10 Tactics to Deal with the Engagement Decline on Instagram

Instagram may be one of the most engaging social media platforms but that doesn't mean that you won't experience a decline. As more brands opt for Instagram as their promotional channel the audience’s attention is getting scattered. If you’ve been experiencing engagement decline don’t worry. Oscillations are a regular part of the business. 

However, if you want to change your current situation you need to do something about it. Silently observing as your engagement declines will only make it worse. It is time that you roll up your sleeves and gets your audience back. To help you form a successful strategy, we have collected some of the most effective Instagram tactics for improving engagement. 

1. MAKE THE FIRST MOVE

Why wait for the audience to come to you? Having your followers leave comments, likes, and share your posts isn't the only way to improve your engagement.

Make the first move and start the interaction with your followers by engaging with their posts. You can be the one who will leave the first comment or like their post.

Such a proactive approach will attract followers' attention to your brand and encourage them to engage with your brand.

2. REPOST USER-GENERATED CONTENT

Show how much you value your customers by sharing their posts. User-generated content is perfect for increasing engagement. It provides you with an endless flow of content and helps you to get noticed by your customers' followers.

Collect user-generated content by encouraging your customers to post about your products on Instagram if they are satisfied with the product. Mention a specific hashtag that they should use so that you can keep track of it.

Check out how Wayfair, an online furniture store collects user-generated content through their hashtag #wayfairathome.

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3. CREATE INSTAGRAM POLLS

Polls and surveys have become quite popular on Instagram. Not only do they help the brand to get informed about customers’ opinions but they also work great for increasing engagement.

Making polls is easy and fun. You can ask any type of question from more personal ones to those that are related to your brand.

If you need some help with creating Instagram Story polls, this guide by Social Media Examiner will tell you everything that you need to know. 

4. SHARE VIDEOS

The fact that videos have a 38% higher engagement rate than image posts tells you enough about how useful videos can be.

They make the users more attentive and their interactive nature increases their concentration. Videos make your brand more approachable which will encourage the users to engage with your brand. 

The crucial aspect of video posts is that they have an attention-grabbing introduction. Additionally, focus on a single idea and keep the video length under 30 seconds. 

5. GO LIVE

Instagram’s live videos are very popular among users. More than 500 million Instagram users use this feature daily.

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The reasons why live videos are helpful for your engagement are the following:

• You can engage in live interaction by responding to users’ comments in real life.

• Live videos will position you first in followers’ Instagram Story feed.

• It enables you to respond to more comments or questions since it is less time consuming than written responses.

• They evoke a sense of urgency because they are available only 24 hours. 

• 80% of Instagram users claim that they prefer to watch live videos from brands than to read their blog posts. 

6. USE IG TV

For longer videos, you should use IG TV. Since Instagram has a limit of 1 minute for live videos, IG TV is created for posting videos that last longer.

Your IG TV content can be informative and entertaining. These longer videos are useful for establishing a closer connection with your followers.

The type of videos you can post on IG TV are:

• Tutorials

• Behind the scenes

• Meet the team

• Unboxing

• Customer success stories

• First impression videos

7. START A CONTEST

When there is a free prize in questions, the users won't be able to resist you. Instagram contests can be very entertaining and you can encourage engagement through requirement.

For example, one of the requirements can be to leave a comment on that post or to share the post on their Instagram Story.

To ease the process of choosing the winner, use a hashtag that will gather all of the contestants’ posts. Starbucks used the same trick for their Red cup contest. 

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What’s also important is that the invite to the contest is appealing for your target audience. Browse through best writing websites to find a writing service that can help you out with that. 

8. TRY OUT AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is mostly used for increasing sales, but it can also help with your engagement rate.

Through affiliate links, users will discover your brand. Even if they don't go through the purchase at that time, they will memorize your brand.

The affiliates will ensure your credibility so their followers will feel confident enough to engage with your posts and ask you about your services or any doubts that might arise.  

9. TEAM UP WITH INFLUENCERS

Users will feel more trustworthy towards your brand if their beloved influencer mentions you. The impact of influencers on users is very powerful. Therefore, that can be your chance to increase user engagement.

You don't have to establish long-term cooperation. Even a simple Instagram Story or post will get the followers to notice you and interact with your brand.

Just find an influencer whose followers have characteristics of your target audience and give influencer marketing a try.

10. TELL STORIES

There is something about stories that captivate our attention. Is it that reminds us of childhood? Wherever the power of it lies, you this to your advantage.

Share stories about relevant events, your past experiences, news you’ve heard, your beginnings, etc. The relevant part is that you structure the story (introduction, body, conclusion) and express your brand’s personality through it. 

A useful tip that will help you to make your stories more engaging is to end it with a question. It can be something related to the story or a general question such as “What are your opinions on it?” 

