How to Start and Run a Digital Marketing Agency Business in 2022

No matter where you live and how old you are, starting a digital marketing agency is one of the hardest ways to make a living in this day and age. However, doing that isn’t as hard as running it – this is where you’ll show your clients, users, and business partners whether you’re worthy of their attention and investments or not. This is why you have to invest all your time, energy, and patience into the process of keeping your agency alive. In case that’s something you’d like to do in 2022 as well, here are a few ideas and suggestions you might want to take into consideration. 

Make sure you know what you’re doing

Before you start your business, you need to do a lot of thinking and figuring out what you want to accomplish with it. Lots of people get into digital marketing simply because they’ve heard that this is a lucrative industry and they believe that they can make a lot of money in it without investing too much time and energy first. But, this isn’t true, and you need to remember that digital marketing is very demanding and hard, which is why you have to make sure this is truly what you want to do in life – before you actually start doing it.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do this, and the best way to figure out whether the digital market is a fit choice for you or not is by actually starting a marketing agency and trying to make it work. Don’t be afraid to think about lots of different things – from the competition in your region to the different areas of marketing that might work for you – before you make your decision, and make sure you stick to it afterward.

Find your niche

Speaking of different areas of marketing you might consider, this is another major decision you’ll have to make before you start your company. With so many different options out there and so many different people doing the same things, you’re doing and offering the same services, being unique and memorable can be harder than you can imagine. But, if you find the right niche and do whatever it takes to make a career in it, you might become more successful than you’ve expected.

Doing this as soon as possible is a must, particularly if you’re planning to start your business soon. Of course, defining your niche beforehand makes more sense than doing that after launching your company, but don’t be afraid if you end up choosing your mind. In case you realize that the niche you’ve picked isn’t working for you, don’t wait any longer and make sure you’ve changed it before it’s too late.

Assemble the right crew

Doing everything on your own isn’t easy, especially if you’re trying to maximize your business potential. If you insist on doing things yourself, you won’t be able to take your company to the top and make it as successful as it can be. Therefore, hiring the right people and making sure all your employees are happy with their jobs is crucial for the future of your business in this industry. However, this also means you’ll have to invest quite a lot of energy and patience into building the right HR team that will take care of these issues for you and find the right people for every position.

Hiring all these people could end up being quite costly and impossible to bear, which is why looking into apprenticeship ideas might be a great alternative. Apprentices might help you more than you can imagine, particularly if they’re motivated to learn new things and update their skills. You might even check out useful adult apprenticeships that will get you in touch with people who are over the age of 21 and know what they want in life, but, even more importantly, know a few things about the industry and how to find your place in it. These sorts of apprentices could help you quite a lot, especially when it comes to the financial aspect of this arrangement, so be sure to check it out as soon as you can. 

Keep looking for new clients

After you’ve set up your business and made sure it’s up and running, there’s one more thing you have to do – constantly keep finding new work. Even if you’re satisfied with your workload and your income, you shouldn’t become complacent and lose your focus. Instead, you should keep looking for new clients and trying to find new people who might be interested in your services because you never know what tomorrow brings.

Finding new clients might not be the easiest thing in the world, but if you know what to do and where to look, you won’t have a problem doing that. Start by defining your target audience and figuring out how to expand it, and then keep widening the scope and redefining the targeting criteria. This will help you reach more and more people in the future and reach those you haven’t reached yet – and that’s the best way to run your business!

Making it in the world of digital marketing isn’t easy, but it’s doable, and, even more importantly, it’s exciting and adventurous. Running an agency will challenge you on every possible level, both professionally and personally, but try not to give up until you’ve reached the heights you’ve dreamed of reaching!

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5 Tips to Better Manage Your Marketing Expenses and Optimize Your Finances

Digital marketing is a fundamental process any growth-oriented company should invest in for expansion and to achieve various goals. Given the fact that digital marketing is significantly less expensive than traditional marketing, but at the same time much more effective, it only stands to reason that you should double down on your digital strategy in order to take your company forward in 2021 and beyond. That said, we can’t pretend that digital marketing does not require a notable financial investment.

For companies operating on a limited budget, digital marketing can quickly drain them of financial resources, especially if you invest in the wrong tactics at the wrong time. Some marketing strategies like content marketing are never wrong, but you could be implementing them in a way that makes your marketing department bleed money. To put a stop to this, you have to start managing your marketing expenses efficiently and effectively.

Let’s take a look at the five tips that will help you optimize your marketing expenses and run a much more cost-effective operation. 

Start with a list of your marketing expenses

First things first, in order to get a hold of your marketing expenses, you have to know exactly how much money you’re investing (or losing) on different marketing tactics, campaigns, and strategies. Your goal is to get a comprehensive overview of your marketing spending, but also to delve deep into each marketing tactic you employ to see how much money it’s wasting and how you can plug each financial leak. 

To start, simply make a list of all the marketing tactics and methods you’re currently implementing in your digital strategy. Each of these tactics should have a set of KPIs that you’re monitoring, and these will tell you whether these tactics are delivering the expected results. You can compare their performance with the amount of money you’re pouring into each tactic to see if it’s creating a positive ROI. 

For example, one of the easiest tactics to monitor is PPC, because you can directly monitor the conversions vs how much you’re spending on keeping the ad campaigns going. If people are clicking on your ads but are not converting, you’re losing money, and that’s telling you that you should either pull the campaign or optimize it for higher conversions.

Set clear and attainable marketing goals

Next, you should revise your current marketing goals, optimize them according to your findings, and work on setting new, more attainable goals in the process. The best way to do this is to implement the SMART approach and create marketing goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. 

For example, your goal might be to increase user engagement on your website, but it’s important to put in the SMART parameters to make it financially sensible. The smart model will help you prioritize your spending, but more importantly, allocate the right amount of financial resources to ensure you reach that goal without going over your budget.

Pay less for marketing with tax deductions

Optimizing your marketing expenses is not just about cutting costs or making better financial projections, it’s about managing your taxes, as well. Yes, taxes play a big role here, and being diligent with your tax planning and knowing how to deduct marketing expenses from your taxes can help you save a lot on expensive marketing and advertising strategies. A good example where this is a popular financial tactic would be a highly competitive market like Australia.

In the Land Down Under, business leaders almost always work with an experienced tax accountant in Sydney to figure out which advertising expenses are tax-deductible to reduce the amount of taxable income they report each year. This means that you’re paying less tax, and it allows you to better allocate your finances for marketing purposes.

Of course, no matter the market you’re operating in, you should work with reliable accountants to minimize your expenditure and optimize your tax spending for maximum financial savings. 

Build a comprehensive marketing budget

Managing taxes is an important part of budgeting in general, and you have to manage your budget carefully if you want your marketing campaigns to produce a positive ROI. Unfortunately, business leaders will oftentimes grossly overestimate or underestimate the financial requirements of certain marketing processes.

This leads to setbacks, budget breaches, and general inefficiency that leads to financial waste. Needless to say, this will prevent you from improving customer experience and converting leads into loyal brand advocates. Instead of wasting money, make sure to download a comprehensive marketing budget template, do your research, and start allocating the right amounts to each tactic and process. 

Monitor the right data and optimize expenses

Finally, understand that you can’t optimize or eliminate extraneous expenses if you don’t constantly monitor the performance of your campaigns and make adjustments as you go along. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal, and it’s important to stay on top of your spending, collect the relevant data, and keep optimizing your investments.

Make sure to use a centralized dashboard where you can oversee all your KPIs and goals, and monitor how much you’re spending on each marketing tactic vs how much you’re gaining in the short, mid, and long term. 

Over to you

Digital marketing is essential for business success, but it can only yield the desired results if you optimize your spending and allocate finances towards the right tactics and strategies. Be sure to use these tips to better manage your marketing expenses and keep your company financially stable no matter which marketing and advertising tactics you invest in 2021.

5 Effective Techniques to Become a High-Level Marketing Manager in 2021

Managers are high-performing individuals in modern business that often wear many hats, balance many projects, and manage one or more teams. A marketing manager is, without a doubt, a person that has to keep numerous balls in the air at all times and use their skills, experience, and innovative thinking to bring amazing ideas and tactics to life. Needless to say, the professional life of a marketing manager can be a difficult and taxing one, but you can achieve better results with little to no stress if you adopt the right mindset, implement the best practices, and dedicate yourself to continuous improvement.

After all, the work of a marketing manager is never done. In this age of marketing personalization, remote work, and digital omnichannel experiences, a marketing manager becomes the glue that keeps the company together and delivers better results with each campaign. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Here are the five techniques you can start using yourself to become a high-level marketing manager and push your company to new heights of success in 2021.

Work on improving your analytical skills

High-level marketing managers that take entire organizations forward in the digital world are visionaries, dreamers, creatives, but they’re also calculated, prudent, financially savvy, and very analytical. In the work of high-level marketing management, you can’t define yourself just as a creative, or just as an analytical person – you need to be both, and you need to be able to wear many hats with ease. 

After all, your team members want to work with a leader that understands them and their processes, a person who can guide them and help them achieve their goals. You can’t hope to be an effective marketing leader if you don’t understand all aspects of your marketing department, especially the analytical side.

With that in mind, you have to make sure that you understand various analytical functions like estimation and allocation of budgets, targeting and segmentation, omnichannel tracking and management, forecasting and strategic planning, and more.

Improve your strategic thinking and decision-making

While different team members focus on the specific tasks, you as the leader and the person behind the vision need to focus on the strategy, the long-term goals and objectives. You need to lead your team towards the desired outcome, and in a very real sense, it all falls on your shoulders. As a high-level marketing manager, it will be up to you to empower and equip your team to achieve the goals and meet the expectations you laid out for them.

For example, improving customer experience can be a short-term, mid-term, and long-term goal, but you need to set the strategy and the micro-goals that will make these objectives a reality. This means that you need to be able to set up, manage, and optimize everything from ad campaigns to content strategies, email campaigns, all the way to social media, possible influencer collaborations, and much more. Most importantly, you need to do all of this with a strategic mindset, laying the groundwork for a positive long-term ROI on each tactic you employ.

Learn to lead an international team

Whether you’re managing a decentralized, international team, or if you’re managing a localized team in another country in person or remotely, you have to be able to connect and engage with them in the most effective way possible. Leading international teams is a cumbersome and complex task, especially when it’s a marketing team where you have numerous creatives and analysts. You need to be able to speak to them in a language they understand best, to achieve the desired results.

For example, if you have marketers from France in your team, you might be tasked with going to the French office to set everything up. Before that happens, you should consider taking some French lessons online so that you can connect and communicate with the local team more effectively. You don’t need to become fluent in the language, but you do need to make the extra effort to engage with your team, and that goes for when you’re communicating with them remotely, as well. 

Elevate your project management skills

Project management is one of the most important, and consequently one of the most complex processes in any company. There’s a reason why project managers are so respected in the modern business world, and when it comes to marketing, companies will pay top dollar to get an experienced project manager on their team.

If you want to become a high-level marketing manager in 2021, then project management needs to be one of your top skills. Every strategy you implement, like an international content marketing strategy or a comprehensive social media campaign, is actually a complex project that you need to set up for success and minimal financial waste.

Improve your collaborative and technical skillset

And lastly, you have to know how to collaborate with your team members to maximize their potential, inspire and motivate them, and facilitate productivity across the board. Managing the people in your team is one of the biggest challenges you will ever face, but it often comes down to setting the right culture that will help you achieve these goals.

As a good manager, you should invest in the right values to motivate your team to love what they do and be passionate about their work. These values should include equality and transparency, collaboration and trust, as well as mutual understanding. 

Over to you 

A marketing manager’s job is not an easy one, especially if your goal is to become a high-level marketing manager, and a leader in this field. That said, these techniques and skills will definitely help you elevate your standing in the industry and become indispensable to your company in 2021 and the years to come. 

Digital Marketing in 2021: What to Implement for Your Small Business

Digital marketing techniques can help your small business succeed in a competitive marketplace. Whether you provide services or sell products, you need a digital marketing strategy that can help you reach your goals. Whether you're launching a new business or already have an established brand, it's essential to learn how small businesses can leverage digital marketing strategies to improve your business growth, strategy, and planning. 

