon the cart. Sometimes even one click options may not be viable for all Ecommerce platforms. The customers also have the option to checkout as a guest, signing in some portals may give a lot of unwanted emails and hence customers resist the sign in. Look below the example of Asos:

    Shopping Cart

    It clearly defines the total cost of items and provides costing for shipping too so the buyers would know clearly the total expenditure costs.

    Fire Box

    The above image shows an organized way of dealing with customers. The indications are clear cut and hence there is every chance of a conversion. The carts are created for checkouts and they are ultimately going to lead to a sale. Hence it is highly important to maintain them well and give good checkout process. A Shopify website offers good customizable options that ensure good functionality.

    Shopping Cart_list.jpg

  • Outdated website theme– The millennials are looking for what is latest, hence new upcoming website designs attract more attention.

    Outdated

    The website that has old type of look can easily be concluded as an old business owner who is no more in business. Customers should find your site that is valuable in terms of providing information because they like credibility. Choosing a web design require a good market research and also the finest UX that you can provide. It gives your competitors the impression that you are competitive. Some sites simply use powerful images while some are heavily filled with content depending on the industries that they cater to, given below is Vera Wang’s homepage:

    Verawang

    The captivating unique video on the site gives impression to user more than anything. If the site is outdated than nothing can make do the gap what your customer feels about the brand. Jeffrey Eisenberg, CEO of BuyerLegends.com, puts it as sites should focus on “persuasion” instead of “conversion”. He further noted “The ability to achieve truly dramatic improvements in conversion rates still requires a shift in conventional thinking. Design teams need to understand that while the goal may be conversion, the practice must be persuasion.”

    Designing a perfect website is magical science that helps to cater to perfect balance of all the elements. It takes into account user prospects of the webpage and also helps to get healthy conversion rates.

Points to ponder if your Conversion rates are falling!

Categories
Ecommerce
Social Planning Essentials – Strategies that give remarkable results

Social media strategies and plan helps to achieve organizational objectives through the means of getting a steady workflow. Given below are some of the strategies and plans that businesses can follow to get optimum output from all the marketing efforts:

  • Building Strategies – Business plans are often actionable plans that help to achieve organizational over all goals. Strategy defines the very aim of social media presence and they define the parameters of what it will deliver and how it will deliver. Strategies are plans that showcase how the objectives will be met with and that includes the channels, budgets and resources to achieve it. A strategy should consist of a concise and short summary of the things that it aims to achieve.

    Strategies help to define goals and objectives that show where you stand in your social arrangements and where should your business be going. Goals are the main criteria that help to achieve your objectives that ensure each goal has measurable criteria for evaluating progress.

    One can decide for themselves, high level goals for social media plan that is to complete social media audit and implement the actions. Creating and maintaining social calendar. Work within measurable framework; demonstrate the impact and ROI of social media. The business challenges need to overcome for social channels and strategic activities helps to enable this.

    Refer the given below format:

    challenge

    The frames help to reach out to social networks, you have to check your core audience and also identify new customer types that you want to attract based on products and services. The three types of social followers are loyal, existing and potential customers. The strategy should be flexible that responds to changing market conditions. Including guidelines in social media strategy helps to execute processes tactfully, this provides for a set of rules for businesses that they have to adhere to.

  • Creating Social Media plans – These are basically nothing but summary of the activities that are implemented to support the plan. The social media audit consists of the summary of social media integration, Facebook profile, twitter profile, reviewing suitable platforms like Pinterest, YouTube, etc. Social media content calendar is created having stand-alone thematic moments having full integration with wide marketing plans.

    Channel activities are an integral part of any social strategies; you have to make sure to include all tactical elements that are related to people or processes. One can make use of Twitter handle as a customer service channel and an interaction channel. Twitter accounts are extremely helpful so that brands are easily available to consumers. It will be beneficial for developing brand awareness. Twitter helps you to do followers, include cross-references to email databases; even following key influencers helps in broadcasting your brand.

    Integrated marketing helps in aligning with other marketing channels so people understand bigger picture. Email marketing explains how to use social networks, using apps, using widgets, using social engagement data to inform email teams, etc. This can work both ways so you can define how other marketing channels can support with the help of a social network.

    Social activities must consist of time lines so the progress is tracked steadily. Timelines are very important and critical when it comes to fulfilling the objectives of the organization. Activities need to have timelines so goals are not drifted, recurring activities can be handled in organized by setting the frequency and targets for the week.

    Measuring your social performance by the way of KPIs helps to keep track on all social networks for easy measuring. You have to also check if web analytics tools are configured in a correct manner that helps to capture relevant data.

With social activities and plans, one can actually know the social performance and take necessary measurable steps that help to isolate specific elements of the activities. You can re-write social goals to meet social expectations by means of ecommerce goals and conversion data to check which one add the most value.

Social Planning Essentials – Strategies that give remarkable results

Categories
Ecommerce
Longstanding Business strategies to boost Online Business Growth

The conventional methods of business are long gone, welcome to the world of digital tech where opportunities are numerous and the growth is stupendous. People usually feel loyal about companies that cater to individual needs. Digital marketing has a great influencing factor on Ecommerce growth of the organization, this allows for customer trust and stand out from the market competition. It might take years to develop brand name and identify individual components, this helps to build up successful e-commerce business model. The success strategies help to differentiate your company and helps achieve long term business success a reality.

Integrating the Data

Good data is one of the key components to personalization; it helps build consumer trust and loyalty. Data is available in huge quantities but not all companies know how to take full advantage of the information that is available to them.

Integrating the date

Aldo Group found itself failing to utilize its data to the maximum potential that it can. It started with a 2-part Ecommerce approach to rectify their situation. The first approach was to adopt a new front-end solution that will help improve data personalization and later investing integration software to merge the power of more than 100 existing apps, databases and services. The final results were outstanding. What it did was blending its legacy systems with new customer-centric data solutions. The brand had this as one of the most successful holiday shopping season since the time Ecommerce debut started.

Companies collect much data today through the means of marketing efforts so it is their responsibility to make every interaction with the company and customer as intuitive as possible. Optimization of data is one of the vital aspects of an Ecommerce business hence website should have every element as dynamic as possible so that it ensures that customers receive tailored business experience catering to needs of individuals.

Expedia, Travel Company, recognizes its customers travel decisions hence they have created their data as smart as possible. This means using strategies to make customer engaged through different social platforms and reaching customers across all devices. This will also help recognizing patterns that provide advertisements and suggestions that are relevant to every customer. A system can be created where customers get reward points for signing up but at the same time they gather a lot of data that helps to meet their requirements. It is one of the best ideas for customer loyalty.

Going Straight to the Customers

Most brands do bigger mistake of waiting for their customers but the secret to gain customer engagement is by going to your customers. Find the ways where you can reach your customers. The best thing a brand can do is to make their products and their awareness highly reachable to customers. For brands it is easy to sell something to people if they are in your store already. Many bigger retails like Starbuck and Target now make use of Beacon Technology that helps them to collect personal data and boost the revenue from customers. Beacon technology works when a person is at close proximity to the location, the brands then sends mobile alerts to people on sales or any discounts at the store.

Beacons can be used by companies not limited to just Ecommerce; brands can use social media for encouraging their customers to make purchases online. The newer advancements have led even more companies to go beyond social platforms and make use of the sites as a selling point directly. Facebook itself marks sales of over 60% worldwide, almost 90% of Pinterest users purchase online in the past six months.

Enhance Customer’s Online Presence

Digital era has arrived and customers are frantically looking for newer experiences and if they like those experiences than they get engaged to the brand. Brands need to just make easier for users to browse through websites so they know what your brand is about, what you sell and provide. Let us look over at some of the methods through which you can achieve this:

  • Simple Website navigation – An easy layout of the website makes it easier for users to understand your website and its structure. A quality search feature and good indexing of products help to display your products and it has higher success rate.
  • Personalization – Personalization is the key elements when it comes to buying and enticing customers with new products. New items and bestseller sections on web makes easy for customers to know about your brand. You can also add sections to recently viewed items so customers know that you are aware about your preferences.
  • Optimizing Cart functionality and making the site mobile-friendly – Shopping cart is an important buying stage hence attention should be placed that customers don’t leave your shopping cart. Arrange good functional features so that they are easily able to navigate through your website. Mobile commerce is growing at a stunning place; it makes up for 30 percent of entire Ecommerce market in the US. These numbers will rise steadily over coming years. Customers would not wait for long for your webpages to load hence optimization is important.
  • Prioritizing on Security – Brands must ensure that their site is safe and secured; they can make use of strong SSL authentication and run regular PCI tests. A breach in data can lead to massive damages to organizations; hence it is best to let customers know that their data is safe and secured.

Customer’s viewpoints

Customers are the best people to know what they want; you can improve their experiences by providing them best services. You can ask for their feedback and ask them what and how they feel about your website, products and its services. Follow up emails, surveys, customer services, social media provide better opportunities to learn new ways and improve the brands digital marketing approach. Brands can outperform by using good tools and leverage the data to boost brand presence.

Longstanding Business strategies to boost Online Business Growth

Categories
Ecommerce
Get Google Analytics answers in plain English

Technological changes have made stupendous discovery of new processes and styles that have led to enormous changes in the way we ever interpreted things. Google analytics will let users’ lead easy interpretation with its marvelous discovery of giving data in plain English. Natural language processing and Machine learning technology are the next big things that are going to be integrated in its popular analytics platform. Google have stated the technology that they use hugely comes from Android and Search hence analytics users do better understanding and act accordingly on analytics data.

Google, after thorough preview with analysts it indicated that they spend half of their time in answering basic analytics questions for other people in organization. This makes it possible for analysts and business users to make use of simple English to provide analytics data. They shall be able to get information in theoretical form faster; it gives groups the power to focus on high value aspects of their roles. The ultimate goal of the Google is to get answers about key business metrics as simple as asking questions in plain English.

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The latest functionality from Google named as Analytics Intelligence is a powerful tool that helps to answer numerous questions. They shall answer questions that are related to basic metrics like referrals and traffic, trends and performance. The users can put date ranges to get the data specifically that they are looking for, that shall also include percentages.

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Google Analytics Intelligence helps give precise information about varied user groups. Retailers can ask any questions relating to their trade in any countries and advertisers can ask questions relating to paid search keywords that give better conversion rates.

Analytics Intelligence is quite intelligent and promises to offer impressive results; it has its set of limitations. The only drawback is that, it cannot tell users which questions to ask. Analytics Intelligence will undoubtedly help a lot of Analytical users not having in-depth knowledge of services to answer questions of their own. It’s a powerful and simple to use service but it often requires good knowledge and experience that most of the companies do not possess. Many people do not realize its utility and hence they are not able to make maximum use of the free service that is available. Analytics Intelligence cannot totally address the issue; they would not be able to tell users which questions they should be asking.

Companies today are already facing a lot of challenges and interpreting data becomes even more difficult with lack of expertise and tools to use. Data is available in huge numbers and tools make the task even simpler for analyzing it. But Data is of no use, if users don’t use the right metrics and ask the right questions. A user can ask Analytics Intelligence questions like, “What channels gave best conversions in the month of July”. The answer may or may not be of real value to the business. Analytics Intelligence does not know what the questions are.

However, good functionality the Analytics Intelligence tool may provide, the users should know that it shouldn’t lead to over-production of reports and charts that might not be of any use for business.

Get Google Analytics answers in plain English

Categories
Ecommerce Technology
How to create social media content strategy and plan

Social Media is whole and soul of any business marketing strategy, it may not essentially guarantee a big bang success but it gets you closer to your goals and business objectives. Smart content marketers exactly know how to develop business ideas and what works best for their business and how social networks can be effectively used in making the sales and engaging the customers. Social alignment is highly important when it comes to maintaining consistent style of communication with customers.

Get your content right first

Social Media networks are heavily used by people for connecting with family and friends and moreover it takes a leap ahead by helping business to involve and engage their customers. Customers are looking for relevant content online, so blasting too much content is not a right technique towards attaining one’s business goals. Brands need to take time to learn the facts about their customers, what they like to watch and read and the channels that are most useful to them.

Communication and Content plan are important

Customers love when there is clear communication from the brands; the content that is shared should be totally aligned with the business goals. It is not specific to any social channels but the way communication is led across different channels. There are several ways through which social content could be made available to the users. Before you start posting the content, you may ask yourself some questions like –

  1. What are you looking for in social media and how it aligns to your core business goals?
  2. What is your story and how relevant it is for social audience
  3. Customer profile and type of content that they will respond to
  4. Current state of market and how competitors perform socially
  5. Who needs to involve in content production and marketing
  6. Measuring social content success, optimizing and improving

When you answer the above questions, you get a clear idea about what your audiences are looking for in your content. The plan provides for simpler guidelines that help to focus social marketers on what they are basically looking for in content marketing.

“Without a useable comms and content plan it is much harder to gain traction with your audiences. You may achieve siloed spikes in activity through individual campaigns but it is much harder to build momentum around brand awareness and engagement. By having a content plan in place that clearly answers the Why, What, Who and How, you will be able to be more adaptable and reactive with your content.” – Sejal Parekh, Brand and Creative Strategist.

Analyzing Competitor’s Social accounts

The markets are overly flooded with lot of competition and competitors, the new comers are still buzzing for opportunities. With the highly saturated markets, it makes sense to go with the flow. By this, we mean looking for contents that your competitors are creating and how they are attracting customers. A close looks up in their social accounts, studying the things that they are sharing or following or offering, shall give you a quick content gaps.

You would know –

  • The contents that they aren’t sharing
  • The topics that are poorly covered and you have the possibility to create a niche market

Original is the key to grab markets

Creating original and creative content helps to reach people’s heart and furthermost, the genuineness. These are the key components if you want to rule the market game. People are ambitious and hence inspiring things attract them. There are several media engagement programs that can be used to drive social engagement. Businesses can announce free events, live tweeting of events, famous personality speak, write-ups about events, interviews, etc. and if you see the after effects, the results are astounding. One may see increased event attendance, increase in the number of followers, increase in social engagement and more.

Social Media Content Calendar helps!

Your social media strategy does not have to be extravagant, keep it simpler for your customers to understand what you are sharing with them. A consistent strategic plan goes a long way in building engagement and loyalty. Work out on a quarterly plan and build your content on ideas aligning to previous content that is shared with your customers.

Social media

Planning a content that levels itself to high level content stories is a good idea since there is clear link in the overall content of the strategy. Hence, every time you plan content, it needs to contain a key story. Do not give irrelevant content with the customers for the heck of it.

Optimization a must!

Businesses should not restrict to the content that is just shared on social, there are numerous things by which they can create infinite content that can be unconditionally used for audience engagements. Customer executives spend a lot of time talking to users; they collect vast data in terms of user preferences, likes, dislikes, etc. Attractive posts on social accounts attract attention that can be linked to a more detailed landing page on your website.

Hooks are a major attraction

Content format plans should be rich in quality, creating regular posts helps people to come back to the brand. The below example shows the Twitter account of @Craft posts from its Flickr updates.

Hooks are

Hashtags are good means to get your brand popular, by tagging people or brand; it is more likely to be noticed since they are monitored. It further helps to build engaging communication. Social conversation threads can be created by the use of hashtags.

Hooks are1

Expansion of Content Reach

Brands are always vouching to reach highest audiences so that maximum benefits can be attained by the way of campaigns. The social reaches can be enhanced by way of users sharing the brand content on their networks. How is that possible? Let us look down on few of the basic techniques to achieve this:

    • Creating a lack of resource – It is not actually creating a lack, but for bigger promotions, it requires bigger marketing. So publicizing your product or event launch in advance helps to drive social activity and get people talking about it. The below example shows how Brighton SEO in UK grew the event into one of the leading European SEO event and tickets went selling too sooner.

Expansion

    • Offering Unique ideas – People look for content and ideas that are very unique in nature, and if they do not get to see uncommon idea other than yours then surely they are up running for you. It increases the chances of brand awareness and attention grabbing material helps to boost the engagement.

Offering

The above is good idea placed by Oreo, the brand created several spoofing videos for Halloween that are funny and liked by all hence people share it.

  • Amplifying the reach – Brands can amplify their reach by encouraging users to engage with their brands. The followers should be those people who are actually listening to and not just listed as followers. The actual followers who are interested will listen to brand and check for any posting updates and share it eventually.

Test and Evaluate

This is one of the most crucial stages for knowing what social media content is working for your campaign. The simplest way is finding through engagement metrics like the total number of likes on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, etc.

For getting optimum benefits from running the campaign, one must do the following:

  • Campaign tracking to be put in all posted links.
  • Using social reports for monitoring social sessions and conversions, the referral reports can be used for comparing social domains to create referral traffic.
  • Using landing page reports and applying social segments to check social impact on web pages.

The Top Preferred Social Media Marketing Tools are basically a set of toolkit that helps to coordinate and automate social content marketing. The social tool helps the content to reach audiences more efficiently.

How to create social media content strategy and plan

Categories
Ecommerce
Top tips to build Quality Keyword List and getting the Right Match type

Proper use of Adwords makes a great difference in getting best ROI from PPC. Keywords are the main resources that trigger the ads, the keywords tool help to find the trending keywords that are being used by the users. So when a particular user searches for keywords, it triggers the ad. Hence building and maintaining correct keywords is important. Keywords are organized in ad groups where one can assign these ad creatives to ad groups. These creatives or texts appear when they are triggered. The keyword research tools help to find which keywords are important that will give best returns, the research helps to form a keyword lists that are searched by consumers with the use of words or phrases.

Importance of Keyword Research

Keywords are highly important when it comes to AdWords campaigns; it helps you get tremendous visibility through the searches that are made online. A robust keyword list will help you get started and with the quality keyword list, it will perfectly determine the frequency at which your ads appear. It is highly important to review your keyword lists on a regular basis even if you have recently run any Adwords campaigns.

Research Tools and Techniques you can use for Keyword Research

There are vast numbers of tools that help you figure out keywords for running your campaigns but primarily it’s a best idea to go with a Google tool:

Google Keyword planner

The Keyword planner tool from Google helps to build Search network campaigns. Through the use of keyword tool, one can get historical statistics, get ad group ideas and see a host of keywords that describes how a particular keyword might perform. AdWords tool is a free tool; it helps to choose competitive bids and budgets that can be used for campaigns. It provides reliable data based on popular keywords from Google.

On-Site Search

Google Analytics is one of the best known resources for searching data, the search queries report provides good insights that helps to start your keyword research process. Your own website search box shall reflect the known terms your browsers use to find the products and services.

Search terms reports

Best Practices one can use for Keyword Research

  • A QUALITY Keyword helps build up a healthy set of keywords, those are strong keywords that helps to have precedence over generic keywords that have high search volumes.
  • Setting a BUDGET is an important element when it comes to making a keyword research. The search volume and CPCs are important to finalize the keywords to be sure of using all the chosen keywords.
  • The COMPETITIVE review tool are useful in knowing the activities and analyzing how fair the rivals are doing and how they are bidding on keywords.