BE PERSISTENT AND TRACK RESULTS

While engagement decline can be harmful to your marketing purposes, it is nothing that can't be fixed. With these simple tricks, you'll be on the right track of getting your followers back.

One last tip that you need to keep in mind is that persistence and dedication are a must. If you want to see results you need to commit to the cause. Also, make sure that you show consistency in tracking the results. Through those findings, you'll know which tactics work best for your business so that you can focus on those. 

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5 Ways to Use Social Proof to Boost Conversions

There’s been a lot of talk about social proof in the marketing world in the past couple of decades, ever since the online flood gates were opened and the business world expanded into the digital realm. This oversaturation of content kind of made it difficult for customers to figure out who they should trust, and it made it even more difficult for them to establish meaningful relationships with their favorite brands anymore. Simply put, there are too many players in this digital marketing game nowadays, and people need a way to figure out which brands deserve their attention and trust.

In essence, this is social proof, a psychological phenomenon that you can use to your advantage in order to incentivize new customers to adopt the behaviors of others, and thus inspire them to buy from your site, or engage with your brand in any way. By building social proof, you will become more trustworthy, and thus generate quality leads and even inspire conversions on the spot. Here’s how you can do just that.

Add User Ratings and Reviews to Your Site

The first solution that might come to mind is to add user ratings and 1st party reviews to your site. The former is a type of visual feedback that your existing customers give to your potential leads and future customers, while the latter is more descriptive and allows the potential customers to delve deeper into the subject matter before making the decision to buy. You can start by adding simple user ratings (typically in the form of stars, but it can be unicorns if you’re feeling unique) to your products to give visitors a clear indication of the popularity of every product in your offer.

Next, be sure to add customer reviews to your site, but instead of copying 3rd party reviews from other sites such as Google or Yelp, be sure to focus on 1st party (native) feedback. The 1st party review is a unique type of content, in a sense that you own it, and that you post it only on your website. While 3rd party reviews can sometimes be unreliable, 1st party reviews are posted only by your real customers, which will help you build social proof more easily.

Emphasize Trending and Popular Product

People who are just now coming into contact with your brand or website for the first time probably have no idea what’s hot and what’s not, but they would love to. It’s up to you to guide them on their browsing journey and help them navigate your site easily without getting confused or thinking that you might not have what they’re looking for. To do this, you should proudly display your “hot” or “trending” products in each product category, which will also build social proof by showing new visitors what your existing customers love the most.

After all, if the majority of your customers are buying one product, then chances are that potential customers will follow in their footsteps. Once you have converted those customers, it will be easier to get them back to your site and inspire them to buy your less-popular items simply because they know that they can trust your brand.

Leverage Website Notification Tools

One of the best ways to build social proof in real-time and as your potential customers are browsing through your website is to use cues and notifications. By leveraging a feature-rich social proof tool such as Cue to create website notifications that will tell people who are shopping on your site, what they bought, when they bought it, and provide other valuable information about other customers, there is a much higher chance that your potential customers will feel more inclined to buy.

Because if other people trust your site enough to make a purchase, so can they. Simply integrate a cue tool into your website, choose the customer information you want the notifications to show, and use the cues to build your brand’s authority and trust. This can also be a valuable tool when you’re trying to prevent people from leaving your website prematurely.

Add Relevant Certifications and Badges

Another great way to build social proof is to add all of the badges and certifications that are relevant to your industry, niche, and business. People love certifications and badges, not because they look good, but because they provide them with a sense of security and ease when buying from brands they’re seeing for the first time in their life. Consider adding data security badges, antivirus and antimalware badges, shipping and satisfaction guarantees, money-back guarantees, and more.

Capitalize on User-Generated Content

And finally, always remember that people trust other people more than they trust you. So, for all the reviews and certifications you put on your site, you should double the amount of user-generated content.

Yes, reviews are user-generated, but beyond that, aim to build social proof on social media by communicating with your followers, engaging them in meaningful conversation, and incentivizing them to make their own photos and videos to showcase your products and just tell the world what they think of your brand. To put the icing on the cake, make all of your images on social media shoppable by linking the products directly to the corresponding product page on your site in order to boost traffic and conversions.

Wrapping up

Social proof is one of the most important elements of long-term success in the modern business world, and it’s easy to see why. With these tips in mind, go ahead and optimize your online presence to build social proof and thus generate new leads and incentivize conversions.

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Search by Image to Find Pictures Online

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of finding images online mantra, then you are surely in the right place because today, we will tell you about the right way of searching the exact images that you want online. You should know that apart from searching through keywords, there are many other ways that you can use to search for images simply!