Digital Marketing for Small Businesses 

Digital marketing can help you increase brand awareness and build up qualified leads that can turn into sales. Small businesses often struggle to get noticed because of their lack of time and money. However, with a few simple strategies, you can scale your small business and improve its overall marketing efforts. 

Company Website 

If your company doesn't have a website, there's no better time to create one than right now. While you can develop a website with a developer from scratch, there are affordable solutions for those with all types of skill levels when it comes to web design. If you sell products online, you can use Shopify to build your website. If you want a more robust website, you can use WordPress for all of your needs. 

Your website should be refreshed every few years and when there's new information to share like new products and services or a new phone number or address. Website content can help your customers and audience get to know your company. 

Take a look at your current website. Does it provide users with enough valuable information to know what your business does, where they can find you, how they can contact you, and more?

User Experience 

When it comes to your website, it all comes down to user experience. You can spend all the money in the world creating advertisements that bring people to your website, but if your website doesn't offer a good experience, your potential customers will leave and likely never come back. 

User experience means creating a website that answers your customers' questions and doesn't overcomplicate the process of making a purchase or finding out information.

Ultimately, user experience boils down to the intent of the person visiting your website. Make sure that your website doesn't simply boast how great you are but appeals to your customers' needs and can provide them with information or solutions. 

Search Engine Optimization 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful digital marketing strategy that can help scale small businesses and get them noticed online. It's also one of the most affordable marketing techniques because you don't pay for any advertising. You should, however, work with a knowledgeable SEO expert to ensure that you're doing your SEO right. 

An SEO strategy can help make sure that your customers and clients can find you on search engines like Google, where many people spend most of their time searching for products, services, and information. 

Social Media 

Another affordable part of the digital marketing puzzle is using social media to increase brand awareness and engage with your customers. Different social media platforms are ideal for different businesses depending on your target audience. For example, if you are a health and wellness brand, you'll likely have more success marketing to customers on Instagram than on LinkedIn. However, if you are a B2B company, LinkedIn might be the better option.

On the other side of social media is something called Influencer Marketing. This type of marketing involves using influencers who have dedicated followings to help you market your products. These people are typically seen as thought leaders in specific industries and products, so they provide you with more credibility and open you up to an entirely new audience. 

To get started with influencer marketing, make sure that you have an understanding of the important analytics like comments per post, likes, shares, and overall engagement rate. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing automation can help you better connect with your customers and potential leads. You can obtain emails by offering your target audience something in exchange, like a discount or an e-book with more information. Then, use automation software like MailChimp or Klaviyo to nurture these leads. Email marketing is easy and scalable. Once you have an effective email strategy in place, you can email out promotions, newsletters, and more to keep customers coming back to your website. 

PPC Advertising 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a type of advertising where you pay for every click that comes to your website from an ad. These can be created for search engines or social media. While small businesses can implement a PPC strategy to help boost web traffic and leads, you may need someone more experienced to help you get off the ground. 

PPC is an affordable advertising solution that's cheaper than traditional advertising in print media or online publications, which can cost thousands of dollars for one advertisement. PPC even offers you complete analytics so you can see how your ads are performing and adjust them accordingly. 

Content Marketing 

Content marketing involves using all types of content, from blogging to videos, to market your business. Visual content will improve engagement on social media and your website, making it absolutely necessary, especially for Facebook advertising. 

Ensure that you have a blog that can help customers learn more about certain topics they're interested in. Using videos throughout your site can also help inform and engage customers quickly without asking them to read long-form content. 

Wrapping Up

The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing, which is why it’s essential you know the trends and strategies that can boost engagement and increase traffic to your company. With these six strategies, from content marketing to social media marketing, you’ll be able to attract leads, boost sales, and increase your online presence to grow your brand.

Matt Casadona

Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. He is currently a contributing editor for 365 Business Tips. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys the San Diego life, traveling and music. 

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How Shared Contacts for Gmail Benefit Your Marketing Strategy

Does your company use Google Apps and Gmail to manage its client base? As the number of your customers grows, manually collecting, managing, and sharing customer data via Gmail gets more challenging. 

Even when working on the same projects and with the same customers, your team members have separate address books in the Gmail Contact Manager. They waste their valuable time having to update and share the same contacts individually.

That is because Gmail does not have contact sharing capabilities. That leads to the creation of silos between your marketing, sales, and customer support teams. Consequently, the lack of data centralization creates productivity gaps and inconsistencies in customer service. 

That is where Shared Contacts for Gmail can help. Here is how this tool can benefit your marketing efforts.

What Are Shared Contacts for Gmail?

Shared Contacts for Gmail allows your marketing, sales, and customer service departments to create, update, and share Google Contacts. 

Rather than using separate address books and manually managing data, your teams can bring customer data together in shared, cloud-based address books. 

Shared Contacts for Gmail offers a wide range of features that may benefit your marketing efforts. Some of them are:

• Creating shared address books from various locations, which is crucial to remote teams.

• Defining access permissions in your organization to protect customer data

• Sharing and synchronizing contacts from Google Contacts

• Unlimited sharing of contacts and contact groups

• Mobile and Outlook synchronizations

• Sharing with external domains

• Advanced logging and security features

• Unlimited contact backups

• Live chat and email support 

Let’s see how it can benefit your marketing efforts and maximize user experiences.

Managing and Centralizing Customer Data

Collecting customer data and managing conversations across various channels can be challenging. That is where Shared Contacts for Gmail shines.

The tool allows your sales, marketing, and customer service departments to centralize customer data. Team members working with the same customers can create shared, cloud-based databases. 

They can update data in real-time and make it accessible to other team members. In other words, your employees do not need to waste time creating, updating, and sharing their address books manually. 

Shared Contacts for Gmail can also serve as a basic CRM solution for your business. Team members can attach various files and fields to provide coworkers with invaluable insights into customer behaviors. For example, they can track each customer’s sales activities and add them to the Notes section. 

When all team members have access to the same customer data, they can provide personalized customer service, shorten the sales cycle, and build stronger relationships with customers. 

Improving Customer Service

Tech-savvy customers use various communication channels, such as phone calls, live chat, emails, and social networks. Unsurprisingly, they expect your brand to provide real-time, individualized, and multi-channel customer service.

Research studies found that 90% of customers rate immediate customer service as important or very important. 

Shared Contacts for Gmail can improve the quality of your customer service in multiple ways.

For starters, Shared Contacts for Gmail integrates seamlessly with Google Apps. Therefore, it allows you to add and update shared contacts directly from Gmail. It makes it easy for your customer service agents to share customer information with their team members.

Since customer data is automatically updated and kept in a central location, your sales and customer service teams can access it instantly via multiple devices and locations. That allows for real-time and more targeted customer service.

Personalizing Customer Experiences

With the rise of advanced data analytics tools, customers have become more demanding. They now expect businesses to provide highly personalized and relevant user experiences. 

According to statistics, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations. Moreover, in the era of GDPR, 90% of consumers are still eager to share their behavioral data if additional benefits are provided.

Therefore, personalizing customer experiences is not optional anymore. It is obligatory for any business planning to convert leads and build meaningful relationships with them in the long run.

Now, you can use Shared Contacts for Gmail to personalize user experiences in many ways.

For starters, you can provide relevant customer service. With the contact data just a few clicks away, your customer service agents can personalize interactions, address customers’ pain points, and provide quick solutions to their problems.

Also, by having fast access to your contact lists, your marketing and sales teams can build trust with target customers. For example, they can use customers’ first names, previous purchases, and demographic data in email marketing campaigns to increase open rates and conversions. 

Segmenting your Customer Base

Serving your newsletter recipients with one-size-fits-all content does not cut it anymore. To email newsletters that convert, tailor them to users' specific needs and preferences.

That is where Shared Contacts for Gmail can help you.

Namely, when used strategically, this nifty tool offers basic CRM functionalities. For instance, it allows sales and marketing teams to segment leads and customers based on the pre-set variables, such as their location, age, gender, job title, or position in the sales cycle. 

Marketers can break your newsletter list down into narrower segments and provide recipients with highly individualized and meaningful brand experiences. For example, if you market to customers in different time zones, you may want to segment them by their location. That way, you can determine the best time to contact each group of leads.

Over to You

In 2021, digital marketing is all about user-centricity. 

That is where Shared Contacts for Gmail steps in. 

Rather than creating and managing address books individually, your marketing, sales, and customer service tools can develop shared, cloud-based customer bases. Seamless, cross-team collaboration maximizes productivity, saves time, and streamlines recurring tasks. 

Most importantly, Shared Contacts for Gmail removes the silos between your departments, allowing team members to provide personalized and timely customer experiences at every touchpoint.

To try and see whether the tool meets your team’s specific needs and requirements, request a 15-day free trial.

How do you use Shared Contacts for Gmail to boost your marketing strategy? We are listening!

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How to Increase User Engagement on Your Website

Whether you’re launching a website to promote or sell products or as a personal passion project, your ultimate goal is for users to visit and engage with your brand virtually. But how do you actually get them to like, share, subscribe, or follow some other call to action?

Here, we’ll take a look at what user engagement means, and later, we’ll share some tips you can use to increase user engagement rates on your website.

What is user engagement?

Put simply, user engagement is when your website visitors appreciate your content so much that they stay to consume it, share it, comment on it, and ideally, make some sort of conversion. Because there are so many ways to measure user engagement, it can be hard to define. Ultimately, measuring user engagement comes down to your goals as a business. If you’re a travel blogger, social media shares may be how you track user engagement; if you’re a service company, you may count consultation requests as the highest form of engagement.

 Below, we’ll take a look at some unique ways to boost user engagement on your site, no matter what type of engagement you’re aiming for.

5 tips to improve user engagement

1. Rethink your site’s navigation

 In order for a user to interact with your website, they have to understand how to use it. If the layout is confusing or it’s hard to get to the information they need, they’re more likely to bounce from your site to some other site on the search engine results page (SERP). Reimagining your site’s navigation is a good place to start.

Site navigation is pretty self explanatory—it’s how users navigate your site. So, if you have a lot going on and the menu labels don’t make sense, it will be hard for people to find what they’re looking for. Here are a few guidelines to consider when revamping your site’s navigation:

• Keep design consistent throughout to establish clear branding and continuity

• Make sure navigation labels are accurate

• Categorize content clearly

• Make sure your site search feature works properly

• Add a related content widget to encourage users to stay on your site for longer

2. Boost your content strategy

They say “content is king” and the idea holds true in 2021. If your website relies on content to generate traffic, leads, and conversions, it’s a good idea to invest in your content marketing strategy. Not only does content promote a positive connection between your brand and your customers, but it also helps increase your SEO and may lead to other important engagement metrics like downloading gated content or even buying your product or service.

Here are some suggestions to keep in mind when building your content strategy:

• When searching for content ideas, think about questions your customers are already asking, and cover them with your blog content.

• Break up content with graphics, images, and block quotes. This will allow users to get the information they need at their own pace and learning style.

• Use CTA’s to promote engagement. A CTA, or “call to action,” is a callout that requests your users to do something, like download gated content, learn more, etc. To create a clickable CTA, make sure to use action verbs, clear and contrasting colors, and tailor your messaging to your target audience. 

Wellness brand, ForHims, does a great job designing their CTA. It’s clear, colorful, and has context to let you know where the button will take you—to your free visit. 

3. Define your target audience

Whether you sell shoes, write a travel blog for fun, or run a local HVAC company, your brand has a target audience. When you’re designing your website and creating content, you want to consider what your audience wants, how they talk, how they communicate, etc. 

Understanding these basics will help you tailor your website, and ideally, garner engagement from your users. As you’re beginning to define your target audience, use these questions to guide your research:

• What is their demographic background? (i.e. age, race, gender)

• What is their level of education?

• What are their biggest challenges?

• Where do they find the most value in a product or service?

• What does their research process look like when they’re deciding whether or not to buy a product?

• What are some of their favorite brands right now?

• How do they socialize in person and online?

With this information in hand, you can predict what your target audience’s customer journey will look like and, as a result, tailor your communications accordingly.