Procuring the Right Match Types

The keyword matching options helps to make your own choices, like you can choose who gets to see your ads. It helps to find the keywords that are searched by similar users on search engines. With the help of Adwords, it lets you chose five main match types:

Exact Match

Setting the keywords to exact match shows users, search queries for keywords that are matching perfectly. The user may see your ad appear, if he searches for the keyword that is a very close variant to exact match keywords.

Exact Mach

Phrase Match

The Phrase Match triggers Ads when users search query matches the keyword exactly or if it is very close variant. The search will also trigger the ad if the search query has other words included before or after the keywords.

Phrase match

Broad Match

Broad Match keywords are the keywords that show ads for wide range of queries that are broadly related to keywords themselves. The users shall be able to see broad match keywords if the search keywords are synonyms, if the searches are made in a different order, if the searches are a long tailed queries relating to subject matter, or the use of incorrect spellings.

Broad Match

Broad Match Modifier

These are the searches that are made between the broad and phrase match, it offers greater level of targeting control as compared to a broad match since it doesn’t display ads when the users search for synonyms. It will also show the ads when users search for words in different order.

Broad Match Modifier

Negative Match

This match is created to define the queries that would stop triggering the ads. These are used for offensive keywords and sometimes there may be some obvious words that are pertinent to your industry. At later stages, this list of keywords can be drawn out at campaign level but you need to be having good understanding of the keywords that convert and the ones that don’t.

Negative Match

Optimizing the right match type

It is highly important to audit and optimize the match regularly, since if keyword targeting is not controlled, it may get out of budget. The clicks from irrelevant and non-targeted search queries would not get converted and it may cost money. The exact match type offers maximum control over targeting, it is followed by phrase, broad match and modified match.

Optimizing

Broad matches are low value hence should be avoided as they appear for irrelevant queries. Ideally, your account has the keywords that are set to exact matches with different variations. It allows for maximum level of control on targeting and budgets. But that is all possible in an ideal situation, but in reality we have to make use of phrase matches and modified broad matches that help us to reach customers without spending too much time optimizing on campaigns.

Must have’s and Not for Brand Keywords

Brand searches are highly important since they ensure Brand Protection. Earlier, there was restriction by Google to bid on competitor’s brand names but those restrictions are no more. Businesses can now bid on competitor’s branded terms but one cannot include them in the ad text if they have trademark. Brands should know that no search query is safe so even if customers are searching for your business they may end up on your rival company’s ads. So it is worthy to bid on your brand name as a keyword, depending on the business names or brand name a company carries. The bigger brands invest on bidding since they want to see their name on top position in Google search, for some it could be sheer waste of money resources.

The markets are really competitive hence big retailers are aggressively vouching to make their position in the marketplace. The retailers who are bidding must ensure that they set their bids high enough ensuring that the customers straight away visit their sites. The main objective must be to stand on #1 position to get organic clicks.

Steps to ensure right matches

  • Consider Match types – Brand names play an integral part for keyword searches. If the brand name is unique, it may be recognized by people since they know the brand and the products and services it caters to. If the brand name is too common, the ads may appear along with other irrelevant searches that go common with your brand name.
  • Brand Targets – Brand keywords are always a profitable venture since people who are searching your brand names have already made up their mind to purchase the product. You can set targets based on brand names or non-brand keywords.
  • Brand Reputation – The brand reputation is the most important elements while considering PPC for brand keywords. So, while thinking of keywords to bid on, one must consider and think of the queries that they do not want to be associated with the brand. Unwanted keywords do not get any brand traffic or conversions.

Maintaining and building effective keyword list is an on-going process for which brands have to stay awake. If you want your brand to run successfully then setting the right expectations and research is needed to form strong pillar.

Top tips to build Quality Keyword List and getting the Right Match type

Categories
Ecommerce
Brand Personality influences Consumer Purchase Decisions

Brand Personality plays a vital role in influencing customer’s decision to purchase the products online. Social media has entered every vein where marketing strategies move and they are increasingly visible. With the competition ever so expanding, it is highly important to create a positive brand personality online; consumers are spending 30% of their time on social media. Firstly, brands need to ask the questions where to raise the brand awareness and how to resolve customer service issues. Given below are few of the reasons why to use social media marketing:

  1. To raise the brand awareness and company’s reputation
  2. Resolving customer service issues
  3. Improving organic search ranking and driving traffic to the site
  4. Engaging with customers and feedback

Consumers are looking for honesty in dealings and brands are upfront trying to give out the best especially with the growing competition. The study by Sprout Social (Q2 2017) says that customers prefer an authentic and honest brand personality that is to 86% on political or sneaky comments.

72% of the surveyed people stated that they are more likely to make a purchase from the brand if they like social media content. Consumers are openly looking forward for the brands that are friendly and give them some kind of engagement. It helps built customer morale and helps increase the brand reputation and influence the purchase decisions. Brands need to be friendly and approachable to have more followers. They should not try stopping much resistance and political correctness. It is only going to put off from people buying the product online.

Branding Behavior

Branding behavior are important elements when it comes to social playing cards. Consumers are looking for honesty and friendliness of the brands on social media. Brands can show customers video and engaging clip that will help them to look forward to brands products. Almost 80% of the surveyed people stated that they prefer brands that respond to their queries and engage them in jovial conversations rather than having competitive tonality. Brands are strongly advised to stay off from political commentary, they are domicile in nature and your product would be lying at one side of the room. Hence, best idea to make your product stand out and you making yourself as a brand ambassador by being unique.

How the research helps?

Customers are very smart people; they can easily trace the fine line between what is cool and what sounds annoying to them. Out of the survey, 51% of Internet users said that would instantly unfollow a brand, if the brand sounds irritating to them and only a 26% will ignore it.

Brands have to figure out what image they should cultivate in front of the customers so that the brand should not unfollow them. Social Media Marketing is an important marketing plan to your customers as much as it is to you as a brand.

Brand Personality influences Consumer Purchase Decisions

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Ecommerce
Top Skills required for B2B Tech Marketers

People management is one of the most important skills required by B2B marketers. The ability to have a good communication is another prominent and an important skill in the field states recent research from Spiceworks. The research data was done with a survey of 359 B2B technology industry marketers living in North America and Europe. The researchers categorized respondents in to three generations: Millennials that are born between 1981 and 1997, Generation X that are born from 1965 to 1980 and Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964. Around 82% of respondents state that soft skills are extremely important for B2B tech marketers. Other skills like writing ranks the second standing at 80%, content marketing skills stands at 78%, digital media skills stand at 77%, data analysis skills stand at 77% and email marketing skills stand at 65%.

Most Important

B2B Technology marketers state that they have advanced writing and soft skills. Over 46% of B2B technology marketers state that their content marketing skills are advanced and 38% say their digital media skills are advanced. The marketers feel that it is very important to stay on the top of the writing game. This is the main reason why Marketing Writing Bootcamp consists of 13 classes that are tailor-made for the one who tasks with.

Most Advanced

The research states that millennials are less confident as compared to older generations when it comes to their writing and softskills. The millennials are more confident when it comes to social media skills. Most respondents are looking to change the jobs in the next one year. The research study states that the main hope for the job switch is with the hope to advance their marketing skills.

Top Reasons

The research was based on the report from data that surveyed 359 B2B technology industry marketers who live in North America and Europe.

Top Skills required for B2B Tech Marketers

Categories
Ecommerce
Why you need a Social Media Strategy

Social Media planning

For organizations it has become highly important to follow a specific strategy that will help them achieve their company goals. Strategies are nothing but a set of defined rules and methods that organizations will follow at a given point of time to achieve strategic goals. Social media strategy regulates the use of methods supporting platforms and tools. Social strategies play an important role in engaging your audience to your business. Some businesses do not make use of planning but important is to know that strategies will help them to stand out even if they are not actively involved, because their competitors are. Let us discuss few of the key points to consider Why Social Media Strategy is a useful for your Business

Social Media is vast and growing

Make you strategy

Social Media is stealthily growing quicker than we think. The key factors driving the social web according to Global Web Index study are the use of Mobiles and Older User Adoption. The mobile internet usage increased to 818.4m that is by almost 60.3% between 2012 and 2014. The people in the age group of 55-64 years age group are adopting Twitter at fastest demographic rate of 79% since 2012. As compared to this, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook and Google+ stands at 45-54 years of age. Overall globally there has been an improved mobile connectivity; people are using mobiles “on-the-go”. People are using social networks like never before, they are getting online, sharing the watching the videos. The Ruder Finn social media usage research in the US shows why people go online and why social outings are the driving elements.

Rf-Intent

A targeted social media strategy helps to focus on using relevant platforms to connect with new and existing customers.

Social Media influences Buying Decisions

The Social media trends keeps changing, right now the focus is on commerce and personalization. Earlier it was audience building and engagement. The platforms increasingly lured marketers with improved APIs and smart targeting. It included the ability for uploading email lists for running personal remarketing campaigns. With the use of Facebook API marketers’ helps to manage audience data for custom audience targeting, creating the campaigns and ads, building custom dashboards and run analytics. The Crowdtap research shows 64% of 3,000 people surveyed make use of social for shopping purposes, it is driven by retailers to target consumers with personal offers and deals on social networks.

Almost 46% of social media users are using social platforms while they are thinking of making a purchase. 40% of users are deciding of buying while already making use of social media platforms, this also includes reviews and recommendations. The recommendations from peers are influencing factors when it comes to holiday purchases. Each social network plays a vital role in the purchase cycle. Some social networks works better with visual products where people find inspiration. Facebook is better for businesses for sharing content and finding promotions.

Strategy Absence gives Competitors the benefit

Every organization today is following some kind of strategies that aligns with their business goals. Marketers prepare a strategy that has a framework through which they can plan, prioritize, execute, measure and optimize. A proper framework will give better results because the activity has been designed and has a direction.

The absence of proper social strategy will not give a clear idea if the campaigns are successful or not. Simply posting social content would not always show results, the efforts that are being put up should have some direction and some objective in mind.
A non-structured approach will lead to gap in communication and measurement. The marketing team would not know what to post, when to post, how, to whom and why to post. The savvy competitors’ works smarter by engaging customers having clear objectives, goals and targets to perform better and give better measuring tools.

Active Customers on Social Media

The new technologies have emerged as a manifestation of all social tools that work with integrations to give finest benefits to the users of the technology. People can access, use and share the information based on their choices. Many people simply make use of Social platforms like Facebook to read content rather actually reading any blogs. It doesn’t amount to a total number of audience, although a subset, some customers may want an information from a social network. Twitter is highly known amongst brand for providing customer service, it acts as a good backbone for brands looking to solve customer enquiries and act as a problem resolution channel.

Strategy is required by brands to connect with its customers through strategic thinking. The social strategy needs proper aligning with other communication channels to define its role and understand.

Social Networks have Key Influencers

Influencers can turn tables in a matter of just few minutes, hours or days, so never underestimate the power of peers. It is a known fact that over years, retailers have seen increase in conversion rates by the power of peer influence. The feedbacks from other customers are seen as worth. Endorsements from experts help to increase brand credibility. The high-end tech markets have led to more people relying on opinions from experts in the field or celebrity or a famous person’s endorsements.

It is highly important for brands to be part of influencer’s world, if you don’t; you have the bigger risk of losing out on market share that has more aware competitors that are creative and innovative with their campaigns.

Social networks can Make or Break a Brand

Social networks help brands to deliver an experience to users, they are good valuable resource to uphold a particular reputation hence reputations are enhanced or destroyed on social networks. Social platforms give voice to the users to have their voice heard on the networks. They are transparent and portable and are readily available to users. The below example shows Aldi social team; launched a genuine marketing campaign which attracted a lot of negative tweets and trolls.

Social networks

Many companies have faced social media backlash and they literally struggle to cope with negative comments and feedbacks. Some companies having social media strategy with crisis response have failed at giving handling such backlash and bring back the same reputation to the brands. The damage is irreparable so it is best advised to have a social media strategy that helps to take effective steps towards maintaining online and offline reputation.

Why you need a Social Media Strategy

Categories
Ecommerce
3 most important things to know about Email Marketing and AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most important topics when it comes to technological developments. AI may seem like just another tech waiting to get implemented although there are some hidden aspects to it. Many organizations have already implemented AI into their working systems and getting good results from it. The buzz surrounding the AIs gives you a glimpse of how huge technological changes are going to impact businesses globally. Let us discuss some internal aspects to the AI tech that people so profoundly know it but do not speak openly:

    1. Marketers are not really ready for AI Step ahead yet!

Artificial Intelligence thoroughly relies on customer data across all devices and channels to understand the user behavior. The user data has the ability to determine what millions of potential customers want even before them knowing it themselves. These insights are merely helpful to get integrated data. A lot of data is available with marketers today but most of these data are unorganized and lags segmentations. The very first step to move towards getting ready for AI is to organize and integrate the data. For that, you require a clean current data that encompasses the information that is gathered at customer touchpoints. Centralizing customer data is another big step to organize big data; the data can be segmented through different departments, vendors and systems. The organized processes will help to set you apart from your competitors and helps you take advantage of AI’s potential.

Marketers need a better foundation that helps to evaluate what AI applications are used for and when is the best time to use them.

    1. AI powered Email Marketing won’t show big leaps

AI has created a lot of buzz amongst marketers and it feels that AI has literally given the solution for every problem. Email Marketing is the best option preferred across different channels and age groups by 2:1 ratio. According to DMA’s 2016 Consumer Email Tracker, 80% of consumers state that less than half of the emails they receive are relevant or interesting.

For starting Personalization in Email Marketing following are the steps –

      • Check how often the customers want to be emailed and if they would like be contacted for any specific products or events
      • Creating customer segments that helps to deliver personal touch
      • Sending Welcome Emails, Thank You and Birthday Emails
      • Emailing your customers when they abandon their shopping carts
      • Reminding them about events, offers and sales

The above things are easy to set up and with regular process; it helps to improve the performance. Make use of automated email tools, the AI idea cannot be achieved with one big step but by taking small baby steps.

    1. Businesses already have AI type Email Marketing Capability

Talking of AI, it’s a simple fact that they are already being used today in Email Marketing. Emails uses send time optimization that uses analytics to check on engagement history that predicts the best time to send emails to individuals. Optimizing your send time becomes pretty simpler with automated campaigns and it starts as soon as you hit the “send” button. The recipients receive emails at specific time of the day that works best for the brands.

Artificial Intelligence use email tools that make use of language algorithms to create strong subject lines, calls to action and body copy. The Analytics information evaluates hundreds of sentiments, emotions and phrases, AI predict the language that will best increase engagement and reflect the brand voice.

AI will be beneficial for fast track sales by giving customized messages to people who are aware and ready to buy. The businesses will be able to aggregate insights across multiple data sources that helps identify potential customers based on purchases they have made from other companies. The best means for using AIs are to prepare your data, perfect the basics and make use of the best tools available. Moreover, you will find that AI provides same strategies that marketers have always used.

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3 most important things to know about Email Marketing and AI

Categories
Ecommerce
Top things to know about Google AMP

Google’s AMP have revolutionized the way e-pages were ever loaded, it uses simple algorithm like that of HTML coding but an AMP HTML version. The Javascript in the coding, don’t let outside elements disturb the loading of original content of the web page. It is designed to give users top loading speed like that of instant bulb lighting. There are many benefits to AMP pages that simply follow its own set of rules and no amount of outside coding disturbs its load time.

AMPs are the next big boom after the SEO on-set. Google Accelerated Mobile pages are set to break down all hurdles for loading web pages. AMPs are targeted to avoid the loss of customers when they leave the site after long minutes of waiting for the pages to load. Mobilegeddon update from Google created much buzz declaring that the search engines will count mobile friendly pages in its searches. With the latest, Google’s AMP – it has a new standard for HTML programmers to in-built AMP HTML pages for higher web performances. So, let’s start with the basics first, what is AMP, how does one get started with it and how is it astoundingly beneficial for ecommerce brands and marketers to market their pages.

Google AMP: Explained

Google AMP is an Open Source Project designed to help web publishers create mobile-optimized pages. The pages can be loaded instantly on all the devices, Google states that web pages need to run rich content like animations, video and graphics that work with smart ads that load in an instant. Google’s blog post stated, “We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant — no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.”

Google’s goal is to provide best possible mobile experience. Michael Bertini, search marketing expert at iQuanti says, “Google wants to get information to the end user as fast as possible”, “Google doesn’t want the user to have to wait to read or see something.” According to SearchEngineLand.com, Google’s AMP Product Manager Rudy Galfi said that median load time for AMP coded content is 0.7 seconds. The median load time for non-AMP pages stands at 22 seconds, he noted, it takes this time or makes you leave the site. AMP was officially integrated by Google on February 23, 2016 for mobile search results.

Google AMP: How it works

The latest AMP HTML framework comes as a big support system to already existing web technologies; it helps owners to crease light-weight webpages, according to Google. “AMP-HTML is simply HTML5 with a set of specifications (requirements and restrictions),” Google’s Galfi told SearchEngineLand.com. “The optimization is powered by JavaScript, styling can be customized via CSS3, and pages are cached.”

Caching is core to AMP, Galfi said. From SearchEngineLand.com:

“[Galfi] explained that Google AMP cache functions in a similar manner as a content delivery network (CDN), that it is free for anyone to use and that it works on ‘stale-while-revalidate’ model. This model helps make sure the content is always up to date in the cache. The process by which it works is quite simple: When a request is made, the client receives the cached version while the document is requested again from its original server to be updated in the cache.”

AMPs are “completely separate from a typical mobile site,” says Jim Robinson, founder and CEO of ClickSeed, a digital marketing and SEO agency. “Assuming your site has a desktop version, a mobile version and an AMP version, the desktop version will be the canonical (preferred version), and the mobile and AMP versions will each be annotated separately as alternates.” Site publishers can serve their own ads through AMP, “although there are restrictions on sizes and placements,” Robinson says. “Most major publishers serve ads through DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) or OpenX, both of which are compatible with AMP.”

Google AMP: Types of Sites that can use AMP

Ordinarily, AMP is targeted on news stories from online publishers, the content that Google search users see as AMP pages in to mobile search results. AMP is also beneficial for Ecommerce organizations that use AMP results carousel and other components are well-suited too. Take for instance; eBay announced that its AMP mobile shopping experience was live. Overall, 8 million AMP based “browse nodes” are in production. Robinson added that the ability to develop AMP based product pages are most likely to create bigger commercial incentive for websites adopting to the standards.
Trevor Paulsen, product manager with Adobe Analytics states that “AMP is an incredibly important part of a balanced marketing strategy for publishers today, given the project’s close ties with search engine results and advertising impression rates,” he said further that “Adoption has been strong, given the battle for mobile ad dollars and the fact that Google prioritizes AMPs in search results. That being said, Google is interested in keeping people within their ad network, so it will be interesting to see whether ads are more successful on the mobile web or in apps.”

“As with any evolutionary change in the search engines, people need to pay attention to AMP and adjust,” adds Thomas Petty, president and digital marketing trainer with Bay Area Search Engine Academy. “Over time, it will become an influencing factor. Just as Google has been recommending mobile-responsive websites, this is another step in that direction.”

Google AMP: Why was AMP CREATED?