You must have tried searching for an image that you liked when you saw it, but you didn’t have the right keywords to describe it, this happens every now and then in our life especially when we see a movie or a trailer or if we liked the picture of a celebrity you didn’t know about and wanted to dig more details about him/her then the best way to dig the details is with the best search by image tool! So today we will tell you all about the tools which you can use to search images with images instead of keywords.

The Image Search Tool By Small SEO Tools!

If you want to get the most reliable services for reverse photos, then you should probably start using the reverse similar image search tool by small SEO tools. We would like you to know that the reverse image search tool by a small SEO tool is the best tool that can help you out in searching the complete details with the help of just uploading the image that you saw. You can upload screenshots and camera photos in the tool too if not the downloaded images in your gallery.

Now you should know that the image search tool will surely help you out in getting the details of the image such as similar images to the original one, the details about the owner of the image, the copyrights of the image and the details about the shape, size, and quality of the image plus it can also tell you about where the image is being used and how you can help yourself in getting the text in the image. The search image tools by the small SEO tools are most reliable because of the fact that it does not save your images in its database.

This is the core reason why we recommend you guys to simply use the tools instead of the search engine to search for images. The search engine can simply save your images in their database without your permission. So you should use this tool instead to secure your search and to get the best results. We would like you to know that if you use a search engine, then you will get limited results related to the search engine only but if you use the tools then you will get the results from different search engines!

The Reverse Image Search Tools by the Search Engine Reports!

We will like you guys to know that if you are looking for simple and free tools, then this is the platform for you! You can simply get the details of the image you upload quite easily. You just have to simply upload the image in the search bar and get the details about the ownership, the rights to copy and the materialistic details of the image.

The image search tool by search engine reports can simply help you to search for images with the help of the image URL that you can find on the internet. In this way you don’t even have to download the image from the internet rather you can simply cut the URL of the image and then paste it into the search bar from where you can simply press hit and get the details of the image!

Now with this tool, you get another important feature. This feature of the tool helps you know about the utilization of your image on other websites. In this way, you can simply get to know about the image plagiarism and can even sure the user who is using your images on his or her website without your permission! You should know that this is one of the most efficient ways of checking your image for plagiarism and you can also use this tool when you want to use an image that does not belong to you!

So now you know about the top two platforms which can help you search images with the help of the image search tools. We would like you to use them to search for images and to get all the desired details about a certain image. If you want to know the details about a person and his social media profile, then you can simply use these tools to dig in dirt on him! So don’t wait and start searching for your favorite images with these tools!

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Crucial KPIs to Track for Measuring Brand Performance

There are too many metrics and KPIs you can measure, whether you own a small business or a well-managed brand. However, it is not the point to track and measure everything – you should focus only on metrics of high relevance. Measuring your brand performance is about understanding the process of how consumers make purchasing decisions in your industry and how to increase the chances of being their favorite brand. Hence, let’s check all crucial KPIs you need to track for measuring brand performance.

Brand Awareness and Recognition

First of all, you need to know if your customers recognize your brand on the market. You can measure it with three key performance indicators (KPIs) – top of mind (TOM), spontaneous, and prompted brand awareness. Using unprompted questions is the best way to measure spontaneous and top of mind awareness. For instance, you can ask which brands they remember when thinking about a particular industry.

On the other hand, to measure prompted awareness, present your respondents with a list of brands (including yours), and ask which ones they recognize. It is not a big deal if your TOM awareness is low. However, prompted awareness is far more critical, and it should not be lower than 60%.

How well your Customers know the values of your Brand?

Finding out if your customers know what your brand stands for is super valuable for your further marketing tactics. KPIs that you want to track in this segment are brand profile and self-declared knowledge about the brand. Before getting to the questions about your brand’s profile, you should first ask respondents whether they know anything about your brand or not. Eliminate the group that knows nothing (but include the percentage in final measuring) and continues the process.

Ask remaining respondents to rate your brand based on different values and attributes, and to give each of these 1-5 ratings. Of course, the goal is to have high scores in almost every aspect. However, even if you don’t achieve that immediately, you will see exactly which segments of your brand you need to improve in order to be widely recognized. As a progressive bachelor of arts degree in product design teaches, the quality of a product, which comprises of the product’s conception, usability, and emotional appeal, should be the hallmark of its market positioning.

Purchase Consideration

Purchase intent is a crucial KPI that tells you whether people consider purchasing your product or not. In many cases, this KPI is closely related to sales, so people who answer positively will, most likely, buy a few products. However, sometimes, people change their minds right before the moment of purchase, and your job is to determine why people make such a decision. For instance, it might be due to high prices or limited distribution of your products. Anyways, whatever the most common reason is, focus on it and do everything you can to make things better and increase the number of purchases.