4. Make it mobile-friendly

From researching restaurant reviews to browsing social media and shopping online, many of us spend a majority of our screen time on our phones. In fact, American adults spend an average of 3.5 hours on their mobile phone each day. So, as a marketer, it’s clear why you’d want to optimize your website for mobile use.

Here are a few pointers to help:

• Use Google’s mobile testing tool to see if your pages are optimized

• Choose a reliable host

• Regularly test and work to improve site speed

5. Promote content cross-functionally

Improving engagement directly on your website is one way to gain traction with your followers, but getting them to your site is just as important. In order to increase awareness and drive visitors in today’s digital age, social media is a must.

Check out these tips to create a social media strategy step-by-step:

• Conduct competitor analysis on a regular basis

• Refer to your target audience research to guide your strategy

• Choose channels that fit your brand and your audience

Final notes

Your website serves as a platform for existing and potential customers to connect with your brand. By focusing your efforts on improving your site navigation and content strategy, defining your target personas, and optimizing for mobile and social platforms, you can encourage users to engage.

Use this post as a resource as you work toward boosting user experience on your website and don’t forget to subscribe to gain access to more helpful tips and tricks!

About the Author

Matt Casadona

Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. He is currently a contributing editor for 365 Business Tips. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys the San Diego life, traveling and music. 

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5 Ecommerce Payment Trends for 2021

Source

In previous years, we would normally evaluate trends that have formed as a result of years of evolution in customer behavior, but this time around, the pandemic has had the greatest impact of all when it comes to our shopping habits. Of course, other customer behavior changes have played a role in the payment trends that have emerged, but we can safely say that avoiding viral infections, following the still-relevant social distancing rules, and other preventative measures have all shared a role in shaping how we buy things online. 

That said, the entire ecommerce industry has yet to feel the full effect of the pandemic and the changing customer preferences and needs. To make sure your own ecommerce business is at the forefront of these changes, make sure that you accept and encourage the following payment methods and trends this year, and moving forward.

Contactless payments on the rise

A major change in how people interact based on the social distancing rules as well as a mandatory quarantine for many has led to a shift in payments, too. No direct contact between people warrants no direct contact with payment platforms and tools to avoid cross-contamination and getting sick. To facilitate that, many companies have introduced digital invoicing and contactless payments on delivery.

This is a great perk for everyone involved, both as a way to avoid spreading the virus in the midst of a pandemic, but also as a way to cut processing times and other intricate issues. The convenience of contactless payments means that more people are happy to buy online, pick up their goods, or have them delivered, provided that they can pay without direct contact. Over time, we can expect more credit card providers to offer even higher limits for contactless payments, to make it easier for people to use this option. 

Buy now, pay later systems

The pandemic has also increased financial instability in every single country in the world. Even among the wealthy and the well-off, people have been buying based on purpose rather than on a whim, making buyers more cautious when spending every single dime. While introducing online shopping has meant growth for many companies, you also need to find ways to help people pay for the more costly products and services available online.

To enable this trend, we now have a selection of payment options that are based on the buy now, pay later model. It helps ecommerce companies get hold of the money as soon as the person purchases it, but the buyer has the chance to pay off the product in installments. The win-win strategy has helped many keep up with their needs, and more ecommerce companies are gladly offering the model to customers. 

Cryptocurrencies taking over the mainstream

In the years of their inception, cryptocurrencies haven’t been the most popular payment choice among many brands, so few have encouraged or accepted them. Today, as more currencies of this nature rise to popularity and their usage is amplified with blockchain technology, the security of these payments and their growing stability is rapidly making them a favorite option among forward-thinking ecommerce businesses.

What’s more, many ecommerce brands are also investing in bitcoin mining to increase their own investment potential and introduce strong cryptos like bitcoin into the mainstream. With access to cost-effective hardware, ecommerce companies can have their own dedicated miners, while encouraging customers who mine to buy with bitcoin and grow their own financial stability with cryptocurrencies. 

Mobile wallets more popular than ever

Convenience remains a top priority among buyers, so naturally, if they can skip a few steps during the checkout process, the chances of them going through with the purchase will be greater. As a result, people are now using their mobile phones to make payments by leveraging mobile apps that turn their phones into wallets. Mobile wallets are highly secure payment options, as these apps store your key credit card information, so all you need is your number to make a payment. 

Of course, depending on the provider and the system you have on your phone, you will have different options at your disposal. That’s why more ecommerce companies will try to accommodate all and any mobile payments in the upcoming months. 

Digital banking expanding rapidly

Leading international banking institutions and credit card providers have always had priority among ecommerce companies. Once PayPal, Payoneer, and similar digital banking options came to life, customers started switching to these new alternatives for making online purchases, too, albeit not exclusively. 

Now, traditional banks are providing their own e-banking options to customers, and more digital banks are emerging with their own appealing offers. More ecommerce companies are beginning to accept these digital banking payments, in an attempt to offer a wider selection to their customer and simplify the payment process altogether.

The world of ecommerce has become accustomed to rapid industry changes, but when it comes to payments, some level of stability gives any business the control necessary for long-term success. That is why learning about imminent and quickly emerging payment trends ahead of time gives you the advantage to implement these changes sooner rather than later and make the most of them quickly. Being a leading ecommerce business in embracing innovation in payments will help you position yourself in your niche and earn the trust of more customers than ever before. 

Fit for Format – Forget Content Marketing Without This

When talking about content marketing, the majority of people automatically think of blog posts. And sure, text is one of the leading formats when it comes to content. It's easy to produce, inherently supports SEO, is simple to update, and can be repurposed in almost countless ways.

However, it's far from being the only format that matters. In fact, in 2021, it could be said that several other ones deserve much more of your attention.

So how can marketers find the absolute best format for their goals? 

First, they need to understand that putting together a content marketing strategy cannot be approached as a step-by-step checklist. No guide can work ubiquitously, simply because different brands have different goals, distribution channels, and target audiences. For this reason, to get a marketing plan that truly works, marketers must consider the specific audience they're targeting. Then they must develop a plan of action based on that audience's preferences and the goals they have in mind. 

And that means finding the best fitting format for each distribution channel and intent.

How Buyers Consume Content

Last year saw a dramatic increase in the time people spent in front of a screen. According to DoubleVerify, the average screen time in 2020 was 6 hours and 59 minutes, with streaming services seeing notable usage boosts. Another resource, App Annie, states that the most used apps in the first quarter of 2020 included Snapchat, Twitch, and TikTok for Gen Z, clearly indicating that some content formats drew more attention than others.

For marketers, this probably isn't too much of a surprise. 

Research from 2020 shows that the most invested-in format in 2019 included video, which was closely followed by blogs and eBooks. Usage statistics also reveal that social media apps remained the most used during the past 12 months, with TikTok leading the race.

All of this information is in line with the data we've had access to for a while. For example, WordPress states that there are 70 million new posts on its platform each month (and that's just for blogs that use WP). And even back in 2019, 500 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute. 

Naturally, this type of knowledge should have a significant impact on content marketing strategies. More importantly, it should help inform the decisions marketers make regarding formats. After all, people don't go to YouTube to read a text – they go there to watch videos on topics of interest. 

So, if your target audience is showing a preference for select platforms, that's where you'll have to rank if you want to stand a fighting chance of effectively grabbing their attention.

The Top Formats in 2021

Blogs

Though text posts may not be the hippest way to reach customers, they still work extremely well. And that's no surprise.

Let's consider the fact that the average person makes around 3-4 Google searches per day. We also know that 8% of all Google queries are phrased as questions. Bearing this in mind, it's quite evident that providing answers makes for an excellent strategy to reach new customers. And blogs are still the best way to do that, seeing how videos get 6.3% of clicks and images just 3%.

In 2021, however, the way to get text content to work won't be to churn out daily blog posts, stuffing them with keywords, or building backlinks from shady sites. Instead, it'll be to pay closer attention to user queries, provide valuable information, and hopefully, win a spot in the Featured snippets and People also ask sections of SERPs.

Another thing to keep in mind about producing text is that, in 2021, longer is better. The average 800-word post is no match to longer articles. In fact, according to Semrush, posts that contain 7000+ words get the most average unique pageviews and shares.

Of course, you don't have to write an eBook for each topic you cover. But do try to hit that sweet spot between 1500 and 2000 words to get the best results. Then, if you've got more to say on the subject offer a gated resource that will further educate your audience. A good example of this can be seen in Skillcrush’s post on remote work. At the bottom of the post, they have an email capturing lead magnet directly related to the remote working topic.

image source: skillcrush.com

Videos

We've already covered the way consumers are shifting to multimedia-oriented platforms. In fact, on all the popular social networks, video posts tend to get the highest engagement rates, making them an excellent investment for marketers.

However, there's a significant contrast between formats when producing for different distribution channels.

Long-form videos work best for YouTube. On this platform, the average length of a video is 11.7 minutes, with some creators producing content three times that length. Seeing how the network accounts for 99.9% of Google's video traffic, as well as its popularity across multiple generations, it's a good investment for brands that want to take a step up from blogs.

Vat19, for example, bases its marketing strategy on creating entertaining videos that center around its products. Following current trends and adopting a friendly voice, they're getting millions of views and thousands of comments, proving that they've chosen the ideal format to reach their target audience.

Still, most other distribution platforms display a preference for shorter creations. Instagram's video limit is 60 seconds, as is Snapchat's. In December 2020, TikTok started testing a longer 3-minute format. But that's still multiple times shorter than the average on YouTube. So, taking everything into consideration, it's clear that short-form video is the way to go for most platforms.

So how can marketers make a limited format work in their favor?

Well, one way would be to invest in content that lends itself to visual representation. For example, a company such as Joi can greatly benefit from transforming its recipes page into a series of TikTok posts showing the preparation process. As most recipes are easy-to-follow, they require no in-depth explanations and can fit into the traditional 60-second limitations.

@addjoi

Vegan Samoa Bars 🤯 Happy Friday from us to you! Recipe is in the comments. #veganrecipes #vegandessert #madewithjoi #addjoi #healthyrecipes

♬ Put Your Records On - Ritt Momney

Visuals

Then there's the most sought-after digital asset out there: images. It's no secret that visual information boosts any post's performance. Articles with images get 94% more views, social media posts get higher engagement rates, and consumers make purchasing decisions based on photos.

But the thing is, marketers aren't necessarily making the most of visuals.

According to Venngage, as many as 40% of companies use stock photos, a practice that can hardly be counted as a viable content marketing strategy. Moreover, visuals created for one distribution channel don't necessarily have to work for another.

As an example, look to mattress brand Zoma. Comparing the Instagram performance of their posts, it's easy to notice that the visual content reposted from their website gets several times fewer comments and likes than the images created specifically for the platform. What's more, their best-performing posts include those made with a clear strategy in place, such as their athlete spotlights that make smart use of user-generated content.

image source: instagram.com

Industry Insights

As we move through the best ways to utilize digital formats in your content marketing campaigns, it's crucial not to disregard any brand's most valuable asset: its experience and know-how.

Though not necessarily appropriate for social media sharing (unless in the format of infographics), industry insights can and should play a role in your marketing plan. In addition to offering eBooks, white papers, research reports, and survey results on their websites, businesses can also build their reputations around being a trustworthy source of information.

For example, Deloitte's content marketing strategy is based around the sole idea of positioning themselves as the go-to resource in a wide range of business-related topics. Their extensive Insights page offers resources on anything – from workspace design to cybersecurity in the electric power sector. 

image source: deloitte.com

But their most valuable digital assets include their in-depth reports. These are available to download to anyone in exchange for a name and email address, making them an exceptionally successful lead generation method.

The Alternatives

Although we've covered the four most popular online content categories, there are still quite a few options out there. And they can be just as effective at getting you the desired results as the traditional formats.

Podcasts, for example, are becoming more popular every year. According to Statista, the number of monthly active podcast listeners is expected to hit 164 million by 2024, more than doubling over five years. The e-learning market is growing as well, with an average annual growth rate of 9.1%.