Usually, web surfers need rapid search results, according to Eric Enge, CEO of Digital Marketing Agency, Stone Temple Consulting. It means Google wants to give its users speed to because there is huge competition in today’s world, if they are able to give superior speed to their users for the content being searched, they will win the market share, Enge added. Google also wants its users to stay tuned on mobile pages, Google has over 5 out of the 9 most installed mobile apps even then its market share is less certain there.

Google AMP: Types of Sites that can use AMP

As Richard Gingras, Senior director of news and social products at Google rightly states that AMP won’t directly show you a massive search ranking while talking to AdAge.com. There should be enough of Search engine ranking signals that need to meet satisfying criteria. He further stated that “Speed” matters the most when it comes to search engine ranking. According to Gingras, “If we had two articles that from a signaling perspective scored the same in all other characteristics but for speed, then yes, we will give an emphasis to the one with speed because that is what users find compelling.”

AMP has the power to influence where Google places its search results, Petty says. AMP pages get more clicks and less bounces because they are quicker to load. If Google feels that the page is of high value to users, then it gets higher placement in search results. Google keeps changing its rules to give the best results in terms of searches made. If your website takes too much time to load pages, it may lose out on lots of business. Mobiles have come to be an important aspect in everyone’s lives; most people are using Google to find anything and everything on earth. AMP acts an essential tool that would ensure better rankings and find ability on the web, says Oleg Moskalensky, President of Productive Computer systems, the company that develops IT solutions for smaller businesses. He says, Google shall punish slow loading web content in their rankings, “So even if you do everything you can to improve SEO, without AMP, you’d be potentially spinning your wheels.”

Google AMP: Potential Pitfalls

AMP is a new technology placed by Google and hence it is going to take some time before it becomes too common and people start using it. “It’s harder to implement at first, but tools, plug-ins and add-ons evolve to make it almost automatic,” he says. “Think of where SEO was a few years ago. Manually hand-coding Meta tags and other elements was the norm. Now SEO plug-ins prompt users with exactly what they should do to improve ranking, without having to know SEO.” And an AMP WordPress plug-in “does a pretty good job, and it will evolve over time” to make it simpler for everyone, Petty says.

AMP does not really have any pitfalls but understanding its limitations of the AMP is the right word. Enge states that AMPs work faster because it has restrictions on the amount of the code that you can apply on your pages. Take for example, an AMP supplied JavaScript library is very limited to what it can do. He further states that one cannot implement forms till the time they use iframes.

One hazard with AMP is when users share links to AMP content through a Google search, the links point to Google.com URL rather than taking it content developers site – this was pointed out by Wired.com. It could significantly give negative impact content developers site traffic, states Mike

Kisseberth, Chief Revenue Officer of Digital Content and services firm at Purch stated.

Paulsen says, AMP “creates a potential challenge on the analytics side, as it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure where a publisher’s content will be loaded from, as well as complications with visitor identification due to tight cookie restrictions”.

Google AMP: Role of IT in AMP

AMP Initiatives involves HTML code and Programming where IT department should be involved according to Moskalensky. “IT needs to work with others for content creation and planning, but the actual implementation and maintenance would need to be done by IT either within the company or by a freelance company hired to do the job.” According to Robinson, IT “will likely play a big role in adopting the AMP standard because there are some behind-the-scenes prerequisites they’ll need to help with,” he further says “For example, depending on the chosen configuration, a server admin may need to set up additional sub-domains or install secure certificates. There will likely be some coordination with any CDN vendor. Most of the work can be handled by developers from there, but there’s definitely a bit of technical work involved.”

Google AMP: Is this the Mobile future?

AMPs are yet to grip the whole mobile market. Robinson says, “AMP potentially has big implications for the mobile web, but it all depends on whether it becomes widely adopted as a standard”. He further stated that, “Not everything Google pushes for gains traction. Google pushed for adoption of Authorship markup, for example, which required publishers to implement code changes and encourage their writers to set up and connect Google+ accounts. But Authorship markup is now irrelevant and some publishers feel like they were sent on a wild goose chase.” He said AMP “may stand a better chance at becoming a widely adopted standard since it’s less proprietary than alternatives, like Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News. As a result, publishers may be more willing to develop AMPs. That combined with the resources Google has put into promoting AMP as a new mobile standard mean it should be given a serious look.”

Top things to know about Google AMP

Categories
Ecommerce Technology
Social Media Planning and Aligning with other Channels

Social Media Marketing plays an essential role in the implementation for varied marketing strategies. Brands today are coming forward to accepting newer planning and implement strategies alongside aligning with other channels. Marketing Calendar forms as a rock solid pillar for the success of the strategies in business.

Role of a Marketing Calendar

The organizations today are resorting to following a specific plan to outline their business processes. Hence, a Marketing Calendar comes handy to follow the guidelines set and expectations to reform with brand objectives. A Marketing calendar is a plan that outlines the key campaigns for the year; they follow a monthly cycle rule. The content calendar helps in defining big campaigns, promotions, key messages, CTAs and different channels that it shall deliver in. Social Media helps to align with the calendar and it is executed across different channels simultaneously. The core message is to promote with a slight different execution in every channel. The marketing calendar is flexible that allows to change the marketing plan and the team.

Role of a Marketing Calendar

Custom Marketing Messaging for Social Media

The Marketing calendar offers a campaign level plan. Given below are some of the examples:

Product Campaigns:

  1. The new product launches offer product imagery that helps to create new boards on Pinterest, Instagram Photos, etc.
  2. Make use of Visual posts on Twitter then only text.
  3. Using Animation to bring products to life Example: gif images, short videos.

Events:

  1. Engaging photos with the use of photography for visual networks like Instagram.
  2. Adding new events to Facebook and geo-tag locations.
  3. Announcing the events on Twitter having the link to the “About” landing page
  4. Using the events or campaign hashtags in different posts.

Brief the social team for handling the campaign activities

The campaigns are created with the sole purpose of Marketing. An offline ad is shared by the user on social networks that generates interactions with other users. The Social teams should be aware of what is happening, when, where and why. It has to plan to take advantage of the campaign in the social space and ensure the monitoring of social channels and brand mentions.

Social Organic Marketing

Social Marketing is done to get best results on Search Engine Ranking Algorithms. The brand should look out for ways where they can merge the key content with landing page URLs; it can be shared socially to maximum the reach. It includes activities like promoting new landing pages through social networks or posting the links to latest content like videos and blogs.

Social Organic Marketing

The social teams can make use of social research tools like Buzzsumo that helps to find the content and the keyword that is most popular. The brands can use this insight to work out the style of content that would be useful to the social audiences. The Social and SEO teams can work together to analyze the content trends and share information to inform the plans.

Understand the difference between the Paid Social and Paid Search

Paid Social and Paid Search requires a lot of honest efforts in researching to get targets to your audience effectively. It requires targeted ad copy and a structure to run the campaigns so right ads reaches to the right people. Paid Social is a form of push marketing that requires segment and structure for the activity so that best optimization can be made on ROI by using the data that is generated. The paid social planning is effective in blending the right resource. Paid Social is an intensive tool that helps to manage the high standards as compared to the Paid Search.

Social Media ad tools offers various targeting and goal options hence it’s important to get the right grip with the platforms that you can start before planning.

Paid Social and Paid Search informing each other

These two are different techniques but they should be well integrated. The money spent on optimizing paid search creative and landing pages can be used for informed paid search campaigns. The keyword data should be full of useful insights. You can apply your keyword learning to the social scene and use those keywords for driving social keyword research. You can also make use of the CRM data that helps with social targeting by creating look alike used on existing customer profiles.

It is highly important for both teams to coordinate well with each other, it’s important to share the data, plans and insights.

Use the Social Networks for Event Marketing

Given below are some of the methods to maximize social reach during and after the event. It has helped good number of organizations create social media marketing plans and events. The simple activity can help drive good increase in social engagement

  1. Remind people of #hashtags during the event and help them to post live by making use of those hashtags.
  2. Include the live tweeter that shares your key content like quotes and pictures from your event.
  3. The thread can be made for every event and it can be shared even when the event is fresh in the minds of people.
  4. Publish a blog write-up and videos sharing key insights and share it on social channels after some days of the event. For videos, tweet each speaker the link that will encourage them to share.
  5. Contact Social influencers, share your event content with them and ask them to share. Parallel, you can also create event photos for creating a Facebook album.

Social Media helps to extend life of an event, the content created can be used to share and maximize the benefits by reaching more audiences.

Adding Social Data to CRM Contacts

Tools like Full Contact is a useful tool that helps to upload customer email addresses and add social data when needed. It can also directly imbibe Twitter handles. The audience can be fragmented to differentiate the high-value customers and also deliver personalized communication. You can do it through email and it is highly important to have alignment of CRM and Social Data, it helps to enable more personal style of communication. Remarketing tools like Facebook are used for Paid Social, it helps to enrich CRM database with customers’ social handles.

Social Media Planning and Aligning with other Channels

Categories
Ecommerce
Top preferred Social Media marketing Tools

Marketing is of prime importance when it comes to selling your products online and social media tools come handy to make your work easier. Conventionally, there has been lot of ifs and buts for marketing field but at the end of the day what counts are the efforts that you put in marketing activity of the brand. Manual settings for marketing are long gone; today brands are much more keener and being much friendlier by knowing their customers and making them happily satisfied with the products or services.

The social media management tools are crafted in a manner to automate the marketing processes to reach maximum audiences. Social Media management means choosing the right strategy and the right approach in reaching the brand goals. Marketing requires a lot of time and efforts so it is not always easy for marketers to shoot emails or schedule the meetings or put up social posts. This work gets done through platform management tools that make your task easier. The tools help you with options to publish as and when required. Marketers can save a lot of time and efforts with the marketing tools. Given below are some of the tools that help making your processes easier:

Social Media Management tools

FLOW

Lifecycle

Flow is a market tool by Driftrock useful for audience targeting. The key functions of these tools are Lifecycle social advertising. It can easily be integrated with Facebook, LinkedIn, Dotmailer, Intercom, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Webhooks, Salesforce Pardot, and Custom CRMs. Flow helps to gather customer data that helps to retarget the existing customers. The tool helps to find new customers having same elements as the current customer base.

SOCIAL BAKERS

Social Bakers

Social Bakers is a social media analytical platform that helps integrating just any social media app, the key function of this tool is scheduling the social posts. The app helps to analyze the performance across different platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. they offer customizable dashboards and flexibility user rights management that allows for internal and agencies to collaborate.

AGORAPULSE

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is used for scheduling social posts; it is integrated with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Google Plus. It’s a social media management suite of tools that helps to manage the social media messages. The inbox feature in the tools helps to see the items remaining and who is working on each of these items. It also helps in providing comprehensive reports.

Through the use of Agorapulse, you can tie all your social accounts into one, it helps to schedule, publish the posts and tracking all your social activity.

SPROUTSOCIAL

Sproutsocial

The key function of Sproutsocial helps for scheduling social posts and also helps in audience retargeting. It can be integrated with popular social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Sproutsocial is a social media management platform that includes a smart inbox, advanced scheduling, social CRM, analytics and reports and team collaboration tools. It is one of the best options for smaller businesses. The best feature of this tool is the “listen” option; it listens to popular terms and Hashtags on different social networks to help you stay on the top of trends.

POSTPLANNER

Postplanner

The main function of Postplanner is to schedule curated content plus Industry news. It can be easily integrated with Twitter, Facebook Blog (RSS Feed) and Pinterest. The tool makes use of custom algorithms that helps to review past performance on the feeds that are available through different social integrations. The tool also helps for re-sharing the popular content on social platforms.

BUFFER

Buffer

The main function of Buffer is to schedule the social posts, it can be integrated with common platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus and Blogs for RSS feeds.

Buffer is usually used to drive traffic and to increase the fan engagement and also save the time monitoring social media. The tool helps to reach out to your audiences at the right time, you can schedule your content and increase the reach of your audience. The tools are made to sync with a number of social platforms.

HOOTESUITE

Hootsuite is useful for scheduling social posts, and is one of the powerful tools that integrate with 35 popular social networks. It helps to gather the data into a single dashboard where the tools can be found to help manage several social profiles and schedule the most effective social content. The other impressive feature it offers is the robust message approval and permissions. It gives the capability to help protect the brand and reputation while increasing other profile protections. This tool helps to guard against hackers and other threats.

COSCHEDULE

Coschedule

CoSchedule helps in managing the content and scheduling your social posts. It works integrated with different tools like WordPress, Google analytics, Bitly, Google Drive, Evernote Google Calender, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook (profiles, pages and groups), Instagram and Google+ pages.

CoSchedule is used for managing WordPress posts and helps promote the online content. It gives the ability to drag and drop social messages on different days and it also allows the platform to pick the right times.

Influencer Research Tools

Influencer marketing is making wonders to brands because it allows publicizing your business with huge exposure. The best to identify influencers in your industry is to take that opportunity and reach out to create relationships. The platforms make it easier.

TAPINFLUENCE

Tapinfluence

TapInfluence is used for managing the content and expanding the influencer outreach. It can easily be integrated with Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. TapInfluence is an opt-in marketplace of content creators and influencers having 8 years of real life program data. It helps to discover perfect influencer for your business. It helps to build a marketing program for delivering fresh content. The tool helps to offer greater analytics having multi-channel tracking on Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

TRAACKER

Traacker

Traacker is a platform for Influencer Relationship Management (IRM); it is a system for managing, scaling and expanding the global influencer marketing. It features team collaboration features and conversation tracking. It is an all-in-one tool that helps to expand the business network; it helps you land the best influencer for your brand. It is a great place to get information on Influencer marketing; the system has a lot of solid content.

BUZZSUMO

Buzzsumo

The main function of this tool is Content Ideation, its an influencer outreach. It consists of integrations like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pocket, Buffer and different standard APIs. The tool helps to identify trending news and content, getting content insights and website analyses, it also helps to identify influencers. Big brands using the tool are Expedia, Yahoo, Capital One, IBM, Ogilvy and Vimeo.

Social Sweepstakes/Contest Tools

WISHPOND

Wishpond

Wishpond is a Social media content management tool; it includes 10 Facebook contest apps that make it easy to create engaging competitions. The competitions like sweepstakes, Instagram Hashtag contests, essay contest, photo contents can all be covered under Wishpond. Wishpond is a tool that helps to integrate easily with other many CRM solutions, webinar apps, email marketing apps, survey apps, team chat apps and more.

SHORTSTACK

Shortstack

Shortstack is a Social media contest management tool; it integrates platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It helps to collect the leads, boosts contest engagement and helps to drive the sales from the landing pages, forms and contests. Shortstack integrates into a number of platforms like YouTube, AWeber, MailChimp, Constant Contact and Google Maps.

WOOBOX

Woobox

Woobox is a social media contest management tools that is integrated with Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It’s a very powerful tool; you can custom design the coupons, photos, instant wins, videos, hashtag contests and more. If you know which campaign works best for your audience than you can manage this tool very easily.

Social Image Apps and Tools

CANVA

Canva

Canva is a standalone tool with social friendly image creation; it’s a free tool that can be used on a daily basis. It is one of the best tools for creating social friendly images in friendly sizes. There are lots of upsells that are available in the app, you can upload your image.

PROMO

Promo is a light social friendly video creation tools, it’s a standalone tool and is one of the best places to get started. By making use of this tool, you can promote your sales by making a product teaser; you get a high quality video content that is searchable within the platform. You can edit the copy and also add the music.

LANDSCAPE BY SPROUT SOCIAL

Landscape

Sprout Social is a light automatic image resizing tool that is used for social; it’s a standalone tool and is available for free. The tool has a plenty of options on offer that will make your tasks simpler and easier. The reports you get from the tool should be properly reviewed and accordingly you can take actions.

Top preferred Social Media marketing Tools

Categories
Ecommerce
Check what channels consumers’ research before buying online

Consumers today are much adapted to using latest tools available online to find the best product they may be looking for. Millennial’s between the age of 18 and 34 year olds are amongst the bigger range of crowd purchasing the products online, the next is Gen X and Baby boomers.

Consumers are tech savvy today exploring every dimension before making any purchases. Before buying any products, you have a good deal of information that will help you make buying decisions.

The research by Salesforce surveyed over 4,000 consumers across different countries – UK, USA and Canada. The results found that respondent spent their times online before making any purchases online. They used different channels before making a purchase decision.

The findings showed there is mega difference amongst the behavior of millennial’s, Gen-X and Baby Bloomers. Millennials were not in favor of a particular channel after the use of websites. Gen-X had similar opinion as millennials except that they relied less in the use of phones. The studies show that the age group up to 54 years has become highly adaptable to the use of latest technology. Baby Boomers switched less channels while doing their research, they usually used emails and websites before making a purchase.

The research showed how it is important for a fully integrated multichannel marketing strategy for getting success.

Source: Salesforce Connected Shoppers Report

Data Sample: Individual data breakouts across three global markets (Canada, U.K. and U.S.) based on responses from 4,000 adults.

Recommended Resource: Integrated Marketing 2020

Check what channels consumers’ research before buying online

Categories
Technology
Track your Customer Purchases to drive more sales

Customer focus is one of the most important priorities today especially with so much of competence and brands overpowering each other to vouch for customer attention. Most retailers today are highly bent towards gaining new customers but what they forget in the hindsight is to take care of their already existing customers and in the bargain they even loose out on new as well as old customers. It is highly important for retailers to go through the past history of their customers in order to understand them better. The data generated from the past sales can help form a strategy that will help to increase the revenue. There are several methods through which one can analyze customer data, let us understand them:

Customer Order history

These are the list of orders, a customer has ordered in the past, it includes items they have purchased and constantly purchased. The history will also show, the amount they have spent on each of their purchases. It also consists of information when they bought the items. Suppose, some items were bought frequently over some festivals or holidays so it gives the data.
The point of sale system, is a robust POS system that allows browsing different data points, it includes take from customer to individual products.

Take Insights from previous purchases

Order histories are meant for the record for customers as well as brands. The brands can easily make use of the data available; let us look at some trends:

  1. Dates – the data denotes the specific time of the month, the particular item was purchased. This data will help brands to formulate selling strategy offering same goods to customers online or through email with discount options or other benefits.
  2. Products – the brands get an idea of how these products are performing with consistent purchase happening. They get information, if customers constantly buy some items together always.
  3. Customers – With this data, brands know if customers are buying certain items at one particular time. They come to know repeated buyers and hence they will formulate the strategies accordingly to formulate the customer into buying process.
  4. Upselling – If the customers are well known to your brands and are accustomed to, then they will frequently buy items from you. Brands need to upsell hence make opportunities for buyers to buy from them. For this, brands can filter the product history, identifying the customers who bought the dress, giving a follow up marketing email feature will help to entice them into buying.
  5. Personal Messages – since the brands know, what the customer bought and what their order history looks like, they can now tailor personal messages to brands.
  6. Promotions – the customer demographic data is useful for targeting the audiences on paid social advertisements and the other promotions.

Improving the Customer Experience

Order history customer data, helps the brands to improve the customer experiences. If the customer is making continuous purchases and suddenly stops, it is time for brands to have a look over it and give customer the precious momentum to get back to the brand. Enhancing their experience with the brand can do this, the motto here is to keep your customers satisfied and give them good value for money. Given below are some of the things the brands can follow:

  1. Sending personal email messages, this includes including a coupon code.
  2. Offering free samples or small gift as an appreciation for purchases made.
  3. Giving customers exclusive discounts and special deals, for this they will feel valued and may buy something extra.