Sales Process

Finally, we come to the sales volume and sales value, which are two crucial KPIs. They will give you the answer to question how often people buy your products or services. To measure it successfully, you need to know how many items people bought and what their value is. For these KPIs, you don’t need people’s declarations – both metrics are entirely based on the real-time data that you can get from the digital marketing reporting dashboard. Weekly and monthly reports are crucial for these KPIs, as well as putting them into spreadsheets and documents. And finally, it is vital to know all the relevant factors that had an influence on sales in a particular period.

Would your customers recommend your brand to others?

Recommendations are crucial for business success. Word-of-mouth marketing is still super powerful, and you should not underestimate it. The KPI you should track is a net promoter score (NPS). Ask people how likely they are to recommend your brand and products to their friends and family members. They can answer on a scale from 0 to 5, for instance. Those who respond with 4 or 5 are your brand promoters, while others are either passives or detractors. Subtracting the percentage of distractors from the percentage of promoters is the best way to calculate the final result.

Measuring your brand performance should be one of your primary tasks each month. It is the only way to improve brand awareness and increase sales.

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Three Tech Trends Transforming Digital Marketing

Unless people have been living in a cave or on a deserted island, they have not missed the explosion of digital marketing. Every time you get online, you are bombarded with advertisements; and when you access your social media accounts, it is even worse. If you have conducted a search for a specific product or service, for example, all of a sudden, ads for this type of product pop up in your feeds. Obviously, your behavior is being watched and noted.

This is all due to big data technology, something that is impacting virtually every sector of the economy. Oceans of unstructured data can now be gathered from all over the web and then organized and categorized, in order to answer questions businesses have about consumer behaviors, needs and wants, and then be used to predict what products and services should be developed and offered. It is based upon science, not “gut” feelings. The implications for marketing are explosive.

And no marketer can ignore the significance of using social media for their efforts. But using social media involves staying current on the latest technologies that will capture target audiences too. It is no longer enough to be on several platforms to promote products and services. Using data science to understand an audience, to know where and when they are online, and what type of content they want to see is critical.

Beyond data science, there are other digital trends that are also transforming marketing. Here are three of them:

1. Chatbots

Chatbots have been around for a long time. They are used via text, voice and messaging. One of the most successful early bots was Poncho, the Weather Cat.

He was developed by a small team, and the purpose was to give daily text weather forecasts to users anywhere in the world, in response to user requests, combined with lots of humor, horoscopes for a while, and social games.

Businesses took up this technology and began to add it to their websites, primarily to answer the most common questions that visitor’s must-have. A prime example is writing services, which students often use for assignment help. One look at the top-rated writing agencies at PickTheWriter will demonstrate the use of these types of bots.

But we’ve come a long way since then.

Enter artificial intelligence. Anyone who has used Alexa has experienced this. Bots are programmed to “learn” through natural language processing technology, so that they become “smarter” through continued use, as they provide more complex answers/solutions to their users.

What does this mean for marketing? A lot, actually. When customer inquiries and product searches are tracked through chatbots, it allows those bots to send out personalized push notifications regarding products/services in which they have shown interest; it allows suggestions for additional “upsells” to be made; and it allows automated yet personalized customer service, which is more and more becoming an integral part of marketing. When customer questions, problems, issues are resolved, they become loyal to a brand.

2. Voice Search

People are busy. And they are on the go a lot. They are on their mobile devices more than on PC’s now, and typing in search terms is no longer convenient or practical (those tiny keyboards). Fortunately. Google and Siri have that covered. Users can search for anything from a nearby Greek restaurant to ceiling light fixtures and get immediate results.

But there’s the thing about voice searches.

They are a huge challenge for businesses. Voice searches do not give pages and pages like a PC search does. It becomes even more important for digital marketers to ensure that their company is among the top results. It means that content must do the following:

• No more single-word keywords. Users search in longer phrases and full sentences, and those must be incorporated into the content.

• Content must reflect the natural conversational language and use vocabulary that your target audience uses. The vocabulary used by a senior citizen may be quite different from that of Generation Z users.

• Content must absolutely solve a problem or answer a question that a target audience will have.

3. Incorporation of Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology is already transforming huge segments of the economy because it creates immutable records and documents. This prevents fraud and theft and is the most secure environment for storage to date. Consider, for example, how an international shipment may go through several “hands” on its way to a destination. All along that way, there is the potential for theft or loss. Blockchain will track that shipment through all of these points and record its contents at each stop/transfer. Blockchain also provides permanent secure storage of medical records, voter registrations and identity, financial transactions, legal contracts, and more.

So, how does this impact digital marketing? Consumers are far smarter and far more wary of providing a lot of personal information when they do business on the web. And they want much more control over how their personal data is used by advertisers (sold, rented, exchanged, etc.). When businesses incorporate blockchain into the “mix,” it is the consumer who decides when that information can be shared with any others, not the business. This increases trust.