Then, there are the more innovative formats you could explore. An interactive map, such as the one created for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, is an excellent example of what can be done with some basic information and a creative approach.

image source: rio2016interactivemap.com

Conclusion

There are numerous options brands can explore if they want to make content marketing work in their favor. In fact, being agile in adopting novel trends and brave enough to experiment with lesser-known methods makes for a great strategy. 

Of course, that doesn't mean disregarding traditional content formats like blogs. But it does necessitate a willingness to experiment and a high level of diligence when doing research and measuring results. Because, in the end, the best way to find what works best isn't to follow advice. It's to try things out and make data-based decisions that will work towards a predetermined goal.

How to Improve Customer Experience during COVID-19

Source

Coronavirus has altered customer mindsets. They expect brands to provide seamless experiences at every touchpoint. 

From boosting the effectiveness of customer support to organizing your workloads more efficiently, you can improve customer experiences in multiple ways during COVID-19.

Here are a few tips to follow. 

1. Meet Customers Where They Are

During Coronavirus, simple activities, such as in-store purchases or dining out with friends, are now hard to plan, risky, and even prohibited.

Given that, it is not surprising that customers are making a shift from offline to online purchases. The way they communicate with brands has also changed. In today’s stressful times, they expect fast, intuitive, and at-home experiences. 

Sell Online

According to the Digital Commerce 360 analysis, U.S. customers spent $861.12 on online purchases in 2020, up 44% from $598.02 in 2019. 

Applying an online commerce strategy depends on your industry. 

For example, fitness companies have started creating online workout programs and expanded free trials to attract new users. 

Banks, on the other hand, have shifted to “do it at home” options. China’s Ping An Bank provides seamless digital experiences. They received more than eight mullion page views and 12 million transactions within half a month. 

Expand your Services

With pubs, supermarkets, and restaurants closed because of the lockdown, home delivers have gained momentum. 

Statistics back me up in that. China’s premier food delivery service, Meituan, reported quadrupled delivery orders in early 2020. Global delivery giants, such as Amazon Fresh, quickly became overwhelmed. 

Therefore, if you still do not offer home delivery options, it is time to rethink your decisions. 

The good thing is that home delivery options expand beyond food drop-offs. For example, pharmacies offer free delivery services, while car dealerships provide vehicle pick-up and drop-off services for repair and maintenance. 

Make Physical Operations Touch-Free

In some industries, contact between your employees and customers is unavoidable. To provide the utmost employee safety, consider converting to contactless operations. 

For example, Walgreens rolled out a drive-thru shipping experience. Customers order from a menu, store operators assemble the order, and deliver it through a drive-through window.

2. Strengthen your Customer Support

During the Coronavirus pandemic, providing exceptional customer service is crucial.

Consider connecting your phone system with CRM software. When a customer calls, your customer support agents will see customer data on their screens and provide personalized customer service.

Use social media monitoring tools to track brand and product mentions. That way, you will respond to customer questions and provide helpful feedback faster.

Live chat is another example of effective customer support. It humanizes customer service and appeals to both mobile and desktop users. 

Remember that, during Coronavirus, when your customer service channels are overwhelmed, self-service plays a fundamental role. Consider integrating AI chatbots with your website and social networks. Also, create a knowledge base where customers can find answers to their questions on their own.

3. Boost Employee Performance

Satisfied employees provide a higher level of customer service. That creates a more satisfying customer experience, improves repeat visits, and encourages customer loyalty. 

For example, increase their productivity with the right tools. 

A CRM solution is crucial to any company collecting customer data. It centralizes all communication channels under a single platform and facilitates interactions between your teams and customers. Most importantly, customer data is available to all employees via both mobile and desktop devices, meaning they can deliver exceptional customer experiences from various locations.

Using an employee scheduling tool can significantly improve employee performance and satisfaction, especially in industries requiring employee scheduling. Humanforce is one of the best time and attendance cloud solutions offering real-time notifications. Managers can update schedules faster and track employee availability to avoid understaffing and boost customer service.

Businesses in the hospitality industry should also invest in an online booking system. During COVID-19, when online table bookings and home deliveries have grown, an automated booking system will save your employees’ time, boost CX, and minimize the risk of human error.

4. Keep Track of Customer Needs and Preferences

Collecting customer feedback helps you learn more about their needs and preferences. Most importantly, by keeping the finger on their pulse, you will monitor your brand sentiment. 

The goal is to track customer feedback across all channels and touchpoints, including:

• Phone systems

• Live chat

• Chatbots

• Social media monitoring

• Website forms

• Online surveys

• Emails

That is where investing in a CRM solution shines. It integrates with a wide range of marketing, sales, and customer support tools. CRM software collects data from these channels and keeps it in a central location. 

That way, you are not restricted to tracking data once daily or weekly. Your teams can monitor and use customer data in real-time and adapt customer services accordingly. 

Over to You

Since the beginning of the pandemic, customer experience has taken on a new dimension. In 2021, they expect fast and frictionless customer service at every touchpoint.

I hope these insights and tips will help you!

Content Marketing Strategies for 2021

As 2020 was drawing to a close, 2021 was hailed as a new beginning and a chance for change. Considering the year we’ve just had, this should not come as much of a surprise. 

However, in the minds of marketers, the start of the new year often also means taking stock of their campaigns and devoting some time to researching strategies that will help them (and their clients) remain on top. 

Let’s look at several content marketing strategies that should prove to be effective in 2021.

Create Content for Different Stages of the Buyer Journey 

Content marketing should always be aligned with your sales funnel. By now, it should be quite clear that random targeting and pouring resources into content that targets no one specifically is a waste of effort (and said resources). 

To make the most of your creative creations, make sure that you segment your content just like you do your audience. Come up with ideas that appeal to the top, middle, and bottom of your specific sales funnel. What would someone who has come across your brand for the first time like to know? Alternatively, what would a long-time shopper like to see?

Gili does a great job of targeting different audiences with their blog posts. They have a guide for beginners, but they also have a post on the nine things you need to know before buying your next SUP. Chances are that both experienced paddle boarders and those heading out to the water for the first time will be hooked.

image source: gilisports.com

Don’t Forget About Google 

You also want to make sure that your content has the best possible chance of ranking high on search engines. Being the featured snippet for a popular query is a great way to get noticed.

Structure your content so that it’s easy to digest: go for short paragraphs and easy-to-read sentences, and provide plenty of headlines. Also, use structured data to help Google understand what your content is about.

Most importantly, answer a question clearly and concisely. Provide step-by-step instructions if that will help your readers solve the issue at hand. While you are essentially writing for crawlers, you are also genuinely trying to help your audience. 

Multi-Channel Content Works Better 

Selecting a single channel to market your content no longer works. Users want to see a multi-channel approach, and they want to be able to recognize your brand wherever they come across it. Not to mention, this allows you to provide multiple touchpoints for new and old customers alike. 

Have a concise and cohesive brand image across all of your channels, online as well as offline. You want your blog and your social media channels to be a continuation of one another. The same goes for all the content you produce for others. Try to brand the images, always sign off in the same way, and create a specific punchline you’ll use. 

LMNT has chosen to brand themselves through storytelling, sharing their mission and values with their audience. They also have a very distinct website in terms of visuals, which they’ve carried over to their social media channels, Instagram in particular. This helps them stand out and remain recognizable in the sea of other fitness/nutrition brands.

image source: drinklmnt.com

Build a Community 

The online space, while it has always been envisioned as a community, truly seems to have become one in 2020. When they can’t socialize in person, people want to socialize online, both with friends and family and with strangers. 

Building a community where you can share your ideas and your content is an amazing channel to invest in. That’s where content around your ideas, values, and brand will be generated. 

It might be a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, a mailing list, a Slack channel – whichever platform you choose, creating a community can be your ticket to reaching more people in 2021. Do bear in mind that you should never use it for promotion’s sake alone. You need to foster genuine community spirit, and the promotion will then happen naturally anyway.

Aura has been building a community for a while. They’ve chosen Facebook as their platform, and they advertise the group on their homepage. This way, anyone who is interested in selling on Amazon and comes across their website can join and reap the benefits of sharing knowledge and experiences. 

image source: goaura.com

Let Users Generate Your Content 

User-generated content has been a welcome sight in the world of content marketing for years. Firstly, it saves you the time and effort you put in to create content. But more importantly, it lets you showcase genuine experiences with your product, service, or brand.

While you can still use the images and videos of your customers (especially on social media), you can also take user-generated content to a new level and create case studies, use cases, and other knowledge bases.

For instance, ZenMaid has created an amazing piece of content, something their clients will certainly want to read through, and the entire idea has come from their involvement in the community. Namely, they’ve come across their interviewee’s post in a Facebook group, reached out, and created an entire post around his success in the industry. 

image source: zenmaid.com

Be Ethical and Transparent 

Finally, we need to touch upon a facet of content marketing you should pay special attention to in 2021, in the wake of Covid-19. 

The one thing more and more users are beginning to realize about online content is that anyone can say anything. Knowing what’s the truth and what’s a mere bunch of baloney is getting increasingly difficult. In a pandemic, trusting your sources becomes more important than ever before. 

To truly appeal to your audiences, aim to always be transparent and provide honest, genuine information that you’ve previously double-checked. 

Transparent Labs does this well, and in an industry that is somewhat notorious for large claims without any data to back them up. They review all of their content with an advisory board, ensuring that what they put out there is fact rather than fiction.

image source: transparentlabs.com

Final Thoughts 

Take our content marketing tips for 2021 into account before embarking on the next stage of content creation. We know every new beginning is hard, and that January can often feel like the longest month of the year. But with a bit of creativity and effort, you can craft content that will appeal to new and old audiences alike this year.

Venture out of your comfort zone and try to be as open-minded with your content as possible. Do something new; try out a new format or a new marketing channel. After all, content marketing is continually changing, and you never know when you might come across something new that works brilliantly. 

4 Ways Cybersecurity Threats Can Hurt Your Brand

Source: Freepik

This year has been turbulent in so many ways due to the coronavirus pandemic. It has elevated our awareness of certain issues and it has caused many companies to change how they operate every day. Another shift in awareness that has already changed how we do business and has yet to show its full impact is our knowledge and awareness of cybersecurity threats. If anything, the pandemic has caused a spike in cyberattacks, as 80% of companies have reported an increase in these attacks during 2020.

Although these reports indicate that many of these attacks are meant for healthcare institutions and banks (there has been a 238% increase in attacks on banks), no business is spared. Small companies often perceive themselves as being under the radar due to their size, but in this instance, smaller entities are at no less risk, on the contrary. They often partner with larger organizations (which makes them great targets), invest less in cybersecurity, and are easier to penetrate as a result. 

The results can be devastating for your organization. The following repercussions are considered the most prevalent as a result of cyberattacks, so let’s see how security risks can compromise your business.

Loss of customer trust and loyalty

As soon as an attack occurs, you need to report any missing information and let your customers know that your business has been compromised. That alone is enough to wreak havoc on how people perceive your brand for the long haul. 

Once people find out that their sensitive information has leaked, or that such a possibility exists, they will never feel comfortable going back to you for services. Security measures are one of your strongest marketing assets, as promising secure transactions (and delivering on that promise) is vital for your success. When you place those security seals on your site, make sure that they reflect the true state of things in your business and that you do invest in keeping your customers’ data safe.

Long-term damage to your industry reputation

In addition to how your customers perceive you, your reputation in your entire industry will be compromised. Your potential business partners, investors, as well as your business community are bound to change their opinion of your business, knowing that you have compromised your business security and integrity. Even if you kick-start a new company under a new name, your leadership that has led to a breach will be what determines the viability even of that new business in your market.

Most companies will need to have dedicated IT teams to ensure better cybersecurity, so obtaining certificate IV in information technology and similar accredited programs will serve to help organizations prevent cyberattacks. With a strong IT infrastructure, security protocols, compliance, and risk management, you don’t have to worry about tarnishing your reputation.

Plummeting productivity for your business

A cyberattack is so much more than a nuisance. Although attacks can come in various forms, and many of them can be recognized and prevented early enough, such as phishing, the risk of business interference is high when an attack does occur. You need to deploy your disaster recovery plan, ensure that your business data is secure and stored safely away from the hacker’s reach, and that means temporarily halting all operations.