Order Histories make better decisions

Customers are always focused into buying but they are always looking for the best customer experience from brands. Order histories are one such tools that helps the brands to form a blue print about the customers and make high decisions about making sales. This includes several things like keeping the inventory accurate; maintain the stores shelves well, in short giving the customers every chance to be happy. Brands should completely discontinue keeping the products that has no sales, sometimes look over at them may be a big turn off because of the bad experience a customer might have had.

Make the most of Customer Data

Customer data is a precious gem that the brands posses hence make good use of them. The order histories are good starting points and help track customers, which, what, why and how they are doing a particular purchase.

Track your Customer Purchases to drive more sales

Categories
Ecommerce
Get to know how Photos can harm your Ecommerce Conversions

Traditionally, brands hardly paid attention to giving customers visual credit to make their purchases. But, today the scenario has entirely changed; photos have become an integral part for converting your potentialities into realities. May it be brands, clothing, marketing plans, selling, purchase or whatever? Photos and images entirely drive sales and this is the reason why social media platforms have become a greater marketing tool for brands. Brands are putting up their visual ads; videos on social networks and customers are increasingly viewing and sharing the visual content. Bigger domains, make use of visuals to display their products, customers can choose their color, pattern, fabrics on models online and buy their products. The important element for brands today is to vouch for customer attention that comes a hardy way due to increasing competitions. Lets check some of the ways through which brands can unknowingly spoil their product image and avoid conversions:

Stock Photographs

Some cases, the stock photos do well but not always as customers have already explored many places before landing up on your page. The pictures actually do very little to promote your brand. The photos need to be effective to attract a buyer’s attention. Different people foresee a different image and hence a different thinking. Limiting the stock photos will help represent your brand in a better way.

Teenie

The above image was almost found on 1500 websites, shoppers see every detail when it comes buying and hence small images don’t always magically work. Customers are always looking for clearer view and genuineness in the product-detailing page. Brands should be aware that customers would view the zoomed image for better viewing hence such options is to be kept. If you feel, that particular image doesn’t necessarily go with the context of the page, than you can add caption on the image for good understanding by the customers.

Coolibar have always used images that go well with their product line. Brands should avoid photos that are blurred or are not properly cropped. Sometimes there are photoshop failures, like blurry image or some elements may be cut-off from the main image or removal of some important things, product images are not properly used, etc.

Eyelet Cover up

The above image shows how the leg of the model was cut off in the editing process. The source is Huffington post. For any image where the brands are trying to demonstrate, it is best idea to make use of real photos. They can even go for candid photography that will help represent the brand idea and image. Sometimes, stock photography is overused and it raises many a questions about the product and brand services.

Dr Berg

The image shows a representative, but so many times this image has been used that represents a call center. But ideally, would it be possible for a person to work for so many call centers at a time. It is best idea for brands to take reviews from several people before finalizing the product photos.

The best photographs for representing any brand or for marketing purposes is to avoid artificial stuff. Like over staged photos of people, the people who are not acting in the image should be avoided. The body language and the pose of the models are highly important in showcasing the brand image. If people see that models are uncomfortable wearing some clothing for a clothing brand, they will avoid buying the product.

Sometimes, the crowd photography is used by brands to convey the message of happy customers. But these photographs do not always convey that message. A stock photography should anyway be avoided and with crowd in side it might send an unrealistic message.

A testimonial page should best consist of a customer posing with the product for better understanding for other potential customers. Some customers would be glad to pose with the product and your reviewers will enjoy watching the pleasure the customer is having in using your product.

Stock photos are not counted as authentic because it describes unrealistic expectations from a brand. Actually speaking, masses do not use the same product so isn’t it a bad idea to represent a crowd in your brand image? Personalization everywhere is the key. So even it takes a good share of pie in photography image too.

Original photos are always the best regarded, so replicating from duplicate photographs is nearly a bad idea. Copying other brands image may lead to copyright issues and if the brands copy it could be possible that the image was a big mess and gave bad results so even the brands copying will have the same bad luck. So being original is the best way to turn potential audiences into real ones and set real par expectations by the customers and give them the trust for buying your product.

Get to know how Photos can harm your Ecommerce Conversions

Categories
Ecommerce
Quick guide to Competitor Analysis for your Social Media Strategy

Social media strategies are used by organizations today to plan a strategic plan that will help them to improve on their products and boost the sales. However, much is important, to stay on par with the competition. If you are really looking forward, you must see what your competitors are doing, that will give you a glimpse and help you identify strategic opportunities. Given below are different types of competitor’s analysis that will help you out with social media strategy:

  1. Glimpse on competitor’s activities – When you look at what your competitor is doing, you might get a clear view scope of the social activities they are performing. You can only do this by checking on their profiles, the campaigns they are doing, comments, content on their accounts, etc.You can get wider information once you act like their customer and start posing them with questions and see how often they are responding. If the replies are same for all, it means the replies are set to automatic.The below screenshot shows a Twitter feed of 3 leading US apparel retailers, it shows visual similarities on their profiles. The first two shows a high visual content while the last is more on textual updates on their timeline.

    Twitter Chat

    It may look worthy for some while not for others. The objective is to get as much engagement as possible. The brands that are constantly engaging with clients have higher visitors. The following questions will give previews about what brands can foresee through their findings:

    • Core channels that organizations are focusing on.
    • How are competitors using the channels to meet their goals to meet the sales, engagement and customer services
    • Frequency of the updates
    • Personal and automated updates
    • What content is used and how
    • What tailored content is each channel preparing.
  2. Assessing their social role in providing customer service – Social media plays a vital role today in aligning your brand with what customers want. Using social media is a good means to reach out to your customers. The brand BT has dedicated its Twitter account to provide customer care than marketing. The companies seek better understanding of their customers by gathering the tweets and use them to improve their services. The Harvard Business review suggests that 46% tweets had no response in Feb 2014 as compared to 38% in Feb 2015.

    There are several things you can see after studying your competitors profile details. You can check if they are responding well to the complaints made, the tone and response style they are using, etc. if the competitors are poor in responding to customers than you know what their weakness is and quickly take this advantage and give customers what they are looking for. Ask yourself this question and you will have an answer:

    • Check if competitors provide separate customer service other than marketing
    • Do they provide personalization with the initials of people posting
    • Do they respond to negative comments
    • Do they provide constructive help to customer queries
  3. Assessing competitor’s strengths and weaknesses – You cannot have it all so the best potion is to rely on a structured approach than comparing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You should be looking for following things:
    • What is the good thing that everyone else is doing
    • What are customers responding to
  4. Identifying what customers like to respond to – A smart marketer would exactly know the difference between being socially active and being active and engaged with the audiences. The success for a brand is correct when it has engaged with its audience. You can go through your competitor’s profiles and find some information to see which of the updates are most followed and liked by their followers:
    • Check which of the posts have most tweets, retweet or replies on Twitter
    • What posts on Facebook has most likes and comments
    • What content formats gets the best engagements
    • What content style does get attention from the people

    After a thorough study, you will know what works good or bad in a social media content plan. Whatever your audiences love, you should be doing that. Make use of the content that you collect online to find most likes, tweets, any particular post that became too popular suddenly, etc. given below is a quick analyze to visualize the opportunities.

    Competittor Strength

    • Big Win – in this case, the competitors are not active but engagement is high
    • Loss Leader – the engagement is high along with competitor’s activity. You need to compete, it shall take more resource effort with lower ROI
    • Space filler – the customer activity is low and competitors are not doing much either. Your brand can be a market leader by engaging smaller audiences.
    • Low value – there is high competitor activity with low customer interest.
  5. Use the knowledge to make your own strategy – Read the above sentence very well, by that it doesn’t mean you replicate what your competitors are doing. If all brands are doing the same, what incentive does the audience have for following one particular brand? After studying their social activities, you need to learn your own lessons, think of the good things they are at. Your only objective is to add up value.

    Customers can react strongly to campaigns they don’t feel linked with or the brand matching their vision. The below example shows Fraser’s #Emojinal campaign, that divided customer opinion and attracted a lot of negative feedback. It wasn’t a bad campaign but it looked quite different than its core styling.

    Twitter

    You can get very good insights from competitor’s examples, the competitor analysis will help you shape your strategy. Do not copy anything! But you can surely take some elements from their successful campaigns and apply it on your marketing activity to make sure that those elements perfectly align with your goals and vision.

Quick guide to Competitor Analysis for your Social Media Strategy

Categories
Ecommerce
Top 3 ideas to repurpose User-Generated Content in Social Media Strategy

User engagement has become extremely important when it comes to keeping brand loyalty and increasing the followers. But that doesn’t happen overnight, you already know that your brand doing well. Now, the next step is to imbibe the policy of good-will content that is created by your loyal audience and that can be technically termed as User-Generated Content. User-Generated content or UGC can simply be coined as a content that is posted by a customer in the form of an image or video about your brand. You effectively seek permissions and use that content in your marketing strategy to further bring accolades to your brand and this time with loyal users.

There are several things that are gets attached with repurposing the UGC. It’s a no fixer that how you are going to use the content. Any photos, snap, tweet or video that is shared about the brand is a UGC and it works automatically with happy customers and bring loyalty to the business. So what’s the notion that helps marketing teams to repurpose UGC?

Sneak Peak on why use Repurpose UGC?

UGC is undoubtedly ted good news for the brands as well as for marketing purposes. It helps to bring in more sales and build customers relations. The audiences can see the experiences and how other customers feel. It is more than convincing for a person to see a product is willingly appreciated by the other user than the brand publishing it. A recent survey, states that 76 percent of users trust UGC than the ads by the brand itself. Almost 84% trust online reviews put up by buyers similar to personal recommendations. As we earlier said, how brand engagement is important from a sales perspective – 97% of people purchase with the brand they interact with and it boosts conversions by a whopping 78% percent.

Now, the next question that confuses your mind is whether to use the UGC content, is it really legal?

UGC is nothing sort of a lethal bomb, UGCs are a content that is generated by the users and using Hashtags itself means that they are implying to use that content for the purpose of marketing or viewership or whatever. Social works rely on the data that is copyrighted and original so the sole rights are with the creator of the original content even if your brand Hashtag is being used.

If you go a legal way, there are lot of implications that are attached to it and questions that are innumerate like – do you require permissions from original poster? Do you require permissions of the person in the image? Can you repost it? Do you send some sort of agreement asking for posting? Etc. Let us take an example of Airbnb. They reach out to users on Instagram who use their tags or posts, asking their permissions to post content in their own feeds. The brand leaves a comment for users to click on the link where they can read terms of use for UGC. Users can reply with #airbnbphoto for confirming and also provide the link to Airbnb for featured image.

Every social network comes with its terms and conditions so assume that all content is copyrighted so the best option is to seek permissions from the original content creators. The users should know that it is the brand that is walking up to them, and there is no doubt about any sort of intentions. Do not jeopardize with the brand reputation by holding it loose, there should be no contradictions to the brand using UGC seeking permissions.

So, finally how can you Generate UGC?

For making optimum use of UGC, your brand should exactly know the system how, when and why you are going to use UGC. The first and foremost is the basic is to create a brand Hashtag so that you can use to repost it into your own feeds. Customers are willingly sharing your brand Hashtag and when you ask for permissions to repost them it is their chance to stand in the limelight hence almost 65% will grant permission to use the content within 24 hours.

Brand can also use UGC by holding contests or sweepstakes that challenge the people to use the brand Hashtag in a photo or any posts to gain entry in to the prize draw. Take for example; Japanese retailer MUJI encouraged their followers on social media to post its photos of artwork with MUJI pens. The brand campaign saw a good 2,500 people entering the contest with the Hashtag #mujipenart. This greatly increased its social out-reach and it created an entirely UGC based campaign that drove many people to it in return for awards and prizes.

The buzz created by your audiences far outweighs the total marketing costs and in bargain you may win a lot of customer loyalty. UGC generates customer engagement and the brands will possess images and comment mentioning them that further goes on to speak how good the brand is or how better the experience was. The UGC campaigns may fall short of your marketing needs sometimes; in that case brands can always rely on influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is a sure shot way of bringing attention to your brand with a popular personality or a celebrity having millions of followers promoting your brand. Instagram influencers help to create content on behalf of your brand, this allows your brand to gain credibility and engage with your customers. So that is all about creating your brand market buzz, influencers will keep doing their targeted work, now let’s check how you can succeed with UGC? How you can repurpose the UGC created?

Steps to Repurposing User-Generated content

The big data that is available on web is truly humungous and to make a good use of it is an art that only few social media companies utilize. It’s no big deal, it’s actually a standard norm but to stand out of the crowd you need to do things differently.

  1. Publishing UGC with the product
    As a brand you already have multiple things and material that you are using for marketing purposes. the example of Sonos is truly inspiring, they have embedded Instagram UGC as a part of the buying process on its website. The Sonos product page shows the product alongside customers with the product to show how they are using the product and how they like the brand. The images inspire new customers to look over it and visualize their lives with the pictures depicted and hence buy the product.

  2. UGC inside emails and promotion materialsHere we take an example of the brand Chubbies where you receive newsletters with UGC content. The brand doesn’t necessarily promote their products but simply use real photos with happy customers that show users how authentic the brand and the product is.The brand simply influences users by promoting products with customer satisfied faces. Chubbies collects its data from customers by asking its customers to share their experiences with Chubbies on social media. The brand has inspired a total of 331, 000 people to follow them on Instagram and 1.6 million on Facebook.
  3. Have your brand’s Hashtag
    Hashtags are the future and prominent methods to promote your business. Have a unique Hashtag for your business that differentiates itself from others. It could be your company name, or using your own tagline, you can also make use of products in your marketing campaigns for Hashtags. Take an example of Coca-Cola’s #shareacoke campaign that results in a 2 percent increase in sales.There can a Hashtag that doesn’t at all talk about our brand name but reflects everything about your brand. Make use of user sentences that will inspire the likes of people in that product segmented group.

<

p style=”text-align: justify;”>Hashtags give an identity to the brand and helps start a conversation with whoever is familiar or not familiar with thebrand. You can build or tablish the brand loyalty amongst the customers.

Top 3 ideas to repurpose User-Generated Content in Social Media Strategy

Categories
Ecommerce
Marketing Automation Strategies to implement for your Business today

Businesses today spend a lot of time and money in marketing their business and products. If you are still hung up to the old conventional methods that takes lot of your time and efforts then you need to hold on.  Take a sneak peak at the following simple steps that would actually automate your marketing processes.

The study from Smart Insights – GetResponse states that not many businesses are tapping into the power of Marketing Automation tools. 54% of businesses use limited marketing automation while 20% aren’t using it at all. The technology tools like PPC and SEO are now a thing of the past but they are very much here to stay. Along with these, there ought to be a marketing strategy that automates the routine tasks with precision and find exact data that will help you score over your competitors.

To start with Marketing Automation, it may seem like a cumbersome task but mixing all the ingredients like an email platform, leads source, CRM full of client data can help you kick start.

Let’s look over at the fundamental strategies that you can use for Marketing Automation:

  1. Good dynamic Content – Businesses already have good amount of customer information about B2B clients in their CRM systems. With this information, companies can deliver personal content that reflects the behavior and history of the customers. CRMs and emails systems could be integrated together to make different segmentations.
    Segmentation can dramatically improve click rates by 62% higher that utilize information in your email database.
  2. Drip Campaigns – Drip campaigns are very effective for businesses with long sales lead-times. They are basically timely emails sent to your audiences that help to introduce business to the new clients. Drip campaigns have 98% conversion rate and helps to educate clients, new leads and new customers.
    Drip campaigns are simple to set-up but it requires effective managing. We have to check if the email platform really supports timed automatic triggered sending of emails to give consistent experience for all the contacts.
  3. Nurturing the Campaigns – Nurturing the leads is one of the most important aspects that need proper watering. Audiences can choose their own journey through automated campaigns. Dynamic content will help change the email based static fields and nurturing will segment your audience based on their interactions with your communications. It will automatically send them in the direction of their interests.
    This automation level is simply spell-bound and can help generate more leads at lower costs rather than using non-targeted static campaigns. Nurturing is particularly good option for leads that have engaged with your site but are not really ready with a direct proposition.
    For a successful nurturing of campaigns, there should be a lot of Calls-to-action and links in the emails for audiences. Audiences are looking forward for your interaction with them on social media and other search options. More marketers are looking forward for an integrated marketing solution.

 

Marketing Automation Strategies to implement for your Business today

Categories
Ecommerce Technology
Incredible effects of Artificial Intelligence on Digital Revolution

Artificial Intelligence has incredibly changed the way machines ever worked. It has continuously redefined its features and has bought much success to the innovations being made. The AI machine evolution has been very impressive so far with the advent of autonomous driving, lip reading robots, interpretations, language processing and the likes.

The extraordinary progress and success stories of AI include AlphaGo’s victory over the world champ Lee Sedol for autonomous driving. Google’s DeepMind AI is capable of reading lips and has already mastered the difficult video game Montezuma’s Revenge; it has actually started learning the game with trial and error basis just like humans do. Watson – IBM’s AI platform reads, analyzes and interprets texts just like a person through natural language processing. The AI has become power humans by grasping as much as 80% of the information available today. Tesla’s self-driving cars are truly innovative with its eight cameras providing 360 degree visibility.

Artificial Intelligence is just rising above the level what it was yesterday, it is innovating and implementing every day by completely revolutionizing the very nature of digital marketing. The AI influence is growing and it will drastically change human interactions to the core.

Some important statistics that shows how huge the impact of AI and is going to affect the future interactions:

  1. Gartner research states that almost 85% of customer interactions will happen without a human being involved.
  2. In May 2016 alone, $1.5 billion were invested states CB Insights.
  3. Crunchbase listed 1,196 AI Start-ups; it lists all the venture capital funded startups in the world.
  4. Forrester states that 16% of American jobs shall be replaced by AI by the end of the decade.

AI is advancing at rocket speed and businesses are already seeing the bleak future. So what is it that Marketer should be particularly careful about and how does AI influence Digital Marketing.

Personalized content

Marketers already have abundant data with them and the developments in AI are surely going to help them make right use by giving highly personalized experience to its customers. Machine Learning has truly advanced and it will help marketers understand the customer’s true desires and take actions. Customers are looking for truly personal experience from brands; marketers will have to rely heavily on AI and machine learning so the data can be utilized for making customer engagement effectively.

With this level of advancement, content will become more personal catering to the demands of customers and users. Interactions will be crafted to suit the exact needs and requirements of the audiences. The whole online experience for user will bring promotions and content that is relevant to the final user.

WayBlazer, AI based Travel Company uses IBM’s Watson to apply cognitive analytics to social data that understands and realizes actual destination and know who it can appeal to. WayBlazer with the use of Watson is capable of giving recommendations to potential buyers for travel and also informing them about the local insights.