And there is also the benefit of blockchain for marketers who use paid advertising. Through blockchain, they are able to track all of their ad dollars and confirm exactly who is viewing those ads, when, and how (and there are real people, not bots being “counted”). The point is ensuring that a target audience is actually reached.

There’s More…

In addition to the use of big data, covered in the introductions, these three trends are big, as far as the technology that should be incorporated. Another huge trend is the use of the augmented and virtual reality that will give consumers experiences with products and services.

But new technologies are not the only key components of digital marketing. There are many non-tech trends too, and marketers would be well-advised to stay current on those as well. Just a few of these involve storytelling, feature advantages benefits selling (FABS), use of media, and promoting relationships rather than products.

Digital marketing, in total, is a complex and challenging effort if it is to be successful. But it is the one thing that will bring consumers to a company’s doorstep and beyond. No marketer can become lazy in a crowded and constantly changing space.

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About: Angela Baker

Angela Baker is a self-driven specialist who is currently working as a freelance writer at WoWGrade writing services and is trying to improve herself and her blogging career. She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth and is convinced that it’s always important to broaden horizons. That's why Angela develops and improves her skills throughout the writing process to help to inspire people. Also, she writes for LiveInspiredMagazine, rounding out her professional writing career.

Intelligent conversions: Understanding the Impact of AI in Digital Marketing

Did you know that 40% of the marketing and sales teams believe that artificial intelligence(AI) and machine learning(ML) will contribute significantly to their department’s success? Does this mean AI digital transformation will revolutionize the marketing world?

Artificial intelligence has already made its way in every major industry, ranging from automobiles to technology. It is already dominating the customer service segment through chatbots. But how is it affecting the digital marketing services world? Will AI transform online marketing as we see it today?

Today, a significant portion of digital marketing revolves around data. Whether it is social media marketing or inbound lead generation, better data insights imply better sales. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning help to make sense of this data.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning support the creation of micro-moments in digital marketing that enable personalizing the customer experience and understanding market requirements in real-time.

Customer analysis is a massive factor in personalizing experience. Netflix and Amazon heavily utilize AI to understand preferences and provide relevant suggestions to customers. AI-based tools enable a comprehensive study of the audience and help in determining what type of content to create.

Digital marketers are working hard to reap the potential of AI. They are trying to leverage AI for campaign management, budget, strategy execution, and ROI estimation. These are significant factors in determining the success of any activity. By delegating these activities to AI systems, marketers can find more time for productive decision-making and creating a better digital marketing strategy.

The influence of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

IBM’s Watson is one marketing automation tool that has helped marketers work at a centralized platform with all their customer data.

While automation and AI are two different aspects of technology, they can work wonders for marketers when combined together.

Online digital marketers are still studying the influence of AI on digital marketing, but its role in digital success is growing with each day.

Let’s have a look at some aspects of digital marketing where AI and ML are playing a massive role to augment enterprise profitability and growth.

Data Collection and Analysis

AI helps digital marketers to collect audience data and create campaigns that target specific touchpoints. AI systems, with the help of Big Data and CRM, bring this data to a centralized platform and present patterns that have worked previously for the target audience.

Website Creation

A prime example of AI-based website creation is the Wix’s ADI. Digital marketers often need a dedicated website or landing page for specific campaigns. The Wix ADI creates a fully-functional website based on a few questions. It learns the requirements and works with a template that suitably matches it.

Strategic Advertising

Planning the advertising budget is a principal challenge for digital marketers. AI predicts customer behavior based on the data collected. The insights from this data are then used to create better ads that match the user’s preference. Combined with A/B testing and market research, marketers can almost accurately determine their online ads budget with the best ROI option.

Accurate Evaluation

With the help of AI-based tools, digital marketers can now eliminate the guesswork from their campaign analysis. While earlier, they had to create the next strategy based on the closest pattern - now, AI can provide accurate insights into the performance of a campaign.

Today, there are more customer touchpoints to target than ever. On average, it takes targeting 5 to 7 touch points before a customer is converted.  AI and ML enable making data-based decisions to actively target these touchpoints and prepare a strategy that influences the customer at every stage of their journey.

How To Use Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

There are a myriad of AI and ML use cases in digital marketing. Most of them are directed towards improving the customer experience, predicting the target audience’s behavior, and generating real-time insights. It is helping businesses succeed in the digital world in areas where human personnel is not particularly efficient.

Marketers working in $500M to $1B companies are the dominant adopters of AI, particularly conversational AI systems for customer service.

However, AI and ML systems can only work in digital marketing when combined with human efforts and creative ideas.