In addition to “fixing” the core issue and recovering the lost data (if at all possible), it’s vital your IT teams come up with reinforcements for your existing security plan, which has apparently failed. Until you completely overhaul your processes and make sure you’re back in the saddle, you cannot permit anyone to access your data storage, or collaborate through software that can be the source of the breach.

Financial loss 

Although companies do predominantly worry about retaining their customers and building those long-term customer relationships, another core issue might arise from a cyberattack: financial loss. On one hand, hackers might reach your business bank accounts, or they can reach your customer’s credit card information if you don’t implement optimal prevention. On the other hand, the cost of data recovery and returning to normal post-attack also comes at a high financial price.

Overall, an average data breach costs $3.92 million, which means that focusing solely on disaster recovery after an attack can cost significantly more than investing in firewalls, software, and other solutions to keep cyberattacks at bay. 

Life will, indeed, go on after a cyberattack, but it will be far more difficult for you to earn the trust of your community and customers, and to keep up with your business as usual. The long-term ramifications of cyber vulnerabilities that remain unaddressed go beyond reparable. Even if you can recover, the costs are not merely financial, but far worse – they can destroy your professional reputation. That is why you need to prevent cyber threats with optimal strategies and make sure your business greets the New Year fully equipped to protect itself and its long-term reputation.

About the Author: Elaine Bennett

Elaine Bennett is an Australian-based digital marketing specialist focused on helping startups and small businesses grow. She writes hands-on articles about business and marketing, as it allows her to reach even more people and help them on their business journey.

AI in Marketing: What We Can Expect to Come

As artificial intelligence technology evolves, it’s beginning to be implemented across a range of different industries. That’s because it’s a technology that has the potential to streamline processes and revolutionize all kinds of business systems. 

One of the biggest industries that AI is already having a significant impact on is marketing. Digital marketers are beginning to understand the power of AI, and putting the technology to use when coming up with marketing strategies. From search engine optimization (SEO) to content generation, AI technology has all sorts of exciting applications. 

In this article, we’ll take a look at how AI is already being used to subtly improve marketing strategies and get results. In addition to that, we’ll examine some of the ways in which AI can potentially be utilized in the future by marketers to achieve data-driven results. So, without further ado, check out these fascinating AI marketing trends. 

Chatbot Integration 

When properly utilized, chatbots can be a valuable tool for taking pressure off a company’s customer support team and delivering an improved customer experience. That’s because chatbots can provide customers with an immediate response to their questions, problems, and inquiries. That means no waiting on hold for hours to speak with a representative, or sending an email and waiting days for a reply.

In addition to providing the consumer with a better experience overall, chatbots make it easier on the company, too. Large companies that receive thousands of inquiries every day may find it hard to respond to them all in a timely manner. Or, if they do find a way to quickly respond, it’s typically because they employ an expansive — and costly — team of customer support representatives. 

Chatbots can greatly reduce the demand placed on the customer support team. When placed on a company website (see the below example, taken from Vapor Empire’s homepage), a chatbot can make it easy for customers to connect with your company. 

Image courtesy of www.vaporempire.com 

You can program a chatbot to answer frequently asked questions and solve basic problems. In the case of more complex issues, a chatbot can collect valuable user information — such as their name, email, order information — and pass it on to a customer service representative. With that information, a representative can more quickly and effectively solve a customer’s problem and provide them with excellent service. 

Automated Content Generation

Content marketing has seen huge growth in recent years, with many companies making it a central part of their overall marketing strategy. And one of the most important parts of an effective content marketing campaign is consistency — your company has to generate content such as articles, blogs, videos, and more on a regular basis in order to stay connected with your target audience. 

However, creating content can be both time-consuming and capital-intensive. First, you have to hire writers and other creators to generate content for your company, and this can end up being a big expense. Second, it can take hours for a writer to generate a single blog post, or days for a videographer to film and edit a promotional video. Even a simple landing page, like the Intuit one shown below, can take a significant amount of time and money to produce. 

Image courtesy of proconnect.intuit.com

Thus, creating content is a long and expensive process, and companies have to pour money and other resources into their content marketing strategy. But what if you could quickly generate content without having to hire writers or editors? 

AI technology may make that a reality in the near future. While current AI programs generally aren’t sophisticated enough to write long, in-depth articles with the same fluency as humans, the programs can generate basic content. For instance, AI machine learning algorithms can put together short articles that outline things like stock updates and sports reports. 

Even in its current state, an AI content generator could potentially be put to use by marketing professionals and firms. What if you could program an AI program to prompt SEO-friendly topics for human writers? Or even put together rough drafts for the content team? You would still need humans to edit the drafts, make them readable, and perhaps add more information, but this system would still likely be more time-efficient than having writers start from scratch. 

Voice Recognition

Voice recognition technology has been a big trend in tech for the last few years, and the market for it continues to grow consistently. According to the research and advisory firm Gartner, 39% of the U.S. population uses voice assistants on their smartphones, and 26% use smart speakers at least once a week. And the mainstream introductions of virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri have sparked even greater demand for voice-activated systems and voice-enabled devices.

Google even has voice search functionality built into their search bar for mobile and desktop: 

Image courtesy of Google

So how does this relate to marketing? As more people begin to lean on their smartphone’s speech recognition technology and bring other voice-enabled gadgets into their homes, they’re tending to order products online via voice commands. With that in mind, many marketing professionals and firms have made a concerted effort to incorporate voice search optimization into their SEO strategy. As the market shifts in the direction of AI-powered virtual assistants and more people do their online shopping using voice commands, marketers will have to figure out the best methods for getting their content to show up in results for voice searches. 

Conclusion

Although AI is essentially still in its infancy, it’s already proven to be a useful tool for marketers. Whether through chatbots or content generators, AI technology enables companies to better connect with their customers and understand their needs. And, as the technology evolves, marketers will have to evolve with it if they want to remain competitive. If you’re a marketing professional who wants to get ahead of the curve, it’s essential that you explore the different ways in which you can leverage AI technology to build a more successful digital marketing campaign. 

About the author: Samantha Rupp

Samantha Rupp holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. She is the managing editor for 365 Business Tips as well as runs a personal blog, Mixed Bits Media. She lives in San Diego, California and enjoys spending time on the beach, reading up on current industry trends, and traveling.

SEO Link Building Tips and Techniques

Backlinks refer to sites linked to your website. They not only drive organic traffic to your page but are also known as the top-ranking factor for the majority of search engines. The better your backlinks are, the higher your website's authority is. The greater your chances of standing out from the competition. Search engines rely on backlinks to judge the website quality, which is why backlinks are the most significant part of effective SEO. No matter how much effort you put into other SEO strategies, your website cannot reach the first page without taking linking building into account. Despite the significance of link building, unfortunately, it's not easy to acquire quality backlinks. However, some smart tips and strategies can increase your chances of getting quality backlinks for successful link building. Here are a few of those tips and techniques.

WHY SEO? 

Before moving on to the main topic, you might want to learn more about SEO applications and see if it's worth your time in the first place. It's the priority of today's digital marketers and even online legal services. For example, if you have online legal services, without proper law firm SEO, you won't be able to appear on the first page of SERPs. There's a variety of different SEO techniques, such as keyword strategies, link building, competitive research, and many more. However, maintaining proper SEO for law websites is challenging. Any law related website must have a high authority built up, using SEO techniques to provide a better user experience and get higher ranks. 

People nowadays look into the best SEO services to perform digital marketing like a pro. Several other types of websites take advantage of SEO, as it's the only way to earn a higher rank on SERPs without emptying your account. The fact that 70% of marketers acknowledge SEO as more effective than pay-per-click further proves the point. SEO is not only used to gain a higher position on SERPs, but it also serves well for gaining organic traffic, increasing authority. Most importantly, SEO is used to stand out from the crowd in online businesses' emerging competition. But, as discussed earlier, to unlock the full potential of SEO, you'll need to learn these link building tips and techniques.

• SKYSCRAPER TECHNIQUE

The skyscraper technique is all about finding linkable content and creating better copies or updates to gain quality backlinks. However, there's some in-depth knowledge that you'll need for this technique. The first step is to find linkable content. For this purpose, you need to have some patience and good taste for content that's both popular and relevant to your website. You can start by doing a simple search on search engines for your website's most relevant keyword and describes it the best. Once you find related websites with popular content and quality backlinks, you need to improve and update their content. However, it's better to refrain from creating very similar copies, as it won't be much of a help. Try to bring something fresh out of the same popular topics that people would like to explore. For this purpose, you can talk about misinformation, making it more informative, link in research studies, and most of all, try to make it engaging. Furthermore, increasing the word limit can also increase detail and gives you a chance to place more keywords.   

• CREATE ATTRACTIVE CONTENT

While the skyscraper technique can help you find popular content, it still won't be your original content, which is necessary for a better backlink profile. So, one of your priorities must be creating content that attracts people to link to your website, naturally. You can start a blog and write about popular topics using an attractive vocabulary and writing tone. While there's not much to learn about making exciting content, there are a few ways to place it. Perhaps the most popular way to convey your message online is through infographics, as people like to visualize things. So, it's a great idea to incorporate images and videos on your website, to increase the chances of getting backlinks.

Moreover, you can use lists to create even better content. People can grasp concepts better via some accurate, readable collection. Ultimately there will be a big possibility that they will click on your content right away and link them to their websites. Another way to create fetching content is by conducting interviews. You can partner with other related online businesses to interview their personnel. The person doesn't need to be a superstar. Undoubtedly, the person will share the interview on their website, leading to a better backlink profile for you. 

• BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

Other popular websites and people like journalists are not going to link to your website unless you've built a lasting relationship with them in the online world. Fortunately, there are a plethora of opportunities to engage with other businesses to create new contacts. Communities, forums, and other social groups are a quick way to start with this task. However, make sure you build relationships with only the relevant websites; otherwise, it's of no use. Start by taking part in relevant communities by commenting on posts or by posting engaging content. As you initiate valuable discussions and gain people's interest, you will start to make relationships along the way. You will acquire quality backlinks and gain a more in-depth insight into the industry while having the chance to talk to many interesting people like yourself. 

• RESEARCH YOUR COMPETITORS

If you cannot find quality backlinks by yourself, then spying on your competitors will conveniently get you some. For this purpose, you'll need to use competitive research tools explicitly designed to find your competitors. First, to start analyzing your competitors, make sure that you only select websites with a healthy backlink profile containing the most popular links. As you research those websites, you may notice some common backlinks amongst your competitors that your website lacks, so try to get your website linked to those first. Most importantly, you must always keep an eye on your competitor's changing backlinks to gain better linking opportunities and to stay on top of the competition. If you're still unable to acquire the backlinks your competitors are using, try to identify and emulate their link building strategies.

• FIX BROKEN LINKS

As you build up links for your website over time, some of these links will turn into broken links. This problem can result from location changes in pages, or a website using your link might have misplaced or misspelled it. Either way, these links lead to non-existent pages, often giving the frustrating error 404. Such problems are harmful to link building and are also highly detrimental to your website's health and lead to a mediocre user experience. Considering the consequences of broken links, you must look for your mentions across the internet and identify the broken ones. If you find broken links on other websites, request them to fix it as soon as possible. You can also try using tools to find broken links if it's challenging to do it manually.

Additionally, there may be mentions of your products across the internet that aren't linked at all by users. In such a situation, you should ask the website owner to link it right away. To find such websites, try searching for the most relevant keywords or search for your website and services. However, if it's not possible manually, you can also use SEO tools. 

• UTILIZE SOCIAL MEDIA

While social media is not a part of on-site SEO, it can still make a huge difference as an effective way to gain quality backlinks. You will be able to reach thousands of people in a short time effortlessly, successfully providing people information about your website and guiding them towards your website. Choose the most relevant and popular social media, and provide viewers with engaging content as you do on your website. However, social media does not require long articles, so sticking with infographics and video content marketing is perhaps the best choice. Videos are known as the number one type of media for content strategies and marketing. Creating advertisements on social media platforms can also help to increase your website's visibility. As a result of this strategy, you will gain organic backlinks, which are essential to improve a website's authority.