Under Armour, one of the biggest brands in athletic wear gives a finer example of how IBM’s AI technology is offering personalized training, nutrition recommendations and recovery programs. Watson will now be able to analyze users with daily activities, their sleep and data with regards to the food and it can share the info with its fitness App under its report.

Personalized ads will help to cater to the needs of the target audience. Brands who implement machine learning and personalization will obviously see increase in the revenues and the conversion rates. Personalized ads will bring a better ROI showing lesser irrelevant ads; it will show ads to the right audience.

As ads will be strictly targeted to the needs of the audience, user engagement will improve and brands implementing machine learning and content personalization the right way will see increases in revenue and conversion rates. Users will only be shown ads that are particularly relevant to them, meaning that firms could potentially see a better ROI by showing fewer ads, but to the right audience. This will result not only in an improved user experience but also higher levels of user engagement.

Chatbots and Virtual assistants

2016 was the year of new inventions and implementations, Chatbots and Virtual assistants saw an incredible growth. Facebook bought a new excitement with the introduction of bots for anything they thought of, for example KLM’s Messenger Chatbot allowed passengers to ask for directions to their stores, or nearby ATMs or restaurants or by sending an Emoji.

Bots and virtual assistants are eventually machines, they generate a lot of excitement for firsthand users and they are willingly ready to spend on it. Gartner predictions states that by the end of 2017, Marketers shall spend over $250 million on conversational technologies such as Chatbots and Virtual agents. In addition to this, room-based screen-less devices like Amazon Echo will be in over 10 million homes.

Adobe Research reports that the app downloads have fallen down to almost 38% in the U.S. and by 5% in the U.K., Germany and France since the year 2014. Chatbots are in bigger demand since consumers will directly talk to bots instead of making use of Apps or emails that take longer time.

AI’s will simplify Human Life

AI is definitely the future but it doesn’t mean they will completely change the human role in marketing. The businesses in future would sure need marketers for important decisions. The Big data is the sole element that marketers use these days to get insights, analyze the markets, study the trends and creating the content accordingly that brings brand awareness.

The most notable thing about AI is that, the more it is used, the more efficient it becomes, as AI are constantly learning and is adapting to new environments to anticipate the changes that are happening. Marketers can set the guidelines for AI so that all interactions stay within the brand context and are consistent with its vision. AI track the trends and optimize the real time campaigns, hence marketers will be more open to concentrate on subjective aspect of campaign. Laborious tasks could be handled by AIs.

The future of AI will help marketers concentrate better on creative aspect that includes understanding the customer and figuring out its overall objective. The repetitive, time-consuming and logic driven tasks will be performed by AI giving the marketers opportunity to be creative and focus its time and efforts on dedicate matters. It will help those transforming thoughts and ideas into decision making processes and products and improving overall business.

AI Problems

AI has created much excitement but Demandbase’s survey states that 80% of marketers feel that AI will completely revolutionize the marketing scene by 2020. Only a mere, 26% marketers feel confident about their understanding and the use of AI in marketing while 10% are already using it.

Marketers are already feeling the heat of losing the control over AI, although their main concern is integrating the AI into already well established businesses and poking over well designed strategic organizations processes. They are worried that employee may or may not adapt to the changes.

Boxever survey shows there is a gap between marketers and consumer’s perception of digital transformation and innovation in AI. Consumers are misinformed with regards to the development in the AI field. Consumers are laymen people; they really do not understand the true value of using AI in marketing. This is one of the reasons, there is disconnect between expectations and reality when it comes to AI.

Final Thoughts

AI is the digital future; Marketers should exceptionally know that world of digital is changing and it is exponentially going to impact decision-making and business growth. Brands using AI will be able to differentiate the casual users and their most valued users and tailor-made offer can be given to them. AI will help marketers recognize the needs of the users and offer real-time solutions that will help engage customers to the brand.

Incredible effects of Artificial Intelligence on Digital Revolution

Categories
Ecommerce
Top reasons why you should redesign your Small Business Website in WordPress

Business websites are a typical means that serves as Digital storefront for your Business. Websites should be user-friendly, should load quickly and have a mobile version, if it doesn’t meet these criteria the customers are quickly going to move away to your competitors. Most businesses rely on websites to bring in leads and educate potential audiences. Small business owners usually think that they can’t really cope with bigger businesses in terms of website design and development but that’s not the fact. You can easily do it and even greater than big businesses with the help of WordPress platform.

Here are some of the reasons as to why WordPress is the best platform for your Small Business Website:

  1. Use website as a Blog – WordPress will quickly let you have a blog for your website if you already don’t have. The software is super easy to operate and is the perfect platform to blog about your small business. You can set a simple page on your website and name it as a Blog; you can keep adding the posts to that page. Blog is one of the fastest and effective ways to continuously keep adding new contents to your website and keep your customers well informed.
  2. Constant Updates – WordPress is a safe and secured platform to use and it is always up to date and uses the latest policies. WordPress is a CMS system that automatically checks for updates and update itself. It is extremely safe and reliable to use WordPress knowing that it offers best security and that your site is secured for users and visitors.
  3. It’s an Open-Source – WordPress is an Open-Source platform that allows developers to contribute to the software in the form of themes, plugins and updates. Businesses greatly benefit because WordPress is constantly improving and getting better, the updates doesn’t cost the owners anything.
  4. WordPress is SEO friendly – The idea of SEO for a website is to make the website searchable on the search engines like Google and Yahoo. It may take some time for some to learn the tricks of SEO while WordPress offers best ways for business owners to optimize their sites in the easy way possible.
  5. WordPress is widely known – WordPress has been around for more than 10 years, it is a safe platform and offers problem-free solutions. The engineers at WordPress have improvised the system over years, it has become timeless in the sense that developers at all levels love to work on it.
  6. Coding is standard – Hiring a web developer for your webpage can get into a tricky affair since then no one else can manage it. It is good if you do not have to make any frequent changes to the website but it is very rare. WordPress has become so popular that any developer knows how to code it. The website designed and developed by one developer can easily be redesigned by other developer.
  7. WordPress is used by Biggies – WordPress is very well-known and people’s favorite. The big brands are using WordPress to power their sites. It is simply the best for small businesses since it provides great visual platform, it is scalable, it is fully functional and offer endless possibilities for new, old or startup businesses.

WordPress offers the best means for small businesses to grow their website by offering numerous options and plugins that will make it visually appealing and easy for the users and operators.

 

 

Top reasons why you should redesign your Small Business Website in WordPress

Categories
Technology
Best ways for Boosting the Conversion Rate of your Site

The conversion rate of a website is useful in measuring the number of potential customers that shall buy the products. Usually websites concentrate on increasing the number of website visitors and there are very minuscule bugs on the website that if improved can have huge impact on the conversion rates. It helps to boost overall performance of the website.

Making Users Feel Comfortable

Businesses should come with simple point of views for them as a company and also become simple in everyone else’s perception while targeting the audiences. The main aim of the web pages should be make easy accessibility for anyone who is planning to purchase from the website. Given below are few of the pointers that should be checked:

Accessibility – A site should be accessible in different countries, the websites that are not accessible may have bad effect on the sales. Visitors will switch websites if they cannot access the website.

Browsers – Most designers use Chrome, it is used specially as a defense as most site users use GC. Most times the reason for few visitors is because of the broken link sites in other browsers.

Usability – These days’ users make a lot of research before buying the product. When the website fails to provide information that the user may be looking for, it may result in low sales. A user-friendly site can have great impact on conversion rate of the website.

It is highly important for users to get access to a website they are looking for; it should be remarkably useful to them and should be convenient to browse on different browsers.

Strong Word compliment your Headline

Headlines are guiding protocols that evokes feelings to read the text ahead or not. It is the very first thing a customer will see. Headlines produce impressions for the users and provide opportunities.

Headlines are the main force that can boost the conversion growth rate. Websites can use short and strong action words with clear language that will give a straight message to its customers.

Clear and Honest Message

Brands posing real things produce real values for themselves. Do not annoy customers with what you are not or don’t have. Honesty and clarity are an integral part for creating good impression and leading to conversions. Include the details and disclaimer information for your customers so that they have clear view about the company, its products and policies.

Best ways for Boosting the Conversion Rate of your Site

Categories
Ecommerce
Guidelines for making Effective Website Design

An Effective website design is the one that helps to attract more customers and create website engagement. So how does one achieve that goal? It is not an impossible task but yes it requires good planning and wit to score over competitors. The idea of good web designing is something that makes users stick to your website and enjoy the happy moments spent on your pages. Let us get a step wise lessons and clarify few of your doubts!

My website looks dull no matter what I do!

Well that’s a common feeling for all who are just starting out but have patience!

“Rome was not built in a day!”

You do not have to be a world class professional truly to obtain a good web design. You can set your sight on other’s website and learn how beautifully they have done it.

Built Kids

The above example shows how a well-planned website shows an amazing outlook for the users to see it. Most times, you may wonder if they are very skilled but matter of the fat is, they are well paid. You may find nitty-gritty fall outs on your site compared to others but given that you are learning and have limited budgets you may want to keep things in perspective.

Content it is

Content Content Content! That’s the very base of your website design. A well planned and executed website will truly have engagement when content looks relevant to the users. Plan your content before you start designing your website. Consider the example given below: it’s an informative website so you want to put profile of the members, schedules, result of matches, logo and other important information. Once you have this data, you can easily know what you require in your design.

USBC

The website that put design first before the content usually concentrates only on design elements of the web. The web design initially thought may not match the content and could be misguiding to the users of the webpage.

Design features of the website

To start planning an amazing website, you need to concentrate on over all look of the website. You have to set certain mood for the website whether you want it bright or serious theme. Look around different websites that are similar and you will get an idea.

Website Design Ideas

The best way to study other’s website is to bookmark the pages that you mistakenly bumped into and liked over all look of the webpage. Well-known browsers allow saving pages as bookmarks so that you can go back and visit it when you want it. Some of the well-designed web pages are:

Colorful Delights

The entire web is being pushed through visual media so color is highly important because it should be visually appealing to the users. Make the best use of your creative power and get audiences enamored by the beauty of your webpage.

Remember to use the magical four colors (red, yellow, black and white) that will unanimously make your website look neat and clear. These are the color that attract eyes and mainly used in advertising. With this color, it becomes easy to read the text and call to action for customers.

GQ website

The above magazine website uses the four magical advertising colors that define its very uniqueness.

Color Schemes – These are basically the set of colors that complement each other. The color combinations in a scheme simply look great together and may have one of those magical colors. The different tools that can be used for varied color combinations given below are some options.

Color combos

Color Palette

Color Palette generator is one tools that helps you determine the color that are used as central image of the website.

Color Blender enables the users to create matching colors and palette based on the color that you selected.

Color Lovers

This website is dedicated to using colors on the website. They usually use trendy colors that are in.

Homely Fonts

Text forms the very essence of your webpage that determines the user engagement. It overall depends on how you want to portray your website.

System Fonts – Especially be careful if you are looking to use some fancy font on your website. A font that you used may not be visible to another person also system fonts are different on a windows and apple platforms.

Image Fonts – if you particularly like a font but it’s a non-system font, you can make the text as an image. For example check below the CNN logo, the font is not in the system hence the logo is an image.

CNN Logo

Here is one only tiny problem. Since the font is an image, it no longer remains selectable and search engines do not read the text in the image although they read image overall. The image may also slow down the page’s load time.

Image Friendliness

Images form an integral part of a website that you design and create. It is always a good idea not to include too many images in your website, it can literally slow down the rate of page downloads

Use Cascading Style Sheets

To keep your web page design consistent, make use of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). This is a webpage guide that could be followed to format elements of the webpage.

Remember to –

Always design best practices, concentrate on giving best content, simple and attention grabbing design elements and consistency across the webpages.

 

Guidelines for making Effective Website Design

Categories
Ecommerce
Top 10 reasons why you need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital Marketing is pretty much a broader term today especially with new innovations happening. There are always some additions that gets implemented that it gets difficult to keep pace with. A perfectly planned Digital marketing Strategy can really help you hit the mark. If you are still wondering, you need to have digital marketing strategy for your business then here is a two-step plan: a. Start planning for digital marketing plan that defines the transformation that is really needed that will help make changes to your digital marketing. b. after getting the approval, start creating integrated digital plan that is part of the bigger marketing plan.

Digital-Marketing-Excellence-Benchmark

Here are some of the top reasons why you need a Digital Channel Strategy for your business:

  1. You need a right direction – most companies are unaware of their strategic goals and what they want to achieve in terms of gaining new customers or re-create the bond. With digital strategy not in place, there would be no goals and organizations wouldn’t know how to achieve those goals.
  2. You lack your online market vision – Studying online markets are important, it shows the customer demand. Markets are dynamic hence they are different from traditional channels having different types of customer profiles and behavior competitors.
  3. Competitors may gain market share – Digital marketing strategy requires dedicated efforts and resources. If your company does not have clearly defined goals then competitors may eat the market share.
  4. Value proposition – A clearly defined digital marketing strategy will help you differentiate your online services that will encourage existing and new customer to engage and stay loyal.
  5. Knowing your customers well – With digital marketing strategy you also learn newer tools like Google analytics and understand the volumes of visits that happen.
  6. Need for Integrated approach – Marketing requires an integrated approach that fulfills all criteria. A digital marketing strategy will help combine all resources and package a good marketing plan that is effective.
  7. Scarce resources – Digital marketing with insufficient resources will be used for planning and execution of e-marketing plans. An absence of strategy will also lead to lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills.
  8. Chances of duplication – A digital marketing strategy help to systematically implement the new processes. In absence of strategy, there may be chances of duplication meaning different organization may purchase different tools for doing similar online marketing tasks.
  9. Staying up responsive – A digital marketing strategy helps for keeping dynamic nature of organization that helps to catch up with new approaches.
  10. Optimization – All companies have website analytics and individual do not review them to act upon it. With digital strategy, it helps to get down to basics and lead the path towards continuous improvement.

 

 

 

Top 10 reasons why you need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Categories
Ecommerce
Read on to find out how Website Designing culture is booming and have golden future

Well, most of always think the trend that is on is sooner going to fade, but that’s not always the thing that we contemplate. If you are a traditional thinker, you sure do not agree but here’s the thing! We have already seen viral news from popular media outlets like Mashable.com reported how AI and low cost WordPress templates are killing the very nature of website designing business. But let me tell you, these are basically geared to drive traffic and take the topics ahead. Most of it is promotion and not based out of actual facts and figures.

We are Humans and NOT Robots

Globally, Internet usage has grown tremendously and it still continues to grow at lightning speed given the number of people getting connected online. It’s an overall growth for the entire industries that are directly or indirectly connected to whole World Wide Web. The desktop website use has gone down but Internet usage has increased and that too at a good rate. Smartphones are the in-thing, people have started using mobiles for everything they like to do, and may it be finding information or shopping online.

The Internet adoption rate has truly showered good blessings and content has now become an integral part. With different devices involved, there is shift from one end to the other. Content has become more diverse in nature and Engagement is the main motto. IoT has actually connected humans, and machines and AI together to achieve the impossible.

AI and Templates are programmed after all

Each website development project has newer expectations and innovations happen. AI are eventually guided to do something but they of course cannot literally, literally solve human problems. The main goal of website designer is to get business problems to the fore thereby offering easy solutions and making tasks simpler.

The task of professional website Design Company is to identify the main issue that is thriving in and to use Internet wisely. Technology is ever so changing and only aim it has, is to solve website owner’s problems, goals and objectives. Ideally speaking, there is no simple solution to getting a structured website development project. It’s all a process that starts with systematically identifying the objectives and making use of the best practices to experience and get a solution.

Grids are clever means but they are factually programmed. They cannot really ask owners the real problems or rather solve them for example: in the case of target marketing, project objectives, product or services, why the traffic is low or how a project will look like after a year’s time, etc.

Professionally good website designs go just beyond image and text messages. It has wide ranging project elements that cover AI and templates.

Here are some of the points that show how Professional website design is really in:

  1. Messaging – most small businesses do not have bigger marketing agenda in fact they do not have any departments. A professional designer will discuss with them and help them to come up with a plan that will concentrate on their actual business difficulties, which will be completely cut-off from the competition.
  2. User personas – designers are usually waiting to give the best structured website to clients and their only motto is to identify the website personas. With that, it can help improve the website design and overall development. It helps to create traffic flows and all actions are focused on the users. The use of AI cannot do what a website designer thinks and interprets by the discussion with website owner.
  3. Call to action plan – a professional designer can do a good job of website design with all integrated options. A call to action plan inbuilt will actually boost the flow of visitors to the website. A designer can have detailed discussion with owner of what needs to be included in the design and what not.
  4. SEO – That’s the heart and soul of website development. The content plays a very important role and also the layout of the website. A professional grafted project by designer helps to start a project with proper detailed analysis. Keywords and site mapping are very basic and gets a good foundation.

Real website designs are a means for successful business leads ahead, Remember that!

The professional web designers navigate through structural ways in designing a good website design process. A properly grafted website structure gives a good website impression to the user and overall enhances organization’s marketing efforts. Automation is truly great but lacks an emotional touch, feel and the results to a certain extent. For organizations that are looking for systematic structured designs should definitely go professional designers. Automated website designs offer preset page layouts and templates that cannot give human element to it.

Read on to find out how Website Designing culture is booming and have golden future

Categories
Ecommerce
Top 4 benefits of Email Marketing for Small Businesses

Email Marketing is evolving time and again with its different strategies and tactics. Often, small businesses are always vouching for new customers while the existing ones are kept behind. Eventually, small businesses make use of different email marketing campaigns that help in influencing their existing clients.

There are a number of reasons why Email Marketing offers the best benefits especially to small businesses. The top reason why it is popular is because it is an economical form of marketing and it compliments business model of any size. Usually, smaller businesses are more prominent in giving quality services compared to bigger organizations. People tend to view their work as genuine and worthy and hence they are willing to provide email details to the vendors.

Given below are some reasons why small businesses should undoubtedly go for Email Marketing:

  1. Its Affordable

Small businesses usually have small ideas that make them very special. They create special offers, reminders and promotions for their customers in printed paper formats. The email formats of the same is quicker and simpler that helps to save on the print and postage expenditure. Email expenditure is negligible expense as compared to printing papers. Emails are faster and the blank templates can be created for the same. A user can use the template by populating it, except for initial costing, emails run on minimum expenses.

Smaller businesses can save a lot of money and time by successfully running email campaigns and it is unaffected by increase or decrease in the staff.

  1. Used for providing Important Data

Email marketing helps to target right audiences, it provides special tools that help to analyze and measure the responses accurately. Small businesses can collect important data such as open rates, clicked links and conversion details through email marketing campaigns.

  1. Emails are Quick

Emails are one of the fastest modes of communications; the brands can get responses from customers within a time span of 1 to 3 days. Emails also allow providing instant replies and answering to customer queries.

  1. Emails are convenient

Emails marketing allows you to place the links of products and services at the most prominent places of emails sent to the users. Email marketing allows updating email list quickly and helps to enable the comments, queries and feedback.

Emails are a good means to market for small businesses, they offer good benefits compared to other email marketing campaigns.