Here are a few ways in which digital marketers can leverage these technologies to generate maximum revenue for enterprises:- 

Content Creation

When it comes to inbound lead generation, content is still the king. However, producing more content doesn’t work anymore. Google’s algorithm and the customer’s mind - both are hungry for relevant content that makes sense to their requirements.

With AI-based tools, content marketers can easily identify their best performing content. They can get insights on what is working for their customers and create more content around that. There are AI and ML tools that help to plan content and suggest which channels work best for different audiences. Companies are also using AI to generate content for specific touchpoints in their customer journey. (Tool: Concured)

Grammar is an important aspect that determines the quality of your content. AI tools like Grammarly help to frame content with proper grammar and eliminate any spelling errors. It also helps in proper sentence framing to help eliminate the “sales-y-ness” from the content.

Customer Behaviour Prediction

Today, digital marketers know that targeting everyone in your niche is a waste of resources, time, and effort. But how do they tackle this problem? AI systems enable them to identify prospects that are most likely to respond to their offer.

AdWords professionals require better analysis to identify prospects that can be converted from expensive advertising on Google. By determining the campaign objectives and analyzing previous data, AI can provide an effective strategy for AdWords.

AI and ML models used to identify customer behavior help in identifying patterns and creating digital marketing strategies according to them. These models are based on the goals you want to achieve from your marketing activity, including website traffic, specific action, or generating leads. Through predicting customer behavior, AI enables digital marketers to use fewer resources and target the right prospects at the right place and at the right time.

Customer Experience Enhancement

Customer trust is solely based on the experience they get from a brand. AI and ML can help personalize the content for users based on their history, location, and preferences. It leads to the impression that the brand is taking care of their specific needs and enhances their experience.

Retailers like Amazon, Warby Parker, and several others allow customers to take a free “try-on” of a product. It is a result of combining AR and VR with AI. The result is an increase in sales and customer loyalty as they can now understand whether they want to purchase a product or not.

Ask any digital marketing agency and they will say that improving the customer’s online experience is their first priority. A significant driver in this could be voice-enabled AI searches to give the user a better experience of a brand’s website. It will amplify the user’s visit on the website and provide an augmented version of the brand using voice-based algorithms. 

Online Advertising

Digital Marketing AI will certainly benefit marketers to target audiences better with online advertising. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have already incorporated AI and ML to understand the audience that any brand is going to advertise to.

Artificial intelligence tools help to augment online advertising by showing marketers what’s important to their target audience. They help to develop a comprehensive understanding of how ads need to be created and what people they should target for maximum conversion.

Advertising online isn’t for everyone these days. But combined with the right AI tools, it can increase the ROI twofold. How? By helping marketers plan an advertising budget based on proper analysis of their customer’s data and developing campaigns specific to their target audience’s requirements. With AI, rapid decision-making during a campaign is possible to avoid underutilization of money spent on ads.

Real-time Tracking and Insights

Measuring digital marketing efforts is crucial to understanding what worked and what went wrong. This is important because customer acquisition costs are much higher than customer retention costs. Tracking each campaign using AI will provide better insights into which customer segment marketers should target.

Through AI and ML, digital marketers can track their audience’s behavior and communicate better with them. They can analyze customer conversations in real-time and identify why people are talking about them (There are tools to track customer conversations on Twitter, Facebook, etc.). This helps to target customers better using the activities that work for each audience.

AI tools also provide insights by comparing past customers and new customers. This data is invaluable as marketers can learn how they can retain new customers. It also equips them with the capability to target their past customers better and improve their experience. AI provides relevant information on what each customer wants and how they should be targeted.

The AI Digital Marketing Transformation is Here

Whether marketers believe it or stay skeptical,  the future of AI in digital marketing is brighter than ever. As RPA continues to work its miracles, combined with AI and ML, digital marketers will drive quickly towards intelligent marketing.

We are looking at a digital marketing world where marketers will be monitoring the activities executed by AI digital marketing tools and come up with better and creative ideas to serve their customers.

Artificial Intelligence will not only save money and time but most importantly, assist humans to target customers in an intelligent manner. Using data and analytics, AI will revolutionize how digital campaigns are executed and measured. 

Many marketers, however, also hope that AI will integrate sales and marketing for creating a centralized environment where customers experience intelligence marketing from the stage of prospecting to after-sale services.

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About: Harsh Sahu

Harsh Sahu works as a Content Strategist at BoTree Digital and has been a Content Marketing Professional for nearly 4 years now. He is all about innovations and how to capitalize on the latest trends in content marketing.

4 Tips to Blend Print and Digital Marketing

Ever since the world fell madly in love with all things digital, brands have started focusing almost exclusively on their online existence. As useful as it may be to invest plenty of effort and creative energy into delivering marvelous digital marketing solutions, too many companies neglect the importance of print media and marketing channels, to their own detriment. Whether you’re utilizing a range of social media outlets, your website, or paid ads across the online world, you could be missing out on certain undeniable benefits of combining all of these and many other digital tactics with your print media. Why? Because of print matters now more than ever.