Besides social media, you might as well try placing on-site social interaction features, such as comments and social sharing features. Suppose you're able to persuade people to share your content successfully. In that case, it will not only increase your visibility exponentially. Still, it will also get you a lot of backlinks faster than you expected. Furthermore, you can also add widget features so that users can place your website on their desktops or mobile home screens.

• LINK OTHERS

To gain other websites' attention, you should also try to link to others in your posts. This way, you will build a good relationship and increase your chances of gaining their interest in your website. However, this technique may take some while before you start to acquire backlinks. Nonetheless, it's a good strategy if you're willing to have some patience. If your content is engaging and informative, you might even attract them faster than you expect.

• INTERNAL LINKING

Internal linking is essential for a robust backlink profile and also an efficient technique. It allows you to create on-site links, linking to different pages of your website. Internal links help users gain information rapidly and help them navigate smoothly through your website's pages. With the help of some interesting and informative links and anchor texts, you'll be able to master this strategy. However, you should not place more than two or three links, and make sure that you only place those links on the most visited pages of your site. Another way to enhance this strategy is by linking selected keywords that people may want to click. 

• GUEST BLOGGING

Yet another effective strategy for gaining quality backlinks is guest blogging. It refers to the process of posting your content on other websites; this way, you'll increase your reach to new readers, increasing your visibility. You can start posting on other websites by looking for their "write for us" page by searching. There's no doubt that this method can consume a lot of time, and your post still may not be published. Suppose you carefully tailor your content according to that website's guidelines without compromising the content's message. In that case, you'll surely be able to get your content published. Furthermore, you can make a few changes in the same post and submit it to many websites relevant to your website to benefit. Most importantly, keep in mind that writing low-quality blog posts can lead to a significant drop in your website's reputation. 

• GET BACKLINKS BY ASKING

If you're a beginner in the online market, asking for backlinks can be an excellent start to a strong backlink profile. You can invite people who own websites in your family or friends' group to give you some backlinks. However, be careful in choosing a relevant and trustworthy website for linking. Otherwise, it can harm your website's health and backlink profile. If you follow the right technique and contact many website owners, then asking for backlinks is a must, as you can't let your resources go to waste. 

SEO MYTHS TO ALWAYS IGNORE: 

1. Keyword targeting becomes insignificant after 'Google Hummingbird'

2. Using XML sitemap to enhance rankings

3. Disregarding meta tags essentiality

4. Disregarding guest blogging essentiality

5. Getting high-level domains will help attain higher positions on SERPs

6. Using any length keywords in anchor texts

7. Depending solely on external resources

8. Relying solely on paid searches

CONCLUSION

Like most tasks, earning high-quality and trustworthy backlinks can pose some difficulties. However, by using the tips mentioned above and techniques, you will eventually overcome these difficulties. All you need to do is show some hard work and patience. Hopefully, you will be able to develop a high-ranking website with a robust backlink profile by using these strategies in a short period.

How to Create a Profitable eCommerce Store from Scratch

Over the last few years or so, digital marketing has grown by massive amounts. It has led to the creation of brands from scratch, with plenty of well-known names establishing themselves purely because of their work on digital media.

One of the primary sources of that growth has been eCommerce. The availability for people to go online and purchase any item of their choice and have it delivered has made an eCommerce boom. Thanks to its growing popularity, brands like Amazon have seen their businesses touch multiple billions, making them one of the world’s biggest brands.

If you’re someone who wants to make money online, you need to know the tricks to create a strong eCommerce store. 

What is an eCommerce Store?

In the world of digital marketing, eCommerce reigns supreme. It provides companies and brands with the platform to reach a wider audience without needing a physical store. Through digital means, brands will be able to sell their products, creating a strong connection with their audiences. eCommerce stores are present all over the world, and they see incredible growth.

The overall income from eCommerce in the U.S. in 2021 is set to touch a staggering $1 trillion. That’s because more people understand the importance of opening one, and with time can cut costs that generally come with owning a brick-and-mortar store.

Over the past decade or so, there has been a proliferation of eCommerce platforms worldwide. Choosing the right one can help brands create a long-term relationship and grow by leaps and bounds. It’s important that brands choose one that suits their needs the best. Different platforms come with their own set of advantages, and this decision can be one of the most important ones made by a company. 

What are the Different eCommerce Platforms Available?

There is a whole host of eCommerce platforms available online. Here are the most prominent ones: 

1. Shopify 

Shopify consistently features on the list of most popular eCommerce management sites. This is because it pioneered the process and is seen as the market leader for eCommerce. Many advantages come with using Shopify apps and other features. The primary of those is its inventory system that’s super smooth and doesn’t require much control. Once you decide what products you’re selling on shopify and the audience you’re targeting, Shopify allows you to update information at your will.

Further, it allows you to sell products across a multitude of channels, including Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, and even eBay. This consistency across platforms is one of the main reasons top brands opt for Shopify, and they provide a consistent approach. 

Shopify also received some of the highest scores with regards to customer satisfaction across multiple businesses.

2. Woocommerce 

When it comes to user-friendliness and adaptability, few do it better than Woocommerce. There are multiple reasons to love Woocommerce, and the first one is that it allows you to start for free. Once you get a taste of its services and begin to get used to it, you can think about paying and creating a strong online presence with its services. 

Another reason for its popularity is the fact that Woocommerce is easy to implement and use. With its super-smooth customization ability, it allows businesses to flourish over time. Its longevity is another factor to stick to Woocommerce, with the platform being around since 2011. It has grown from scratch and only improved with time. Also, the developers are known for being professional and reliable with their offerings for support and products. 

3. BigCommerce 

Another one of the popular services for eCommerce is BigCommerce. Perfect for fast-growing and large businesses, they provide services that can be easily accessed and understood. 

Another significant advantage for BigCommerce is that it comes with a super range of built-in features and tools. These are perfect for supporting the growth of the store. With the powerful tools available, it becomes all the easier to keep track of the various things happening around the store, and will help in improving the overall scope of the store. Further, you can also sell via multiple channels while also managing everything from a single space. 

BigCommerce allows you to sell digital, physical, and also service-based products automatically. You don’t have to install any app to allow for the same as it already comes included in the builder itself. 

The platform also offers some excellent features for eCommerce management across industries. 

4. Magento 

One of the most popular eCommerce platforms worldwide, Magento comes with open-source technology. It also provides merchants with an opportunity to use a flexible cart system and gain access to an online store’s functionality and content. The site also offers search engine optimization, powerful marketing, and tools for catalog management.

Not only is it flexible, but it is also secure. The wide array of services for support, features, and security are fully scalable and easy to implement. Magento currently has over 260,000 merchants on board and is one of the most popular store-building platforms online. 

The complete customizability adds to its benefits, and overall, it is an excellent platform for merchants who wish to implement the best in advanced technology. 

5. Volusion  

One of the leaders in eCommerce software solutions, Volusion provides businesses with a software platform that caters to industry needs. The eCommerce solution can be used to handle essential features such as payment processing and order management.

Volusion can help companies collect payments from customers based on sales products. With these eCommerce website stores’ creation, retailers online can easily receive instant payments and carry on their business. 

6. 3DCart 

3DCart has a host of benefits and comes with a 15-day free trial so that you can get used to the program and platform. It also enables you to get the store up and running before deciding to go forth and invest in the pricing plans. There are a bunch of rich SEO features and integrations for social media. This makes it easier to get your store discovered and drive traffic.

With the customized and simple mobile theme and templates, you’ll also be able to enjoy shopping across devices like phones are tablets. The software also updates the platform with the best in functionality and technology innovations so that you can maintain a competitive edge.

7. Prestashop 

Prestashop is another popular eCommerce store management software that comes with a host of benefits for users. It’s super easy to install and requires you to download the necessary file from their store. Post this; you can create a functioning and responsive online store. The file size is 6 MB, so it works fast, without taking too long to download.

Prestashop is also budget-friendly and free of cost. Merchants looking for minimum investments can depend on it because there’s no need for a license to set up the store online. 

The custom design is simple and convenient, without the need for technical knowledge. The user-friendly interface and simple design can be easily handled, along with the thousands of plugins available. Prestashop also comes with simple customization with which you can add and delete features.

The shop also supports multiple languages and currencies, making it easier for localization. The assistance helps them run stores around the globe. The software has stores in India, the USA, Canada, China, Germany, and Japan. The website is also capable of translating up to 45 languages. 

Why Should You Use Shopify Over other eCommerce Platforms?

Shopify is great for stores that sell products or services which require minimal configuration. You can sell products with the advanced Shopify homepage section as required by your business.

Shopify also offers a simple way to quickly launch a store without worrying about development costs or worry over servers common with platforms such as Magento.

There are also no tech worries when it comes to Shopify, as it can help make the hosting faster and accommodate any spikes that come in traffic. The platform is super reliable and has 24/7 customer support for any merchant.

The app is also mobile-ready, and they’ve adapted their site to accommodate the larger number of traffic coming in. The optimized site allows merchants to create and customize the store online and help customers work with a mobile responsive cart.

Shopify is also customizable and comes with over 160 themes. Most of them are mobile responsive, and creating this unique online shop becomes simpler.

The app store has a treasure trove of functionality where you can add loyalty programs, reviews, wishlists, and receive in-depth analytics, packing slips, print labels, and shipping programs.

It’s good when you have your online store, but Shopify takes it to another level by providing a powerful SEO engine. You also gain access to advanced analytics so you can understand where your customers are coming from.

There is also a wide range of marketing tools that include product reviews, social media integration, and email marketing. You can also create gift vouchers, discount codes, and take the next level up. Shopify also provides a seamless, abandoned cart recovery experience by automatically tracking and reminding potential customers.

Finally, Shopify also comes with its payment gateway, for which you won’t have to incur transaction fees.

How to Set Up the Shopify store?

Now that you’ve understood the advantages of Shopify, you can go forth and set it up. Here’s how 

Start your free trial on Shopify 

With Shopify, you can start a free trial and begin to understand the initial steps that go into creating your shopify store. Once you do so, you’ll be able to understand what’s needed to integrate into the store. There are plenty of features, so you can take your time exploring it.

The free trial allows you to fully set up the store and try it before you decide to go ahead and purchase apps.

Pick a theme and customize the Shopify store

The next step is to pick yourself a theme and customize the store according to what works best for you. There are plenty of themes available, and they’re also segregated according to industry, color, and so much more. These brilliant themes can help make your store look visually stunning and offer the best functionality, so you don’t have to compromise on either.

Add the products you’d like to sell 

After you’ve set up the theme, it’s time to add the products you’d like to sell in your store. Find the column and begin adding the products for customers to view. You can add extra parameters and segregate them next.

Group and categorize your products

After you’ve added the products in the store, you can go ahead and group or segregate them. Based on the parameters you’d like to add, the software allows you to categorize the products carefully. Hence, it becomes easier to create a fully-functional and optimized store that customers can visit and easily navigate.

Create necessary pages for the store 

Once you’re done with the product creation, it’s time to complete the website’s look and feels. You can do that by creating the necessary pages, including the About Us, Contact page, and so much more. Shopify allows you to integrate the themes accordingly, so it becomes easier for you to manage the store right from one point. 

Change your shipping settings as per your preferences 

Based on how you’d like to ship your products around the world, you can set the necessary shipping settings. There are plenty of parameters available on the Shopify store, so you can accordingly do it in a way that suits your preferences.

Set up your tax settings 

Shopify allows you to create tax settings with which you’ll be able to download statements and upload them for tax returns when needed. These tax settings also apply for customers shopping online, and you can adjust it based on the bracket you fall under.

Set up your payment getaway 

This step is crucial because you need to know how money is coming into your system and how you’ll analyze and monitor it. You can choose from a host of payment gateways available in the store and make it easier for customers to go forth and purchase from your shop.

Test your order system 

You can test the order system to know if the platform is working smoothly with your store. Once that happens, you know that you’re one step closer to going live.

Setup the domain with Shopify 

Shopify then allows you to set up a domain and create a website on the internet, right from their app. You’ll be able to go live then.