 

Top 4 benefits of Email Marketing for Small Businesses

Categories
Ecommerce
How Ecommerce brands are generating Leads from Social Media

Today, Businesses are overcoming many hurdles in terms of challenges faced and keeping pace with developments. Qualified leads are a challenge for any business enterprise. Social media comes as a handy tool because it helps customers to discover brands for the products that they are looking for. Here are some of the brands using social media to target the said prospects, gain leads and build the awareness:

      1. Generating Leads from Social Platforms

Facebook and Twitter are prominent platforms for lead generation; it provides an easy built-in ad format that prompts for User information before it leaves the ad.

The below picture shows how GrowthHackers, a consulting firm, allow new subscribers to enter email addresses on the Twitter ad.  Customer lists can be uploaded in each platform to target similar audiences. Testing the ad formats is important especially the native lead generation ad versus an ad with a video or an image.

growthhackers

The below Wantable ad from fashion and fitness retailer shows how a video is used to capture the interests of the users driving them to the landing page.

Wantable

Users are targeted sometimes by offering them free stuff. The example below from Brit + Co, a female apparel and lifestyle portal sells its video for learning new skills and lessons. The company offers free classes to its potential interested customers to buy their videos.

BritCo

The Facebook ad is displayed to induce the prospects into signing free class.

Many businesses make use of Twitter for building brand awareness and to generate the leads. The specific target ads helps the users to dedicated landing page, it could be replying to a tweet or targeting competitor’s customers. The below example from Green Chef, an Organic food delivery company exactly shows how the tweets are used to entice the prospects in trying new recipes.

GreenChef

                               Green Chef uses Twitter to tweet about its new recipes

     2. Website Pop-ups connecting to Social media channels

Website Pop-ups are a popular means where it asks for user information like email address or social login for gaining access to discounts. The users are given the option for liking their page or follow the brand’s social media accounts.

The below example from Apparel retailer FlyPolar gives its users the options to follow its Social Media Channel or enter an email address for getting the discount code.

FlyPolar

FlyPolar entices its customers to sign up with them through social media channels or entering their email address to get the discounts.

     3. Refer a Friend

Refer-a-Friend is a highly incentivizing program for customers to send prospects. This has been popular for quite some time now, even before Social Media arrived.

StitchFix

Stitch Fix, a Fashion retailer endorses its refer-a-friend program on social media. The above is an Instagram example.

Vistaprint

Vistaprint gives a $10 voucher for every referral that produces a Sale.

The big challenges that the retailers face for promoting refer-a-friend program could be visibility deficiency that is if the customers are aware of such programs. The best idea for retailers is to include refer-a-friend program along many touch points that includes an email, social media, on-site and packaging.

Julep, a Cosmetic retailer provides its referral program in its Shipping boxes.

Julep

     4. Social Media Shares after the Purchase

Brands encourage their customer to share the purchase made on Social Media to create awareness and leads. Retailer “Know Style” offers discounts to customers for future purchases who share on Social Media.

Post Purchase Sharing

Know Style, a retailer makes use of the above display ad on its website to offer discounts to customers who share on social media for their future purchases. Customers can also be given discounts or coupon code for giving reviews or ratings to be shared on their social media accounts.

     5. Giveaways

Incentives to customers are a domicile tactic to lure consumers to follow on Social Media, states Marketing Sherpa survey. The brand, My Pooch Face sells hand painted pet portraits, it entices the visitors with a free pet portraits for contests.

My poochface Sherpa survey

My Pooch Face offers free hand painted pet portraits to whoever takes interest in the contest. By this, they grow their email listing.

Visitors are given additional entry into Sweepstakes by following their social media profiles, referring the friends and signing up to receive emails.

mypoochface

Like mypoochface.com offers entry into sweepstakes to customers who sign up on social media, refer friends or sign up for newsletter. Additionally, brands can ask audiences to tag friends on social media for entering a contest as it will help to expand the brand’s awareness and reach the right prospects on social media.

BluKicks

Brands encourage the shoppers to actively participate in the contest with the condition of taggign their friends on social media.

 

How Ecommerce brands are generating Leads from Social Media

Categories
Ecommerce
7 Important B2B marketing trends for 2017

Trends for business-to-business marketers need to follow in the year 2017

Innovation is the main starting point for reviewing all marketing trends for the New Year. Marketers assess the marketing techniques giving them uplift in the business. The top techniques are well focused in getting aligned B2B sector. The most important it is, to realize the importance of new technologies such as real time personalization, mobile and marketing automation.

1. Marketing Automation

Automation is one finest technology when it comes to B2B marketing. It’s an automated process of scoring and nurturing the leads with relevant content along the customer journey. Not many businesses are exploiting marketing automation since they are still on at earlier stages of maturity.

Level of use of Marketing Automation

Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights is going to speak at B2B Marketing Automation Expo 2017 where he is going to cover the best ways to start automation. Here are few of the key techniques that he spoke in the last year’s show:

  • A welcome sequence with multi steps that can have more relevancies with dynamic content.
  • Lead scoring and grading to put more relevant emails or outbound calls when the prospects are qualified.
  • Re-marketing on third party sites that will help nurture prospects showing interest in product or services.

 2. Content Marketing

Content Marketing technique has been prevalent since last several years in B2B marketing but the popularity of inbound marketing has given more importance to sharing the blogs and social media. Last 3 to 4 years, readers have voted for content marketing against any other marketing activity. The main element in inbound marketing is getting the right balance of content quantity, quality and the frequency. Content Marketing is greatest method used by B2B marketers because longer customer journey would mean customers would want to do plenty of research before making the purchase decision.

b2b-using-content-marketing-2016-550x593

3. Web Personalization

The personalization of the website is a long standing tactic for Ecommerce site but was less used conventionally for B2B marketing. Personalization of emails involved using dynamic content insertion technique. SaaS products like BrightInfo and Evergage make web personalization services affordable for smaller companies. It includes automation features to recommend most relevant piece of content.

4. Channel Integration

Several digital marketing channels are available hence there is always a tendency to focus on individual channel. Integrated nurturing process helps earn dividends. The key trend here is the integration of different channels. Other trend on this includes generating B2B leads by Ascend; this proves that B2B marketers are not chasing the latest fast by not spending too much time on channels that deliver the vast majority of leads or sales.

State of lead generation survey_Ascend

Marketing Automation enables businesses to join customer journey between website and emails. It concentrates on not just email sequences but also identifying when the prospect downloads the content in future and showing their interest and follow up further.

Other form of integration is through re-targeting or re-marketing in Google Adwords where the ads are served to previous site visitors on Google’s display network. This option has been available for last many years with social media. LinkedIn is more important within B2B marketers; Facebook and Twitter have extended their retargeting option.

5. Account-Based Marketing

Account based marketing (ABM) is an established approach in B2B marketing, within larger organizations having structures and processes to target key accounts. ABM was pioneered by ITSMA 10 years ago, they define it as “more than a sales or marketing approach; it is a collaborative strategy that engages sales, marketing, subject matter experts and delivery professionals, as well as key executives
in the chosen client account to determine where and how to best meet the client’s unique business challenges. With deep insight into the client’s business and key goals, this collaborative team creates a well-orchestrated marketing and sales campaign for a single account.”

Initially, ABM was an approach that was supported by Marketing Automation service that focuses on individual customer records. The trend is for automation services that include ABM features that make it easier to nurture groups automatically through emails and re-targeting.

6. Mobile Marketing

The shift towards mobile is the latest trends for B2B Marketers since last many years now. Google notes that businesses have responsive sites hence it’s no more a trend. The change that affects B2B marketers in 2017 includes Google’s new mobile-first index and potential penalties for pop-ups.

Mobile covers almost half of web traffic today where in the past B2B companies used to assume that their customers are researching about them on desktop devices. The new breed of business owners use mobile device to research solutions on the go that means B2B marketers needs to be sure that the content is mobile optimized that ensures smooth processes for users on different devices.

Mobile marketing tactics

Almost half of B2B businesses have mobile sites and apps this shows that industries are finally starting to come together on mobile. For some industries, mobile apps are not necessary but all industries should have mobile responsive sites. Even if customers are not logging on the mobile device, businesses still need responsive site with Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update or else you may be penalized for the same. B2B buyers on mobiles are increasing as shown in the chart below; hence mobile optimized sites are absolutely necessary.

B2B-buyers-mobile-device-usage

7. Social Media

As per the research, B2B businesses tend to get best results from LinkedIn and Twitter although they are present across wide range of social networks. YouTube and Slideshare are particularly effective; Google+ is ineffective since majority B2B is using it. The eMarketer chart below shows 2015 data and the second chart show the data for 2016.

usage vs effectiveness

effectiveness-of-b2b-social-media-550x511

While it is extremely easy to set up a social network it is often important to prioritize. It requires good efforts to run it effectively focusing on the best tactics.

 

 

7 Important B2B marketing trends for 2017

Categories
Ecommerce
How Small businesses are influencing marketing automation?

Consumers spend a lot of time researching before making a buying decision offline. 37% shoppers state the retailers “get” them through the collective data gathered by varied ongoing campaigns through the social media. Ecommerce generation has come with latest offerings that make customer journey easier that are most crucial factors to keep customers and business attracted. According to C-suite executives four technologies will be the key for marketing successes in the future: a. Cloud computing and services, b. Mobile Solutions, c. IoT and d. Cognitive tools. Lets have a look at some of the marketing trends that are very specific to these four technologies that can be put to right use for enhancing the customer experience in your business:

  • Cloud computing and services (marketing automation) – Digital marketing processes involve a lot of steps that are time-consuming. Automation is a cloud-based service that helps to cut down the time on routine marketing tasks. Marketing automation guarantees perfection and optimization of business resource to give good customer experience.

Digital Marketing techniques

The Grey shade is for 2015 trends and Purple shade is for 2016-2017 trends. SmartInsights study reveals that marketing automation is the top priority for the year 2017; content marketing and big data will follow it. The bigger market players are using Salesforce and Marketo, small businesses can make use of affordable marketing automation tools like ConstantContact and GetResponse, designed for small businesses.

Getresponse1

Image Credit – GetResponse

GetResponse gives a unique customer experience with drag and drop workflow planner. With the use of this tool, small businesses can:

Create email-marketing workflow that will enhance UX.
Hosting information webinars.
Build high converting landing pages.
Conducting surveys for target audiences, their needs and expectations.
Integrating shopping cart in email workflow.
Get improvements by analyzing the data.
Utilizing advanced email-marketing features including tagging, scoring and segmenting.

  • Mobile solutions – 63% people make use of mobile few times every month to search for customer and product support. How their journey look like with your business? Have you made it easy to get help from you when they use mobile?

Software advice                          Image Credit: SoftwareAdvice

The common issues users face while finding customer support are:

Complex navigation through the website
Results after the search are not helpful
Loading time is slow
Website not searchable.

Providing online services or products to consumers would mean making it easy to get support through mobile device. One tool you can use is Zendesk’s Mobile Help Center application that makes your resources easily accessible form mobile devices:

Zendesk

  • Internet of Things – IoT allows online and offline connecting through the Internet. This idea is not too common with small-scale businesses hence if you implement it; it’s going to be a great booster against your competitors.

          What you can connect and synchronize to impact Customer experience journey?

Customer Experience Journey

                            Image Credit: KESolutions.Biz

Take example of Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma – the ticket sales increased by a whopping 700% after implementation of analytics technology to combine offline and online marketing activities. The zoo is planning to come up with mobile ticketing in future, so visitors can “check-in” at exhibits there by improving the UX. Small retailers can make use of sensors monitoring the foot traffic and customer behavior in-store.  When all of these sales data are combined, great findings are emerged that have ability to influence UX.

A customer standing at the airport waiting for carousel to deliver his bag getting a light bulb moment thinks, of being notified by Bluetooth when the bag is about to arrive – is the perfect IoT thinking in action.

How can you combine sensors in an offline world to improve things for your customers or create new products or service offerings?

  • Cognitive Tools – Using the customer behavior to improve the experiences. Cognitive skills impersonate the way human brain works. It is a smart machine that acts and thinks like human. The tools that originate from cognitive computation can turn the data into powerful insights. Cognitive skills can be used by small businesses for analytics and predictions to access consumer data that gets created daily to understand and learn from it. The end result of this is to drive loyalty and build trust worth relationship with customers.

GeoffLivingston

                                                                Image Credit: GeoffLivingston

For example, do stores understand why a customer abandoned his online cart and do they have processes in place that will ease the customer to come back to store and complete the shopping?

A good example would be an eCommerce store using Marketing automation for tracking and analyzing user behavior on website. It then creates email workflow having conditions, filters that trigger to re-initiate the relation with customer through emails. The more salient of these is when businesses use cognitive tools for tapping into emotions of customers and delivering the experiences just at right time. IBM have suggested cognitive strategies to answer the following questions:

On who is the focus
Actions you want them to take
How they want to interact

Customer experience is one of the crucial marketing trends for 2017 and for the next coming years. The four technologies that will be key for marketing will be mobile solutions, cloud computing, IoT and cognitive tools. The smaller business can make best use of these trends by using automation tools, by introducing mobile desk solutions, combining offline sensors to the online world for better US, using cognitive tools based on UX that delivers best UX at the right time.

 

How Small businesses are influencing marketing automation?

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Ecommerce
Social Media marketing is a great booster to generate ROI

Latest research from DMA states that only 48% of marketers agree that social media is actually gaining them any ROI. There are some of the trends that DMA realized in its reports, but not all are positive. Almost, 77% of marketers do use at least one source of social network for promoting their brand. The research was done with 111 marketers from B2B and B2C companies, in 2017 that they did their own research with a sample size of 609. They result found a divide in the way marketers see the effects of Social media marketing

What channels are used for marketing?

Marketers would obviously be directed towards the channel that is most effective to them. Twitter is number 1 choice since it doesn’t have any filtering and marketers can be sure that the posts will appear on follower’s feeds without paying anything. Facebook ranks 2nd overall and stands at number 1 for B2C because it has considerable margin. It really makes sense for the brands to target it. Instagram has overtaken Twitter, these are clear signs of how popular it will become with marketers.

Social media platforms

For what purposes brands use social networks?

Most brands are using social networks today but what are primarily their aims? It was interestingly found that it varies depending if the brand is engaging in or organic social activity.

Social Organic marketing

social media paid

There is some type of logic that is involved in using paid social media differently. Lead generation can easily justify the investments that are being made but at the same it’s hard to convince marketers of the need for paid investments in customer engagements. It’s worth mentioning that all social media activities by means are a paid activity since you are paying someone for doing it.

How much you agree to below given statement?

Social media survey

Organic is undoubtedly better than social media while getting your perceptions clear for ROI. A mere 48% feels they see results with social marketing it shows how others are failing to engage rightly with right platforms. One-third of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with the statements; this means they do not have clear picture of the impact of social media on ROI. This clearly states the need of better use of analytics and attribution models amongst marketers.

How to get more ROI from social?

The most obvious way to improve on ROI is to do your social activities in a better way. There are millions of posts online demonstrating how to boost engagement on social media. Read the posts where you can seek more information giving you better returns.

Using social data for other channels

Social media is too vast and often we see customers do not properly utilize the insight it provides. More money is spent on crafting social campaigns. The data achieved can be used for targeted email marketing or on-site messaging.

Social Data for Channels

The above chart clearly indicates that only few marketers used social data for messaging and generating relevant content. The data gathered from social can help increase lead generation and revenue on the main site since customers like to respond to messages that are tailored to them. There is great scope of improvement here with majority of brand rarely use social data for other channels.

Research from Smartinsights members

Digital Marketing activities

The latest research conducted by SmartInsights in partnership with TFM (Technology for Marketing) and Ecommerce expo has bought forward things that marketers think of social media on ROI in 2017. The senior marketers were asked about channels they use most and the least ROI ones, a total of 609 marketers took the survey and it revealed that social media is far from best channel in terms of ROI.

The results reveal that organic social is a poor performer for those who think it gives low ROI while it did quite well for those who think it gave high ROI. There is a big divide in marketing community for how they perceive the effect of social marketing. It could be because of over-hyped marketing or may be some socials just do not work in particular industries.

 

Social Media marketing is a great booster to generate ROI

Categories
Ecommerce
Watch out Instagram for Influencer endorsements

Instagram is abuzz with new developments benefiting the brands with translucent approach. Instagram is all set to launch the new “Paid Partnership Tag” for sponsored content.

Instagram’s new feature is specifically targeted for influencers. The main objective for this feature is to let consumers know which posts are sponsored and which are not. It allows the influencers and brands to tag their partners who have paid to be featured in the posts.

The tag will mark the images clearly if they are paid and same for stories too. The influencers who use the tag feature will be able to track the insights that will allow both parties to check and track how the content is performing. Currently, the paid partnership tag is being rolled out to only selected few influencers, businesses and brands. The feature will be widely available to all in the coming months.

Instagrams-new-Partner-feature-

The new feature is a good step taken by Instagram in order to increase the transparency on the platform. It enforces the new rule placed by The Federal Trade Commission that will help clamp down misleading social media campaigns.

Nisha Arora, CMA’s Senior Director for Consumer Enforcement comment on this issue:

‘Social media personalities can have an important influence on people’s views, especially young people. It is therefore crucial that when people decide what to buy, they should not be misled by adverts on social media that read like independent opinions.’

Influencer-on-Instagram--550x400

Social Media celebrity status has increased tremendously and this has increased the amount of paid endorsements and brand collaborations. Influencers like Kardashian, Zoella, have over 100 million followers giving them humongous following and the audience influence. Many social media influencers and celebrities were warned last year since they failed to disclose that some of their shared posts were sponsored posts.

“Paid Partnership Tag” is one of the right moves taken by Instagram. It will create more transparency amongst the followers and consumers.

 

 

Watch out Instagram for Influencer endorsements

Categories
Ecommerce
Ecommerce Personalization Strategy, an Ultimate need in 2017

Personalization helps to create loyalty and drive high conversion and grows the revenue of the organization but how does one achieve this objective? Ecommerce Personalization strategy is the right tool that helps serve relevant content to your customers and optimizing their experiences. Marketers have only one genuine aim and that is to deliver perfect 1-to-1 personalization experiences across all its channels.

The last four decades have unfortunately seen a lot of difficulties that marketers face leaving unpredictability in the revenue numbers. The advancement in AI have led brands and retailers deliver 1-to-1 personalization and serve the best digital experience to their customers across different touch points. Given below are important reasons why Personalization Strategy is a must for your organization:

  • Diversity in Customers – Marketers have long been struggling to cope with diverse audiences preferences. Staying up to their expectation is almost like impossible task for creating the design of each individual. The “Segmentation” method allows defining the distinctiveness of each group and helps to target each group with specifically tailored creative content. The only demerit here is that segments are defined by few data points and it could be challenging. Customers have different preferences based on their colors, styles, purchasing frequencies, price brackets and more. Segmentation is a good method used by marketers and shows improved results but at some point it may veer off its effectiveness.

With effective marketing communication, people would take actions that they wouldn’t otherwise with the element of value in it because it is unique.