In this digitally-dominated world, people are becoming more responsive to tangible outlets and face-to-face interaction. The key failure of digital strategies is that they can only do so much in creating a warm, personalized experience, which is where more direct, print options step in to save the day. In order to further humanize your brand, maximize your marketing potential across the board, and give your customers an experience to remember, you should combine the best of both worlds. Here are the four key tips on how to accomplish just that.

Don’t forget QR codes

The most seamless, brilliant way to help your mobile-focused customers interact with your print media remains adding QR codes to each and every outlet you can. This simple solution has enabled many a company to invite their customers to visit their mobile-friendly web stores by adding this single digital footprint on their printed outlets.

Their use can be tracked and then measured, allowing you a glimpse into customer behavior, so that you can gain more understanding of these interactions, which ones convert the best, and what kind of content attracts the most users to actually use the code. This will further help you refine your strategy for the future, and hopefully give you a more seamless way to connect with all of your followers.

Amplify the effect of your brochures

Nowadays, most brands focus almost exclusively on designing beautiful and appealing digital presentations, be it a new landing page or a video ad for a new product. However, your brochures and other print outlets have the same potential to boost sales and followers when you design them with the right intent.

Brands that are aware of this potential have started turning to experts such as Infostarters to make sure that they can infuse your brand’s look as well as its tone of voice into every print they create. It’s important that your customers can instantly recognize that the brochure or the flyer comes from your business, much like they need to have the same level of recognition as soon as they land on your website. Achieving this consistently can be challenging, so working alongside design professionals can be beneficial.

Infuse your print with CTA

Wherever your customers look when they glance over your digital channels, there’s yet another call to action for them. It can be in the form of a button to check out a new product line, a blog post ending with a powerful CTA, or simply a cross-selling action just below the product they’re looking at. Alas, few brands use the same with print.

Look for ways to invite your customers to check out your latest digital campaigns with the help of print. A social media icon printed on your handouts can be enough of an initiative to get more followers for your business. How about adding a unique promotional code on a personalized letter for your digital store? Or a gift certificate sent to their doorstep, but inviting them to your online store? All of these are legitimate ways to increase the effectiveness of both of your outlets.

Cross-offer digital and print

Each industry operates differently, and as a result, each brand has different potential to utilize a wide range of digital and print channels for the sake of greater exposure and loyalty. Depending on where you stand with your audience, and if you want them to consider opting into a different marketing outlet, you can utilize them both to promote them equally and effectively.

For instance, if your customers love your brochures and printed flyers they pick up directly in your store every time they purchase, or you send them a monthly catalog of discounted items they might love, you can use the print material to invite them to follow you online, too. Add your social media pages, your latest active campaigns, hashtags, your website address, and your email subscription option. The same can apply in the opposite scenario. Should your customers subscribe to only digital outlets, offer them the printed variety through your email newsletter and see what happens.

Wrapping up

Truth be told, there’s no one-size-fits-all for any form of marketing, and the same applies to mix print and digital solutions. That is why you need to remain creative, keep getting to know your audience, and always go that extra mile to give them the experience they’ll enjoy the most. Use these tips to enhance your ongoing strategy, and you will hopefully connect to your customer base more than ever.

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How Web Hosting and Domain Name Can Affect SEO Ranking

How do you choose a domain name from more than 342 million registered domain names? Undoubtedly, every website owner wants their site to rank on the first page (especially Google) of browsers. But it starts with choosing a domain name, host, and developing SEO rich content.

Pursuing these three things can be a challenging task because Google keeps changing algorithms and rules regarding SEO. You, therefore, have to keep checking every month to identify what's working and what's not including your web host. For instance, if you create SEO rich content and you have a host who keeps failing, your website will never rank appropriately.

On the same note, the domain name also affects SEO ranking. How? The extension .com is a popular name, and almost all the best names with this extension are already in use. Why? It’s the right domain name, and it performs when it comes to ranking a website.

So, How Precisely Does Web Hosting Affect SEO?

1.   Server’s Quality

Your website deserves the best hosting services. Therefore, you need to know how to choose a web hosting service that will eventually be productive. Notably, when you select a particular host, your web will be installed on a server. If this one server is overcrowded, the results are low quality of the server. This means it will be failing as often as you can guess. A crowded server equals downtime, and downtime lowers the rank of your website.

2.   Server’s Location

If your website is serving in Australia, ensure your host has a server in your country. Google locates a website and classifies it depending on the state of its originality. This factor, therefore, need to be addressed; otherwise, your site will be losing traffic based on geographical reasons.