Do the basic on-page SEO optimization 

• Optimize URL structure - Ensure the URL structure is correct, and there are no dead ends when people try to search for your site.

• Optimize the Metadata - You can click on the SEO suite available with Shopify and optimize your Metadata. This can help in better visibility and get your store more traction online.

• Optimize your headings - Headings give customers a taste of what’s in store (no pun intended), and you need to optimize them from time to time on the Shopify backend. 

• Optimize your body text with primary and secondary keywords - Help customers easily discover your store and optimize the primary and secondary keywords as needed.

• Optimize your image alt tags - Image alt tags make it easier to provide more information about the product when a customer hovers over it. 

Remove password protection and launch your store 

You can finally remove password protection and launch your online store. 

Keep tabs on all the various activities occurring and ensure that you’re constantly checking the web traffic and quality. Shopify’s features allow you to manage your store end-to-end, and with time, you’ll begin seeing the value of the investment you’ve made. 

Conclusion

Keep optimizing the store and ensure that customer queries are taken care of in the right manner. After you’ve mastered Shopify, you can begin adding custom apps that simplify tasks and can be run on an automated basis, allowing you to take a backseat and focus on growth. Good luck!

Guest Post by AdNabu

AdNabu helps improve sales in Google Ads for eCommerce companies. If you are running the search, google shopping, or display campaigns in Google Ads, This software will be able to increase your sales. 

5 Marketing Personalization Trends to Take Your Business Forward

Source: Freepik

As the online world becomes an increasingly competitive place to run a business, personalization becomes a necessity. In fact, personalization should be one of the key pillars in your business plan, as you can’t expect the modern consumer to fall in love with your brand if all you have to offer is an amazing product or service. You can have the best products on the market, but if the overall customer experience is generic and unimaginative, customers will abandon your brand for a competitor that invests in personalized experiences.

With that in mind, you should always be looking for ways to improve personalization, especially in the digital realm. Doing this will improve brand relevance and authority, build trust and loyalty, and of course, set the stage for long-term success. Let’s take a look at the personalization trends and tactics that will help you achieve these goals. 

Weaving AI into predictive personalization

Artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions are set to take over the business world in the years and decades to come, and even now we are witnessing the use of these technologies on a grand scale. From sales and customer support all the way to inventory management, marketing and beyond, artificial intelligence is facilitating automation while making big data analytics cost-effective and efficient. When it comes to personalization in marketing, sales, and experiences in general, AI can prove invaluable.

One of the key ways AI can help is through predictive personalization, or in other terms, AI can help you choose the best method of communication with customers and online audiences with ease. Whether this means choosing the right email template for the individual or tailoring your ads for every stage of the customer journey, artificial intelligence makes data gathering more efficient and delivers personalized solutions faster than any manual method. 

Developing customer journeys across all touchpoints

While the majority of businesses focus solely on building one comprehensive customer journey, it’s important for future-oriented businesses to start developing customer roadmaps for all marketing and sales touchpoints. Why? Because addressing the unique needs of customers on all touchpoints allows for better personalization and for the creation of tailored solutions. In other words, you need to start creating customer journey roadmaps for every sales and marketing interaction in order to personalize the experience per customer group, not just your demographic.

To do this, your marketers need to work side-by-side with data scientists to analyze customer behavior at every stage of their journey, identify the touchpoints they are using, and create a comprehensive plan for every touchpoint. This will boost engagement while showing the online world that your brand goes the extra mile to address the specific needs of every customer.

Personalizing your domain for higher brand awareness

In the modern online world, it’s important that you personalize your whole digital presence, not just your marketing messages or sales tactics. Many business leaders will forgo the importance of personalizing your website, which starts with domain personalization.

Instead of going for a traditional top-level domain, you can personalize the online experience and make your domain more memorable by switching to a personal domain like .me to improve brand stickiness and help your visitors connect with the brand on a more personal level. Once you have a personalized domain, you can start re-tailoring the content on your site to address the needs and pain-points of specific customer groups, making sure that different customers get a different version of your site based on their browsing and purchase history.

Displaying user-generated content in emails

Email marketing has grown to become one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal, and you can elevate its effectiveness even further by weaving social proof into your email strategy. Nowadays, people want to see that other customers are putting trust in your brand, which means that you need to build social proof.

Given the fact that email is a personalized way of communicating with customers, you want to weave user-generated content like reviews, testimonials, and visual content into your emails for better personalization. This will help build trust and loyalty, and it will show the recipients that other customers are satisfied with their experience – that said, remember to use different user-generated content for different customer groups. 

Introducing multivariate testing to replace A/B testing

Last but not least, another powerful way of improving personalization is to replace A/B testing with multivariate testing. Essentially, multivariate testing allows you to test a product or any digital item through multiple versions at the same time, instead of testing just two versions simultaneously. 

What this does is it allows you to find the ideal solution and product version that fits the exact needs of your customers or even identify a set of product versions to appeal to multiple consumer groups. That said, running multivariate testing is labor and cost-intensive, so be sure to leverage artificial intelligence to do this efficiently and effectively. 

Wrapping up

Personalization is the driving force behind long-term success nowadays. With these personalization trends and tips in mind, you should be able to improve the customer’s experience across the board and take your business forward in 2020 and beyond. 

4 Marketing Tactics on the Rise for 2021

With 2020 coming to an end, it’s time to look forward to next year and think of new ways to continue to grow your business. 2020 was a year unlike any other due to the coronavirus pandemic shutting the economy down, which forced companies to close their doors and consumers to isolate at home. However, many businesses, both big and small, have adapted, and new trends are on the rise to adhere to these changing consumer behaviors.

To ensure your company flourishes this upcoming year, it’s time to take a look at different trends and tactics to keep your customers coming back for more. One way to reach a broader audience is through marketing. Take a look at our top four marketing tactics on the rise for 2021.

1. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a popular marketing tactic for the past several years but continues to grow in importance as time goes on. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are constantly rolling out new algorithms that determine what sites and pages rank well for specific queries, meaning companies with websites need to always be on top of new SEO trends in order to rank #1 or win the featured snippet/answer box.

To ensure your SEO is up to snuff, consider these SEO tactics:

• Publish well written and informative content

• Use numbered or bulleted lists throughout the content

• Improve page speed

• Incorporate tables and charts

• Use original photos, graphics, and videos in content

• Use targeted keywords

These are just some of the ways you can ensure the content that you’re publishing on your blog is rank worthy. With these tactics in mind, you can watch your rankings climb up the leaderboard on search engine results pages. For more information on SEO, take advantage of sites and tools like Moz, SEMRush, and Wordstream.

2. User Experience

Another area of SEO that businesses often overlook is user experience (UX). When users come to visit your site, you want to take them on a journey that leads them down the sales funnel and encourages them to make a purchase. Companies with websites that have poor UX often experience high bounce rates, which means users quickly hit the back button and search for another more functional site. High bounce rates aren’t taken lightly by search engines like Google, which means your rankings can suffer if you have poor UX.

To improve the relationship with your customers, some UX tactics to consider include:

• Improving page speed: We’ve all landed on pages that took forever to load. In an age of instant gratification, consumers want information fast. To improve your page speed, use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool, which can tell you whether CSS and Javascript need to be optimized, images and videos need to be condensed, or large files need to be compressed.

• Enhancing functionality: No one wants to get lost on your website. To enhance functionality, make sure page navigation is clear to follow by incorporating drop-down menus, search bars, and calls to action (CTAs). Take our example below. On Shareable for Hire’s site, you’ll notice a menu on the top where users can easily find out how the product works, information on background checks, how much it costs, and where to get help.

• Increase accessibility across devices: Today, consumers are conducting web searches from a host of devices, such as laptops, desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets. However, each device loads and displays web pages differently, which is why you want to ensure your website is accessible across all devices. To do this, take advantage of web tools like BrowserStack to ensure your website is compatible with multiple devices and bug-free.

As a business owner, one of your top priorities should be ensuring your customers are happy, both in-store and online. With a user-friendly website, you can ensure your customers and leads know where to find what they’re looking for and have a pleasant experience that encourages them to make a purchase.

3. Chatbots

One area of business the COVID-19 pandemic has changed was how customers interact with companies. Prior to nationwide lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, customers could easily shop in-store, ask floor representatives questions, and see and test out products in-person. However, consumers are now doing most of their shopping online, which means access to help can be fairly sparse.

Having 24/7 customer service is essential to keep your customers satisfied, and chatbots can help make this happen. Many businesses can have a team of customer service representatives working remotely to answer any customer questions, complaints, or other inquiries. However, employing a staff that can work around the clock is often unrealistic. Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) is making it easier for businesses to help customers when they need it by having the ability to respond to frequently asked questions.

When using a chatbox on your website, make sure it’s easy to find and use. In our example below, you’ll see consumers can access a live chatbot where there are numerous topics a user can choose from to answer a question. It’s also accessible right on the homepage by scrolling to the bottom and clicking “Start a Live Chat.” With easy on-demand access, consumers can easily get help and answers the moment they need it.

4. Shoppable social media posts

Social media is one of the easiest ways to market your business. Not only is it free, but it’s an excellent way to reach a broader audience by posting unique content, interact with users, and compete with your competitors. 

One thing you may have noticed is that social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are allowing businesses to create shoppable social media posts where users can buy the products they see right in an image or video. With shoppable posts, you now can tag products or services you sell on an image or video you post, which allows users to connect to your marketplace to purchase.

Wrapping up

2020 might not have been the year anyone has been expecting. However, there are plenty of teachable moments that can help you go into 2021 with a solid plan for your business. With these four marketing tactics, you can bring in more leads and customers to your site in an authentic way. From improving your site’s SEO to harnessing the power of social media, these are just some of the ways you can connect with your audience, improve sales, and grow your business.

Samantha Rupp

Samantha Rupp holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. She is the managing editor for 365 Business Tips as well as runs a personal blog, Mixed Bits Media. She lives in San Diego, California and enjoys spending time on the beach, reading up on current industry trends, and traveling.

7 Things You Need to Know About App Marketing

Mobile apps have attracted a significant traction in ways that marketers can advertise. Here are a few ways to identify your target market, engage your audience, and get the best return for your app marketing.

What is App marketing?

App marketing is growing at an enormous rate among different plans of action to take out the best for their business. The greatest bit of leeway of conveying a mobile app is that it permits a simple reach to customers, better traffic, and hoisting deals.

Along these lines, you have begun an app for your business, and it’s finished. It isn’t so straightforward. There is far to go for reasonable development. You should have something interesting so the customers will come to your app and stay. To elevate your app to the right audience and get growth in business is the following step. Otherwise, your presence gets lost in the crowd of such a significant number of existing organizations with no appeal and traffic.

A significant angle to see here is that the mobile app marketing procedure must not left immaculate for the end. It must run in corresponding with the app advancement process.

Being an entrepreneur, you additionally need to watch out for your necessities and work likewise to accomplish the maximum.

Below is a list of factors to ensure your app will help grow your business.

1. Implement a Marketing Plan for your mobile app

Like a site, a mobile app should likewise be set up with extraordinary accuracy as it features about you; your objectives, business requirements, character, and taste also. Just inserting an app into the app store doesn’t ensure downloads. If you exist over the web for quite a while, a sound web presence is necessary. It’s an ideal opportunity to let people know about your app by marketing it across all social media channels.

2. Keep your customers

Customers are the advantage for any business, and making them hold for max is the way to progress. Even though there is a significant contrast between conveying a site and an app, it tends to be seen that countless users download your app. But, what a number of them will keep on utilizing it on often interims is increasingly significant. Essentially, it is an essential factor to break down the targeted traffic. For essential customer maintenance, you need to thoroughly investigate the lacking zones to recognize what customers need from your mobile app.

3. A Stunning Mobile Experience is Must

Ultimately, the native spot for a mobile app is the mobile phone. Along these lines, mobile visibility is a must to grab a decent audience. The greatest issue that many apps face is the customer exit due to the small screen but with similar usefulness as the desktop. It isn’t a perfect path for costly mobile app advertising. A mobile app is wholly founded on various ideas where you can confine barely any things for better visibility and upgraded usefulness. A small screen is a bit of leeway to concentrate on essential things. In this way, a great practice is to permit less contribution to save time for the users. There isn’t just the visibility, but also, much more than that, it that can ensure predictable development and increased deals of your business. Obvious buttons, extraordinary visuals, and incredible layout features make a mobile app stand out among the rest. It also helps you to gain good data revenue out of your data collected from your app.