  • Traditional and Rules-based personalization doesn’t measure – A segmentation based approach would mean identifying and targeting the biggest opportunities. A segment of people is selected with a set parameter within the channel and introduce the segment to experienced set that are more likely to respond to. Micro segments can be created but they yield diminishing returns. The marketers hit a plateau where spend expands than the actual returns.

personalisation-paradox

The main goal of segmentation and 1-to-1 personalization are similar as they help to establish relationship between the brand and its customers. The increased workload of micro-segments would make it difficult to manage everything in order to design the individual experiences. The actual reality is that 1-to-1 personalization don’t require unique content. With the help of creative elements it is possible to individualize experiences for varied interests of your customers.

Decisions-personalisation

For successfully implementing personalization at scale, we should break the old thinking and achieve the
latest.

  • Consumers invite personalization – Personalization is the key to behold consumers’ interest. Marketers keep struggling to master personalization. The recent personalization attitudes survey of online shoppers by Accenture Interactive states that personalization can achieve its objectives if the offer is relevant and subtle. A strong alignment with customer needs is in direct correlation to financial success of the industry.

The tested methods of A|B testing, segmentation, optimization and targeting are the essential tools in the marketer’s toolbox. The desire for improving customer experience, increasing the conversions, and AI offer great benefits. With improvisation happening on a continual basis, the experiences are going to be more relevant.

 

Ecommerce Personalization Strategy, an Ultimate need in 2017

Categories
Ecommerce
Reasons for the popularity of Multi-Channel Customer Communication Platforms

Embracing Multi Channel Strategy

The most important assets for any online business are their valuable visitors and customers. Whatever steps is taken eventually have an aim of satisfying the prospects and building trustworthy relationships. Most marketing efforts are bent towards conversions hence conversion rates and ROI metrics are of utmost importance.

Multichannel-communication-550x310Interactions with existing customers or new prospects play a vital role for offering help to the customers. ROI and conversion rates increases if the customers can reach you faster and can enjoy the live support.

Optimization of Online Communication channels

Global Businesses would mean availability of personnel for 24/7 in multiple languages and dealing with different cultural people. The very basis of multiple communication channels is to align oneself in doing what is needed. Small medium businesses at the very least can offer English support. Optimization of online communication channels would mean adding multiple apps on your website or within the app itself.

Opening multiple channels lets users interact with your company personnel through SMS, Voice, Facebook Messenger, Line, Whatsapp, etc. asking customers to fill a form or sending an email also works wonders.

Multichannel communications

Add Multiple Communication Channels

As Technology is moving at a rapid pace and evolving each day, companies are also adapting to new tools and implementation. The online businesses are thriving explicitly through Automation but human interaction is highly important while closing the deals. The top industrial players know this importance hence introduction of bots, virtual assistants, digital agents have come into picture. Businesses should add more channels while communicating with the users; different users may prefer different messaging tools. There are several platforms through which consumers can interact with businesses and the year 2017 have more consumers craving for multiple communication channel support.

Which Channels to choose?

Well, businesses should implement multiple communication channels but the hard question is which ones to select and how to know users choices. Businesses could decide this, going by their personal preferences through industrial statistics and popular app amongst the specific target audience. Recent report states that almost 78% of people wished they could text businesses. Forrester study states that 62% business owners felt they may fail to keep up if they do not implement social customer service technology in customer operations. Putting FB messenger apps makes sense with 1 billion worldwide users, even apps like Viber and WeChat are a good means to opt for since they have user base of 900 million.

Integrating Multiple Channels into a Single data feed

For Integrating Multiple Channels, it is highly important to make sure that website or App’s UX supports the multiple channel implementations in a graceful manner. The third party online widgets offers floating bubbles, drop down menus, etc. The multiple channel approach allows the prospects to send emails, SMS, Facebook messages and call the sales team. For the best optimized sales process you have to make sure that all communication events with each prospect are stored in unified data feed CRM.

Online Businesses need support for the following:

  • Integrate multiple communication channels
  • Managing the operations in a dashboard
  • Organize the costing and payments
  • Migrate the data in existing CRM

Multi-channel communication platforms

New platforms have emerged to allow businesses to follow “multi communication channels” strategy; they offer all-in-one comprehensive support as given below:

  • Single plugin for multiple communication apps that include Voice, SMS, Web Chat and other IM apps offering an open API.
  • Optimizing the load time that minimizes the multiple apps load on domains
  • Dashboard that helps manages the operation for back-office
  • API support integration that exists with 3rd party CRM systems

The above strategies help to forego conventional methods and ideas. It is important to follow the new technological trends well so you can interact with prospect through the right channels they are comfortable with.

 

 

 

Reasons for the popularity of Multi-Channel Customer Communication Platforms

Categories
Ecommerce
Ideas to implement video in your Digital Marketing Strategy

Videos are the next big boom that has entirely changed the way marketers ever marketed their businesses. People actually like watching video content than they do for textual content. Videos have gained good popularity with the onslaught of varied networks and social media at its brim. The fact of the matter is – Videos can give you more than expected results if done in the right manner. The Cisco report states that by 2019, online videos are slated to generate four-fifths of global Internet traffic. Given below are few of the tips and steps that will help you target your audience with how, where and why you should take Video marketing seriously.

Website Video Marketing

Almost 79% of consumers stated they will watch video about the product and 84% noted they will make a purchase after watching the video.

Getting results with SEO:

  • 97% businesses reported that their product video tutorials helped user understand the features of the product or their services.
  • 54% business reported that they saw reduced support calls by putting video tutorials for the users.

How-to-videos-examples-550x545

  • User-generated content can be used for making video content without investing on it. You can also offer users discounts or a gift in return for video review.

What to expect:

  • 80% increase in conversion after putting the video in the landing page.
  • Increased traffic to your website.

Question and Answer Platforms like Quora

Quora is one of the best platforms to imbibe video content that will help populate comments or discussions on the forums. Quora is ranked in the Top 500 by Alexa ranking.

Getting results:

Usually Q&A forums, like videos a lot and it is much appreciated. People genuinely prefer posting video answers, you can add a link to your website in the video and you will be astonished to see your traffic grow.

Video-answers-in-stories

What to expect:

Significant increase in the generated traffic –

  • 100M unique monthly visitors on Quora
  • 15M users on Yahoo answers on a daily basis

Emails

The recent Conductor research states that 51% of people discover new websites through emails. Most email providers do not support videos in emails. The use of the word “Video” in the email subject line boosts open rates up to 19%, increased click through rates up to 65%. It has greatly reduced unsubscribe rate by 26%.

Getting results

These are the 3 powerful methods that can help using Video in the email

  • Taking the risk. Including the video in the body of email using html5. It will only be visible to iOS, Outlook.com, Apple Mail and Thunderbird users. Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook do not support the videos.
  • Creative Step. Make use of GIFs, it is the best option to use if you want your video to be displayed to all popular email clients. GIF images are better than the static images and it’s easy to convert to GIF making use of ImgFlip, GifLike or Gifsoup.
  • Classical Step. Add “PLAY” button to a static picture and send the user to your landing page where the video is embedded.

What to Expect

  • More backlinks, 41% increased sharing and forwarding of a content.
  • 24% increased conversion.

 

Social Media

Social Media is one of the most powerful means that has made video trends more popular. Technologies like Live 360 and VR have been tested there. According to 2016 reports, Facebook and Snapchat received 8 and 7 billion video views respectively on a daily basis. Instagram saw 5 million video uploads in the first 24 hours of availability of the function.

Getting results

It is highly important to react to new video trends and analyze the responses. The infographics are a great means to show the most liked trends followed by marketers.

What to Expect

Social Media show amazing results with 7 times more shares on Facebook and 6 times more retweet.

YouTube

Tubular insights reports that, 68% of YouTube users made a purchase decision after watching the video. The review trend continues to show thrust for bloggers and advertisers alike. Google loves YouTube for the sheer reason people love videos and it is their own product. The videos appear in 20% rich snippets.

Getting results

  • Follow the YouTube Trend – Make use of Trends Map, Trends Dashboard, Trends blog
  • Search “Video keywords” the show YouTube results right on the first page of Google.

Examples: How to, Reviews, Tutorial, Sport related (Morning Yoga), Funny videos

  • Make use of the keywords in the filename, it is highly important to use keywords in the Title and Description. Use keywords in the first 25 words and repeat it throughout for 3-4 times.
  • Adding links to your website and profile description.
  • Engage in comments for active discussions, they are good signals for search engines.
  • Analyzing the video positions to check the ranking.

What to Expect

  • 50% Increased chances of appearing on first page
  • 41% high clickthrough rates compared to plain text.

Following are few things worth taking note of:

Mobile – During the 2012-2014 study, mobile video views rate increased by 400%. Almost 48% of Gen Y watch videos only on mobile devices. Hence, it is important to optimize the videos embedded on your pages

Speed – While adding videos to your site, you have to make sure that the load time doesn’t increase. There are higher chances of conversions with less loading time.

Tone Friendliness – 83% consumers reported to having found informal voice, more like a friend talking to them. This adds trust and a sense of connection to the communication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ideas to implement video in your Digital Marketing Strategy

Categories
Ecommerce Technology
Top Google Adwords Conversion Rate chart

The chart gives information on conversion rates in AdWords from AdWords management platform – Wordstream. If you are looking for paid search marketing, this chart will surely give you an idea of the conversion rates while making a business strategy. The different tests show you the rates that are very specific to the markets, the type of the keywords and the proposition.

average-conversion-rates-2016-adwords-550x699The above chart is published by Wordstream. The report is based on the US based Wordstream client accounts in different verticals; the total research was conducted with a sample of 2,367 clients. The different verticals represented a total of $34.4 million in the total Adwords Spend that were advertising on Google Adwords Search and Display networks in the Q2 2015. The different sectors covered includes Auto, Advocacy, B2B, Consumer Services, E-Commerce, Finance and Insurance, Employment services, Education, Dating and Personals, Health and Medical, Industrial services, Home Goods, Real Estate, Legal, Travel & Hospitality, Technology.

Conversion Averages for previous AdWords conversion rate data

All the results are true averages, the summary of previous recordings is stated below:

  1. Average conversion rate for search network in Q3 2012 was 5.63%
  2. Average conversion rate from display network in Q3 2012 was 4.68%
  3. Travel Industry had the lowest conversion rates
  4. Internet/Telecoms have highest conversion rates for search and display
  5. Display networks generate 5 times the volume of impressions but only 1/5 of the clicks compared to search network.
  6. According to Wordstream, it suggested an average of 2% to 5% paid search clickthrough rates for competitive industries and 5% click through rate for non-competitive industries slotting for top positions.

 

Top Google Adwords Conversion Rate chart

Categories
E-commerce Website Ecommerce
8 Tools to Spy on your Competitors

Are you competent or feel that something is missing in your Business Marketing framework? If so, here is whirlpool of info that will help you go ahead with better and better results. Businesses that understand their customer pain points, know their target audiences and buyer personas are undoubtedly already doing well in marketing business game. But there is still something amiss here! And that is to thoroughly investigate how your competition is doing and how they do it. You will be glad to know that you can actually investigate what your competitors are doing by Spying on them. It doesn’t cost anything, in fact gives you a clue of what you should be doing.

One way is to analyze your competitors’ website by searching their backlinks, email marketing funnels, and research the kind of paid and organic search keywords they focus on. Given below are some of the tools that will help you spy on your competitors:

  • Sortd – If you are looking to check what is happening around you, it is presumed that you are doing best to stay on par with what is latest. But mind you, just a simple subscription to email marketing lists is not enough. You need to scatter your glances just everywhere you can think of. Subscribe to all email lists that includes cheat sheets, free ebooks, challenges and training. Study your competitors email sequences and cross-references that you are already doing. Evaluate every aspect of the product you like by checking on the material, quality, any weak points that you can improve on.
    The only demerit of this is that it may quickly fill up your inbox, you can use tools like Sortd that will help you streamline new subscriptions and alerts and also helpful in organizing to-do lists and follow-ups.
  • SEMRush – This is a very special tool that helps you research the keyword your competitors are already using. This tool helps you spy on your competitors’ blog posts, websites and ad keywords that help you study the best ones that are giving results. Choose the best one that will show you effective results for your company. SEMRush helps you find the keyword that is generating huge traffic. Scanning through all this information will help you craft the type of content that you need to write and target the markets.
  • Social Media – Social Media is the best tool that helps to see what your competition is up to. But there is something deeper than meets the eye and the layman users would not know about it. Scroll through the Twitter Feeds and Facebook pages, social mention uses the keywords that you may be looking for and it shows you the conversation that is going on in Social media and the way trends are moving.
  • Quick Sprout – The Competitor analysis tool from Quick Sprout helps to figure out the websites that are similar to yours. The information will help you to shape your strategy and the means to outreach them in search engine results. The tool also helps to gain insight on estimated traffic scores, SEO scores and Social Network Shares that show which businesses are and could be your competition.

Along with what is stated above, pay attention to speed scores. Almost 47% of users need faster load time of 2 seconds or less. 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. You need to really gear up if competitor’s website is running faster than yours.

  • Monitor Backlinks – The tool helps to check the links with your competitors. It helps to enhance your SEO thereby improving the search reach. Monitor Backlinks is a tool that helps to check the quality links that your competitor gets. This will give you the clue of which businesses would backlink your business or have an interest in your products or services. It is one of the best tools while conducting competitive link analysis.

Monitor Backlinks gives alerts when backlinks are posted to your own site, this is the best means to actively engage with the blogger, build relationships and share the content. You can also check if the backlinks are removed so that you can keep pace with ongoing changes in your marketing efforts.

  • Import.io – Data mining is one of the best means to get information on multiple things. Import.io is an important tool that is helpful in extracting the data from webpages and use the information for lead generation, price monitoring and market research. The benefit here is that you can extract and process the data from multiple URLs at the same time that will give you bigger picture idea of the competition.
  • Similar Web – Similar Web is the tool that helps to get a glimpse on the online marketing strategies that are being followed by your competitors. The Similar Web dashboard gives a view on referring sites, display advertising, search the traffic. The information will give you a better view of competitor’s monthly traffic estimates and the engagement, the tool helps to keep a track on organic and paid traffic.
  • LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a professional platform and can provide infinite information on competition businesses. Make use of follow-up feature that helps to keep tabs on competition and the postings that they do. The LinkedIn Pulse helps to find out information where they are blogging and information about their products or services. You can find all the information here that could benefit you.

 

8 Tools to Spy on your Competitors

Categories
Ecommerce Technology
Top Ecommerce Trends to include in your Marketing Strategy

For a successful e-commerce marketing results, it is highly important to have a good marketing strategy and you need to start planning for it now. As Ecommerce continues to grow at rapid speed, the markets are ramping up with faster ecommerce growth than initially targeted. It will eventually lead to more dissatisfaction amongst customers, losing out on leads and non-satisfactory UX. To avoid this trauma, it’s highly important to stay in tune with the fierce market competition. The mega global trends have huge implications and are not going to be grounded too soon. The marketers will have to integrate latest trends in their planning with a focused approach taking into consideration analytics and great optimization techniques in an effective manner.

Planning-for-digital-marketing-most-effective-550x444

Given below are few of the greatest trends that can be included in your marketing campaign for fastest results:

Trend 1
Asia specific eCommerce progression

US-ecommerce-Sales-growth-chart

Primarily, US were the only one that was driving eCommerce market growth, now it has become a global phenomenon. US, is still the most significant partner driving the business growth globally. The chart shows how US eCommerce annual growth has continuously seen explosion in the past 15 years. The growth rate is still very strong and isn’t too far from the market saturation so the sales are just beginning to plateau. This is in absolute contrast with Asian markets where eCommerce markets will see astounding growth. The below chart shows China driving overall growth including that accounts for over all global eCommerce sales. The sales are expected to double from present day till the year 2019 that will add $1 trillion of additional sales in the next three years.

The Keynote:
Asia’s ecommerce growth has great potential, however to take advantage of Ecommerce boom they will need to go International with their ecommerce. The best part of ecommerce business is that you don’t have to have any physical stores and with easier inter-country business relations it has become easier to enter new countries.

Trend 2
Rise in Mobile users but are they really contributing to eCommerce growth

Session-by-devices-revenue-by-device-550x391

There has been a massive shift in the mobile use in the last five years and it continues to show increasing trend towards mobile web traffic. But it is surprising to know that a big chunk of customers aren’t really happy with mobile shopping. Wolfgang digital analyses state this fact with 80 million website sessions and online revenue worth €230 million. Out of a total 59% of all sessions by device, there was only 38% revenue through the mobile browsers. Desktops have higher conversion rates while mobiles are basically used for research purposes. The difference came in larger quantity with high cost purchases like holidays that made up to 41% of traffic on desktop and dominated sales bought 67% in revenues.

So basically, it can be summarized that mobile users cannot be ignored. They make their major buying, researching decisions on smartphones they than actually log on to desktop for making the purchase. Wolfgang’s study found a strong correlation between high percentages of mobile and overall website conversion rates.

The Keynote:
On average households have 7.4 internet connected devices, so a user is a mobile user at particular moment and the desktop user the next. An excellent mobile UX may help mobile users convert without switching to desktop. The main focus should be to provide seamless user experience in all buying decisions a customer makes.
The key strategy that can be used here is to send an email of all items that the user browsed on the mobile there by giving the user best possible getaway to convert.

Trend 3
Growing Ecommerce competence

Every year brings new challenges and innovations. The startups are entering the markets and bigger retail outlets are turning to ecommerce markets to rake in online sales boom. The Martech 2016 by Scott Brinker clearly shows a big explosion in mar-tech tools.

massive-growth-in-marketing-tools

The growing competition will pose a serious threat for ecommerce marketers in the year 2017. Mark Schaefer point out that the real problem would be for anyone who is using content marketing that includes big amount of eCommerce companies.

The Keynote:
The trends show historical win for ecommerce marketer although competition and content shock are undoubtedly a serious threat. Marketers will have to come up with the best exclusive content to stand out in the year 2017 and if they cannot manage that, moving to other focused marketing approaches may be the best bet.

For successful eCommerce marketing with a dominating content shock world, marketer will have to employ innovative model. The 70:20:10 model will help shape content marketing strategy with 70% of time focused on effectiveness, 20% on innovating new content and 10% time on risk project that could potentially be a major payoff.

Trend 4
Subscription based Business Models

SaaS based business models are pioneers in the subscription based model and have been highly effective to businesses and consumers. It offers greater flexibility to consumers and the recurring revenues are a win-win situation for both the parties. This has amazingly led to its massive growth in the past ten years and would continue as we proceed for 2020.

The subscription based models need not be limited to software. The last few years have seen ecommerce businesses providing physical product on subscription than paying for a single fee during the purchase. The pretty good example of this is, the dollar shave club which was founded in the year 2011, today it is worth $615 million.

There should a strong focus on retention with constant efforts and investments in improving the product. It could be very tempting at first to focus on getting more conversions, but if you neglect them, customers will go elsewhere. Industries are already ripe for disruptions from successful e-commerce sites and looking for economy wide trends and this is set to continue further.

The Keynote:
It is best to sell your product through a subscription model. The millennial’s high disposable incomes would mean more cash for subscription but lower wealth would mean there is never a chance for big one-off purchase option. So there is never going to be a better time to sell your product through a subscription based model.

Trend 5
Growth of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial-intellegence-start-up-funding-700x371

It’s pretty much a new trend so it is hard to make any predictions. The availability of more consumer data has increased the ability to target the customers but that doesn’t mean increase in effectiveness. Marketers can get caught up sometimes with big market speaks and buzzwords but fail to see what a consumer sees. What “big-data” actually means to customers is getting served the ads of products that they have already bought. Cracking the targeting is a big challenge and that is where the role of Artificial Intelligence comes in. The funding cost for AI has seemingly increased over the past three years. The year 2017 will most serve the best AI resources that combine genuine intelligence with data. The analytics and tracking software will get smarter, this will help target the ads and help in personalization strategy.

Trend 6
Chatbots

Chatbots have bought a huge change in the way customer ever communicated with brands. The important trends like big data, VR, AI and IoT have already been around for some time now. Chatbots have been around since before 2016 and it has grown huge in popularity.

Chatbots help to automate repetitive tasks over the Internet. It also includes different applications. The latest bots are built to help marketer, they act like a human helper without actually hiring a human.

The Keynote –
Chatbots are emerging technological tools so do not invest in it only because it’s the latest. Do your own market research and know what is really needed. It has a huge potential for growth, it will soon become a norm before experimental phase passes away. E-Commerce businesses will soon start utilizing Chatbots as the best means to provide to a customer on its Journey.

Trend 7
Shoppable Personalized Video

Shoppable videos are not really new things, it was launched by YouTube way back in the late 2015 but it didn’t take off really well the way it should have been. The simple little pop up cards in a video is an old jargon that any video creators could do. The prediction for future is one of the providers or YouTube will merge the tech and create programme based general personalized videos. There has been a great surge in creating Shoppable and personalized videos that shows a massive change in the manner in which eCommerce marketers are selling through videos.

The Keynote –
The merged tech will offer superior outcomes to eCommerce marketers. Placing the products in the video based on customers’ preference through programming will offer advertisers the outcome they never expected before.

Conclusion

Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing fields and it’s necessary to keep up with the latest trends. Consumers can effortlessly switch from one brand to the other hence it is very important to provide great customer experience and use a great pricing strategy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top Ecommerce Trends to include in your Marketing Strategy

Categories
Ecommerce
The most vital Digital Marketing Tools for 2017

Smartinsights.com brings you the best model to understand the essential digital marketing tools that you need to follow for 2017. Following these marketing tools will essentially showcase how you can use marketing technology in the best optimum way.

Marketers are profoundly fortunate today to have huge number of freely available tools giving insights to the customers, the markets and competitors. The latest tools help us to compete by helping us deliver relevant and real time communications that are integrated across desktop and mobile digital marketing channels.

The below infographic highlights good range of options including marketing technology, it’s a Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework that helps to manage digital marketing. You can review the tools and use the best ones that suit your requirements.

The infographic shows enormous amount of marketing tools that helps improve the quality of your marketing efforts. There are numerous freely available online tools that can give you insights about our customers, competitors and markets. The digital edge gives us the advantage of automated real time communications integrated process across desktop, mobile and digital plus marketing channels.

 

The most vital Digital Marketing Tools for 2017

Categories
Ecommerce
Knowing three Cs of Search Engine Optimization

With social marketing at its highest grade, it’s become important to know in and out of SEO basics before you start doing one or get it done. SEO definitely has huge ranging benefit if you are looking forward to get more visibility on search engines. Given below are the important 3Cs, core concepts to keep in mind for a successful SEO strategy:

Content

Content is indeed the market king when it comes to online texts. HTML Text is highly important on the key pages to get higher visibility on search engines. Search engine spiders are programmed to check for codes in the images, text or flash animation. If there is no code attached, it will never know what it depicts. Even the sites with frames are difficult to get traced by spider since they cannot locate multiple frames and can only index single frame.

Website indexing means the spider looks for HTML text that is understood. It is highly important to embed the target phrases on a regular basis. You can use the phrases in the headline, body and at the bottom of the page. You can emphasize the phrases in the body of the text by making it bold, italics, underlined or giving it a hyperlink for other relevant content.

Code

Often times, the source code behind website is quite larger and clumsy because of the propagation of the use of database driven CMS editors. The web spiders may get difficultly to deal with certain programming languages like Javascript which actually makes building and managing the website easier. To ensure that the site is properly indexed, you need to make sure that the website is designed according to acceptable Web Standards.

Complying with web standards would mean that the site is accessible to wide ranging browsers and speed; this will directly enhance the visitor experience. For source code optimization, make sure that every page has keyword optimized title, ALT tags and META tags. The keyword phrases should be similar to the ones that you used for body of the content. Even domains with keywords are great beneficiaries.

Credibility

There may be times when you use keyword phrase reasonable number of times in the body and tags of a particular page and the result would not show your page even in the first 100. Why? There are certain elements that affect the way search engines functions. You need to build credibility to push yourself on the top from the noisy competition below. You can build your credibility by acquiring links from relevant industrial sites that are popular and search your target terms. The more relevancy and popularity the linked site has, you get higher link credibility with the search engine.

The best way to gauge the success of your SEO campaign is to monitor and analyze the traffic of the site. You can make use of freely available tools on Internet that will tell you which phrases generates the traffic from search engines. The above 3 Cs of SEO will most likely give you increased search engine visibility and outreach.

 

Knowing three Cs of Search Engine Optimization

Categories
Ecommerce
Universal Social Media Research summary for the year 2017

Social networks are far and wide popular and are the key means for marketing, business and networking purposes. The trends don’t easily change, but the popular sites does show different level of usage based on demographics. Smartinsights.com brings the newest social media statistics relating to consumer adoption and usage.

Social Media 2017 update

Given below are some of the questions that social Marketers should check into while deciding on how much time to invest in social media.

Question – Most Popular Social network

The Statista compilation of the most popular social network undoubtedly shows Facebook is ruling the media. Facebook has over 1,870 million active users and holds a total of 18% market share and its closest competitor is Facebook owned Whatsapp.

APAC favored platforms accounts for a total of over 600 million active users with QQ standing at 9% and WeChat at 8% and Qzone at 7%. The western social media networks stands with Tumblr at 6%, Instagram at 4% and Twitter at 4%.

Facebook is leading with major market share and retaining huge lead. The penetration rate stood at 89% for US users and Instagram stood at 32% in the penetration rate.

Question – Fastest growing Social network

twitters_user_growth_in_perspective_n-550x392

A Marketer has very limited time when it comes to marketing in social networks. So basic question is which network to focus on? Statista chart shows the growth of Twitter and how it compares to Facebook, WeChat and Whatsapp.

Question – Most Engaging Social network

The most important factor that matters in social media marketing is the total amount of audience engagement. Facebook enjoys the dominance when it comes to social engagement.

Social-media-engagement-UK-Facebook-vs-Twitter-vs-LinkedIn-vs-vs-Instagram-vs-Snapchat-550x289

According to US Consumer panel from comScore – Facebook has biggest engagement. The update also shows UK comparing Facebook vs Twitter vs Instagram vs Pinterest vs Snapchat. This chart especially demonstrates the engagement on the amount of time spent on platforms with the demographics. It’s amazingly great to see Facebook at top position and interesting to note the development of Snapchat and Instagram on monthly usage per visitors. Facebook’s successors are also impressively at 47 penetration rate for Facebook messenger and Instagram for its engagement, they are both Facebook owned platforms.

Question – Interaction rates in Social Media

social-engagment-

TrackMaven’s analyses of over 51 million posts from 40000 companies from over 130 industries clearly shows Instagram dominating all others counting on the number of interactions per 1,000 followers. The number is so high that it required second chart to demonstrate the big differences between Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn-Engagement--700x430

Instagram dominates the lead in interactions but Facebook tops it when it comes to networks like Twitter and LinkedIn. People tend to frequently post on Twitter since it doesn’t follow any algorithm serving posts only to particular section of audience. Twitter actually acts like fire hose of content, companies keep sharing more often to have more visibility and create noise on the platform. This actually results in low engagement per post.

Question – Global Social Media Usage

smartinsight global digital snapshot

SmartInsights.com brings an exclusive summary of Social Media and Mobile stats from WeAreSocial Singapore, the records are mainly extracted from GWI. Global Web Index provides the most reliable research statistics that helps to compare consumer use and engagement on different social networks. Researches are done on a quarterly basis for which the total sample size is 40,000 of Internet research program.

Annual-growth-in-social-media-2017-stats-550x277

It is interesting to note the massive difference amongst different countries when it comes to the use of social media and more so interesting to see the western countries are lagging behind when it comes to adoption rates. The Annual increase in growth rate of mobile users stood at 17% in 2016.

Annual-Growth-in-Asia-Pacific-Social-Media-Stats-2017-550x278

The Asia-Pacific region showed good internet usage rate and the number of active social media users increased by 14% in 2015 alone.

Internet-Use-regional-overviews-550x270

Counting on the global internet users, East Asian and South Asian markets have remarkably hit the tide. With digital innings, it has become easier to reach out to these people although cultural challenges are always the hurdle in International markets.

Social networks popularity (country-wise)

2015-Social-network-popularity-by-country-550x395

Based on the interviews in the GWI reports, it shows great visualization when it comes to popularity of social networks. Countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Mexico, India and Brazil are amongst the top 10 countries that tops the list for using four core social networks (facebook, twitter, YouTube and Google plus.

Demographic-use-of-social-networks-age-and-gender-550x326

Social networks are strikingly showing signs of maturity giving opportunities for people of all age groups and genders; the only exception is Instagram and Tumblr that are more popular among the younger age group.

Universal Social Media Research summary for the year 2017

Categories
Ecommerce
Latest SEO trends for better rankings

SEO is a capricious industry because Google Algorithm keeps changing ever so often and with every update brings new changes. It keeps evolving every day; this strongly boosts the power at which SEO specialists are tuning up with the updates. Given below is the best guide for SEO managers to stay on par amongst related SEO business:

  1. Optimization for Rich Answers

Optimize for rich answer

As it is, aiming for top position in Google searches is a good idea; today more focus is being laid on Rich Answers too. The research by Stone Temple Consulting states that rich answers appear on 19.45% of total searches on Google. The number may not seem too high at present but looking at the scale at which it is growing, it shall surely increase in the future. Google has made it very clear that it will provide value to its users by giving them relevant information through rich answers.

   2. Reviewing other Content on Google

Mozcast Google Feature review is the tool where it features other types of content within the Google results. Rich answers are mentioned here as “featured snippets”. Other similar feature available is “Related questions” this features explicably shows how articles should try covering the questions. Other than these, videos and images are other ways through which SERPs rank better.

    3. Improving the user engagement

Although the speculation is very ripe about user engagement a possible element, which influence the ranking factor but it merely has too indirect influence on search rankings. Eventually, it is up to the website owners to optimize the sites if they are really looking forward for good results. There are other factors that include average time spent on the site, the bounce rates, pogo sticking and more. Lack of data is one of the most thumbing factors that make it difficult to measure search engine success.

Matt Banner from OnBlastBlog.com states that User engagement is of prime importance in the present day. According to him, the user is going to spend more time if he enjoys the website. They will visit more pages and hence contribute to low bounce rates for overall site and these are the people which are more likely to visit your website again. He further states that the positive elements of the website will help Google rank the website higher since if the user likes the website, there are likely chances for Google also finds it beneficial.

   4. Optimization of Mobile App

Mobile Markets are getting bigger by the day, Google’s Mobile friendly update – Mobilegeddon encourages the site owners to develop responsive designs that helps increase the loading speed of the mobile devices. A good loading speed will ensure more retention of users on the website. eMarketer figures show stunning rise in mobile ads and Google will play significant role delivering the content to the mobile users through app store optimization. App Indexing is one the latest developments that will make an impact on how pages are ranked for targeted keywords.

    5. Google’s guidelines

Google’s guidelines keeps evolving based on the changes and the way people it. Here is the brief of the search guidelines stated by the Google:

  1. High quality standards are set on YMYL pages. Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages are pages that include financial information pages, shopping transaction pages, medical information pages, legal information pages and other such similar sites. Low quality YMYL pages can give negative impact one’s health and happiness while high quality standard pages are directly linked to future happiness, health and wealth of the users. Hence, higher importance is given to create useful pages under this term.
  2. High quality content is expected from E-A-T sources that is Expertise/Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness. It can be acquired through accreditation. For example, medical information must come from accredited or authorized medical personnel.
  3. Mobile pages are evaluated based on their optimization for mobile viewing and the satisfaction that they provide to the users about their search query.

These points stated by Google give perfect guidance to improve the usability of your mobile site and become an influencing factor in your niche. You can build your identity and authority as a subject matter expert in the industry; this will help in getting trust from your audiences.

Launching an influencer marketing campaign helps the brand to establish an online visibility. After establishing your online visibility you can build yourself as an Authority depending on different factors like site’s domain authority, its social proof, blog comments and more.

Latest SEO trends for better rankings

Categories
Ecommerce
Organic vs PPC: Top 7 Viewpoint from consumers

Investing in Organic SEO needs a lot of justification in terms of time and money spent. The mutual fact internally known to consumers as well as marketers is that customers don’t trust ads, they believe in Organic search results that have more likeability of being clicked.

organic vs ppc1

Given below are some infographics from 1,000 respondents from a SEO survey that was recently done:

  • The search results are deeply concentrated on the type of queries asked put on a Google search.

informational query

  • The relevancy at which Organic search results are portrayed.

  • Consumers largely notice the ads trolling them on every network they get logged in.

remarketing

  • Personalization plays a key role in defining how consumers think they get results through searches made on Google.

  • This is the behavior of the audience when they see organic result and a paid ad.

  • People reflect on the results they get through organic searches made.

Ranking is undoubtedly good for your business. A measly 28% of people feel organic results are more reputable than Ads so it clarifies that PPC ads are not that bad after all.

 

Organic vs PPC: Top 7 Viewpoint from consumers

Categories
Technology
Top Digital Marketing Trends for the new era

Today, there are several techniques that are used in Digital Marketing world to market your products and services. Let’s look at some of the Digital Marketing Trends that are fast catching up:

  1. The Big Data Marketing applications give a predictive analysis into the customer insights. This is the trend that is followed by many people globally because they have experienced increase in the volume of sales, data formats and the real time data.
  2. Marketing Automation includes the use of tools like behavioral email marketing, CRM and the web personalization.
  3. Mobile Marketing is fast catching up with the brands with increase in the use of mobile app and mobile advertising. Companies are providing an adaptive mobile design that helps to reduce the load time and provide contextual content and CTAs for the users.
  4. Social Media marketing is a growing field where CRM and social customer care plays a vital role. The huge audience engagement happens with the efforts put by social networking sites to increase their popularity.
  5. Internet marketing applications has fast caught up in the recent years targeting different market segments. According to the research, there are going to be over 75 billion connected devices by the year 2020.
  6. The Internet has seen huge increase in AMP smartphone traffic since the time Google rolled out AMPs. Hence, smartphone app development is the big trend.
  7. The Digital marketing has found new ways to reach audiences and with wearable tech it has come a long way. The digital Apple watch and activity trackers have laid strong foundation in the manner in which marketing was ever done.
  8. Paid search marketing through Google Adwords and online PR is intimately linked with Content Marketing, social media and SEO. These tools have played a major role in digital marketing world showcasing a huge impact on the entire industry.

Digital Marketing trends 2017

The Digital Marketing world has bought amazing opportunities for marketers and businesses to grow their sales and increase their audiences online.

Top Digital Marketing Trends for the new era

Categories
Ecommerce
The Branding Prophecies for the year 2017

The branding practices are going to main stream markets across B2B and B2C business models. Here are some of the Branding predictions by the experts:

  1. Howard Belk, Co-CEO (Chief Creative Officer) of Legacy Brands – The focus on process improvements will drive down the costs, thus introducing new mobile channels. The established brands will offer simple, transparent, easy utility approach that will surely enhance customer value proposition.
  2. Thom Wyatt, Managing Director – According to Thom, the US unemployment has led for intensified talent search. The company’s work role will help identify talents that become a person’s identity. Employees require diversified stats, purpose, value and social responsibility metrics to provide the cultural glue for a workforce.
  3. Leesa Wytock, Senior Director (Experience) – Leesa stresses the importance of shift to digital experiences focusing on empathy. The trend shifts from delivery platforms like AI, chat bots, VR experiences to more emotional and interactive impact. The brand employees will experience elevation of employee training, onboarding experience and varied manners in which they will be empowered to be the frontrunners for brands as the Brand Ambassadors.
  4. Brian Rafferty, Global Director (Business Analytics & Insights) – The emerging disruptive brands will move their focus from traditional processes to examine how they can evolve and grow their brand valuation. With the business price wars, the companies are targeting innovative approaches to capture loyalty.
  5. Christian Turner, Global Director (Naming) – According to Turner, as technology is rapidly moving and the global perception of having lost the human touch will keep driving  naming trend. The main question that will haunt brands is how human or how artificial we want our technologies to be?
  6. Maria Boos, Group Director (Simplification) – Maria shares her view on real time messaging platforms like Slack, these platforms will completely change the way we collaborate and share ideas. It will enhance greater collaboration amongst interdisciplinary groups and multiple locations. The use of Slack messaging platform will help reduce the dependency on email communications.
  7. Lauren Thebault, Director (Activation) – as the tools to branding keep becoming outdated, there is going to be growing importance for creating opportunities that will facilitate quick absorption of content through seamless engagement.

The Internet trends keep changing and thus the technologies. For a marketer, it is highly important to follow best practices for profitable business.

 

The Branding Prophecies for the year 2017

Categories
Technology
How to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Online Store

It’s all too familiar a story.

You’ve created a beautiful online store and you’re carrying products that you know people will love but the only problem is, no one is coming to your store.

Why is that? There could be several reasons but one of them is probably because you’re not doing a good enough job of actively driving visitors to your site.

In this video, we’ll show you six practical and proven ways, that you can use, to drive traffic to your online store today.

Easily build your online store with Shopify’s ecommerce software. Sign up for your 14 day free trial:

http://goo.gl/vrfy0R

How to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Online Store

Categories
Ecommerce
Facebook Business Page Likes may drop

Attention Facebook Page Managers, be prepared to lose page likes in the coming weeks and explain to your boss/clients the reasons why? Because to make data more meaningfull Facebook announced on removing all deactivated accounts from the page check out from the source

Facebook Announcement

Continue reading “Facebook Business Page Likes may drop”

Facebook Business Page Likes may drop

Categories
Technology
Online E-commerce Portals driving the Real Estate boom in India!

With the Indian E-commerce market reaching nearly $20 billion in 2015, one of the many challenges facing this industry is space crunch. Any lay man would think this as impossible considering that the e-commerce industry is completely based on online buying and selling, and retail property should form a miniscule of the cost for the company. However, with the Indian user going online to buy every single item – be it grocery, washing machine or even furniture; the warehouse requirements of these companies are increasing at an unbelievable pace.

E-Commerce- Real Estate
E commerce Giants to absorb big Real Estate this year
Continue reading “Online E-commerce Portals driving the Real Estate boom in India!”

Online E-commerce Portals driving the Real Estate boom in India!

Categories
Ecommerce

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