4. Accept and implement customer feedback

At the point when a customer has your app literally in their pocket, you have an extraordinary chance to use targeted ads in order to keep their interest. As long as your app has brand standards, engaging content, and good customer service, you are in good shape to keep up long-lasting relationships. Allowing customers to give feedback not only makes them feel heard, but it will also help your company know what steps to take to make your app the best it can be for most users. An expanded ROI and improved consistency standard are the undeniable advantages here.

5. USE Keywords to get seen

Regardless of which domain or type of service you have, your app should be visible among online users. Without a sound presence, the target audience won’t contact you, and you could be missing out on potential long term customers. Using keywords and SEO causes you to get noticed at the very moment a potential customer is searching for your service.

6. Branding is Beneficial

When you are building an app, it should directly reflect your business. Keep your branding consistent with your organization. Here, the name of your business, the logo, and the design of the app, all must be consistent with your company’s brand standards. A brand name creates from how your users use the interface and what first impressions will be. It may be using the download page of your application, its depiction, and your logo that help to change over potential users into downloads.

7. Understand Your Competitors and Work Hard to Match Up

Having an engaging app will help increase the number of downloads. See what your competitors are doing can help you make decisions for your marketing strategies. Also, finding a niche audience can help your application rank higher. An app is an entryway to the cognitive development of your business where the mobile app marketing acts as a catalyst to improve the execution.

Conclusion

Right now, app marketing holds a high potential for earnings in the marketing world. With a sound mobile app marketing strategy, it isn’t so challenging to keep a solid spot in the market and the pockets of your potential users. The above suggestions can help you enter into the app marketing world with productive outcomes.

About the Author: KHAdeer sultana

My urge to learn something new and passionate attitude changed my interest in being a professional content writer. My constant efforts and experience in the marketing field have built a first-rate conception of Martech, Adtech, and digital marketing in me. Currently, I'm putting my efforts in delivering content on advanced marketing & technology techniques to confer a benefit to entrepreneurs.

How to Make Your eCommerce Store More Competitive

Since the beginning of the pandemic, eCommerce business owners have seen a 42% increase in sales. This is mostly due to the fact that many consumers are stuck at home and ordering things online. If you are the owner of an online store, finding ways to edge out the competition is imperative. Failing to do this can result in a loss of profitability and the inability to grow your audience.

Rather than allowing the competition to beat you at every turn, it is time to take action. Are you trying to make your eCommerce store more competitive? If so, check out the helpful information below.

Change Up Your Product Packaging

The main thing a consumer will notice about your product is the packaging it comes in. Modern consumers want product packaging that is both appealing and functional. If your existing packaging design looks outdated or wrong for your product, it is time to make a change. The longer you allow bad packaging to stay on your product, the harder it will be to win consumers over.

This is why working with professionals like Deepking Labels is so important. These product packaging professionals can help you design and mass-produce new packaging. Revamping your product packaging is a great way to attract attention from a wider audience. Promoting this change on your social media pages and your eCommerce website is imperative.

Figure Out What is Causing Shopping Cart Abandonment

Online retail establishments have a shopping cart abandonment rate of over 75%. If your abandonment rate keeps climbing month after month, you have to figure out why. Allowing this rate to continue to trend upward can leave you with less money in the bank.

If you are offering the same product as a competitor, you have to make sure you have cheaper prices. Many people will abandon a cart if they find a cheaper price or a coupon code. Keeping your prices low will require you to monitor your competitor’s website. You also need to make sure that you haven’t made the buying process too cumbersome on your website. If you are requiring consumers to fill out tons of online forms before they can make a purchase, they may get annoyed and leave.

Offer Better Customer Service

Making your online business venture a success will require lots of hard work. One of the main things you should focus on when trying to beat out the competition is the level of customer service you offer. You need to make sure your employees realize just how important it is to go the extra mile for customers.

When receiving complaints from customers, you need to address them right away. The last thing you want is for bad customer interaction to damage your online reputation. Reaching out to loyal customers for feedback is a great way to figure out where improvements need to be made. While getting this feedback and implementing new customer changes can be difficult, it is definitely worth the time you invest.

Take a Look At Your Product Descriptions and Images

If turning website visitors into paying customers has become difficult, you need to think about revamping your domain. One of the main things you should look at when trying to optimize your eCommerce website is your product descriptions and images. Using new keywords in the descriptions and high-definition replacement images can help you attract more attention from consumers and search engines.

Take Action Right Now

If you feel like your existing eCommerce website isn’t producing the sales numbers you want, it’s time to make a change. Using the tips in this article can help you make your eCommerce website more competitive. 

5 Most Effective Off-Site SEO Strategies for 2020

Source: Pixabay

For those who aren’t familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), it is a digital marketing technique that focuses on creating higher traffic, and in some cases increasing conversion rate optimization strategies, for websites. SEO is as old as search engines themselves, and just like they’ve evolved to the behemoths they are today, SEO saw its fair share of development as well. There are 3 main branches of SEO that anyone looking to optimize their overall website health should focus on. 

First, there is technical SEO, which includes handling domain, hosting, landing pages, error pages, and loading time; followed by on-page SEO, providing control over the website’s data like the descriptions, internal links, and others, and the last branch, which we will be discussing in detail, is off-page SEO. Its main role is to induce more visibility for the website on the internet by focusing on various digital channels. To help you properly handle off-site SEO, we’ve listed 5 of the most effective and popular strategies used by experts.

1.   Creating the Right Content

This may sound quite easy but creating shareable content isn’t always the priority of many beginners. Even though its effect is quite impressive thanks to its reach on social media platforms, it can be underestimated by those who solely focus on on-page and technical SEO. For that reason, content is said to be the king of SEO, and that is quite true in an age where content can be easily shared on dozens of platforms. 

The content you create shouldn’t be just for the visitors of your blog, but it should be for a market audience who has never heard of your website and stumble upon its great content. This ensures that you’re taking a piece of the untapped-potential pie in your market. If you want to create content that has effective and natural backlinks, you’ll need to make sure your content is well-researched and constantly updated.

2.   Backlinks

In 2020, there are endlessly available SEO building practices that can completely change your business website game. Backlinks rank high on top of this list as one of the most effective used tools to add credibility to your website while increasing the traffic. Without having to change your website, SEO specialists who provide white label link building agree that guest blogging on bigger and more established websites has a higher payout among many other building techniques. You are basically building a relationship with higher influencers and websites to open the door for many opportunities for your business. 

3.   Fix 404 Errors

User experience is highly affected by how smooth your website works. If users get too many 404 errors, they are more likely to stop trusting your website for a credible business. Some users might get too frustrated and stop using your website altogether. That said, broken links don’t only affect off-page SEO, but they also add a big red flag for website crawlers. The outreach might also cost you potential customers. This is why fixing 404 errors is always on top of any SEO checklist. By fixing these errors, you will enhance user experience and prevent outreach opportunities from reaching your competitors. 

4.   Paid Ads 

Promoting your content to ensure that more people are seeing it, is essential for the nourishment of any business. Without this essential step, you will be left with a limited pool of customers that already know and trust your business. Promoting your content with paid ads, on the other hand, widens your reach and increases traffic. This way, you will rest assured that more people are getting familiar with what you have to offer. Paid ads such as Google Ads or using other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram get the job done quickly when it comes to getting the most value out of your off-page SEO.

5.   Guest Authoring

Contributing to other blogs and websites as a guest author is one of the most effective off-site SEO techniques that is used by many popular bloggers. If you’re still trying to launch your blog off the ground, there is no quicker way than appearing on a more popular website with high traffic to redirect some of the people that may be regular users. 

You don’t exactly have to network your way into these websites to contribute as a guest thanks to the many blogs and websites that readily welcome guest posts. As a guest author, you should focus on the quality of the links you use rather than the quantity because you’ll want to leave a good impression on the reader. Try to diversify the type of blogs you post in to avoid restricting yourself to one or two blogs only.

In our modern-day, ignoring the importance of having a strong online presence isn’t even a possibility. Without a strong website and some powerful SEO techniques, you are more likely to lose to even small competitors. Building an effective SEO strategy isn’t all plain sailing, yet it’s definitely worth it to live up to the competition in our digital-driven world. 

5 Ways to Improve Relationships with Your Customers

Attracting more customers will always be a vital pursuit for every business out there. However, customer acquisition is always more costly and riskier than good, old customer retention. That is why more companies are using their resources to achieve both, albeit with a greater emphasis on retention and improving customer loyalty. This is a much simpler way to boost revenue, ensure a high ROI, and always get referrals that will ultimately fuel acquisition, too. 

To earn that loyalty and those referrals, you need to invest heavily in improving your customer relationships. Yes, it often depends on those individual, small-scale interactions your agents have with them daily, but you need an overarching strategy containing targeted tactics for long-term customer retention. Here are a few ideas to help you strengthen those bonds and thus enhance your brand reputation over time.

Personalize your offers and discounts

Saying that your customers come first is very different from actually treating them as a top priority. One very effective way to show them just how much they matter is to implement advanced personalization methods to improve customer experience. 

From geo-targeting, segmentation, all the way to using customer shopping histories to create tailor-made discounts and birthday offers, you have a wide array of personalization tactics at your disposal. All of them serve to make each individual customer feel special, and thus more eager to come back to a store where you know their name. 

Be available across different channels

Nowadays, convenience is often the key reason why some customers return or leave. If you can’t send them a product today, there might be a competitor that can. If you can’t respond to their message in the next five minutes, someone else surely will. And if you keep them on hold, no matter how cool the music might be, they’ll hang up and call a different number. Your availability will define how eager they are to go back to your product or service.

For that very reason, more companies are turning to top VoIP services that are both cost-effective and easy to use in any customer service department. Instead of endless lines of phones and equipment stacked in your office, you can have an internet-based communication channel that connects your customers directly to speak to your agents. Throw in chatbots on your website and social media, and you’ll be able to provide support 24/7 if need be.

Provide transparent insights into your business

Content is not restricted to selling and advertising, on the contrary, you should use it to get closer to your customers and to let them experience everything that makes your brand unique. You’ll notice that some companies use the latest, trendiest social media features to post videos and live-stream from their offices to give their customers a glimpse of what it means to work with your business. If they get to see the process behind making your product, all the better for them.

Starting polls on social media, posting images from your events, and sharing stories your employees write and create are all valid tactics for improving customer engagement. Incentivize customers to post their own stories and experiences with your brand, and that alone will make them feel like part of your brand story. 

Exceed their expectations

The very first time they purchase something from you, throw in a freebie to surprise them. It will be a great conversation-starter, and a surefire way to inspire them to talk about your brand with their loved ones. Add to that, use every opportunity to exceed their expectations by going that extra mile whenever they make a request, a purchase, or simply interact with one of your customer support agents.

For example, if they come to you with an issue or a suggestion, don’t just thank them for taking the survey and sharing their feedback with you. Take steps to make it happen, and then go ahead and notify them of the changes you’ve made to accommodate their needs – they’ll not just appreciate the effort, but the communication, too.

Focus on the ongoing value

Some of your customers have come to your website because of a sponsored post on social media, so they were instantly on your product landing page. Others, however, might have discovered how your brand fits into their lifestyle by reading a blog post on improving their health. Either way, content is behind both of these valuable touchpoints, and it can make all the difference for your future customer interactions, too. 

Creating valuable content for your customers is one of the main ways to provide them with free tips, suggestions, advice, and guidance. Free e-books and informative articles are there to add even more value to the mix, assuring them of your credibility and authority in your industry. 

Selling a product once or getting someone to subscribe to your services is merely an opportunity, not a done deal. It’s a chance for you to shine and to show your customers just how much you value their business, beyond that initial sale. These strategies aim to do just that – make your customers feel appreciated and relevant so that they can return the same level of appreciation and trust your brand for years to come.