3.   Changing Your Host to a New One

Different hosts have a precise structure of a website. So, if you were using a different host and decide to move to a new one, the new host will implement a new structure for your website. Consequently, Google will mistake it for a new site and thus reduce your ranking.

4.   Loading Website Speed

Have you ever come across a website that took forever to open? Most people ignore a slow website and look for one that responds better. In that context, loading speed is significantly determined by website hosting. If your site exceeds the expected standards, Google lowers your ranking.

5.   Hosting Type

Dedicated, shared, and VPS hosting are the plans for hosting. If you don't have enough money to pay the dedicated and VPS plans, you can opt for cheaper options like shared hosting. Nonetheless, the shared plans are under the risk of downtime, and this could affect your website SEO.

So, despite not being able to afford a dedicated plan, ensure to check whether your host is reliable. How? Check the reviews from other clients using the same host. Alternatively, consider paying for web hosting services monthly instead of yearly

How does domain name affect SEO ranking?

Now that you know how web hosting affects SEO, let's look at how domain name influences the SEO ranking of your site. Gone are the days when websites used to rank based on the domain name. A company could domain search depending on the products it was selling and boom! The site could rank.

For instance, if a company sells fluffy carpet, it would choose fluffycarpet.com, and it would immediately rank. However, this does not mean such a site had relevant content. Undoubtedly, Google had to do something about it.

To answer the question, a domain name may or may not affect SEO ranking. But, when a domain name is unique thanks to domain name generator, it provides:

• Trust

• Brand potential

• Promotes click through

• And pronounced attention on search engine result pages

Therefore, your domain name should send an accurate signal to achieve the above four. In other words, while exercising domain search, ensure the name contributes or promotes your branding. Also, try and find a name that matches a keyword in your niche. If you do, Google will bold the keyword in a search result.

You have to choose a name that users will consider it as a reference. For instance, if a name has an extension, such as.TECH, ONLINE, STORE, the user will recognize the kind of niche your site serve and log into if that's what they are looking for.

In other words, the secret is to impress people. When your domain name has an extension such as.STORE, people will know you sell goods online and thus click on it. Notably, more clicks more traffic and, therefore, sales and higher ranking.

Another way to improve SEO ranking using a domain name is by considering the anchoring factor. To illustrate, if a website's domain name contains names like web hosting services like the link above (blue text), that web will appear in search results every time a user looks the keyword up.

Ideally, a link is a text with information sending the user to another website for extensive data. If you offer parcel delivery services and your domain name extension is parcel delivery, this could improve your site ranking every time parcel delivery cis used as an anchor to your site.

Google uses more than 200 ranking factors. Web hosting and domain name are some of the ranking factors. So, if you concentrate on these two, who will focus on the other 198 factors? It's your job to implement as many ranking factors as possible. This is the only way your site will rank appropriately.

While at it, ensure you observe:

• Signal relevancy

• Get the precise audience

• Reputation management

Furthermore, consider expired domains when setting a new site. Expired domains are domain names that were popular in the past but are not today. Together with great content, expired domains put your website on the front by default.

Take Away

Let users identify your presence online by choosing a proper domain name and host. These two, along with great content, will elevate you to greater heights in web ranking and sales. Besides, that's your sole goal.

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ABOUT: DELAN COOPER

Delan Cooper is a writer with years of experience in marketing communication. He enjoys meeting new people and reading more books to get inspired for his own book. Connect with him on Twitter.

How is AI Impacting B2B Marketers’ Jobs on a Daily Basis?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has immersed itself in our lives and made a remarkable impact. Smart devices and AI tools and toys used to seem like products of the imagination but now they are part of our everyday life. Considering that AI is an inevitable future advancement, marketers should know more about it. They are the force that keeps people updated with the newest trends and that is why AI should be on their list of priorities.

The fact 80% of B2B marketing executives predict AI will revolutionize their industry by 2020 clearly shows that AI is redefining B2B marketers’ jobs. If you want to be a part of this change let’s learn more about what AI can bring to the table and how it impacts the world of marketing. If you are being impacted by AI and need to update your professional resume, check out CraftResumes, for professional resume writing services.

AI and Marketing

Artificial intelligence presents enhancing human knowledge through machines. What makes these machines smart is applying different technologies, algorithms, and techniques to achieve natural language processing and deep learning.

Or, how this infographic explains it:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai claims that AI will have a massive impact on the world. Considering AI as an innovation that will spread worldwide, he said the following: “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.”

Pichai’s attitude about the importance of AI shows that this leading company finds AI to be an essential, not a potential addition.

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence Marketing (AI Marketing), it presents using customer data in combination with AI advancement such as machine learning to predict customers’ actions, intelligently target the customers, and act accordingly.

The reality of AI in marketing is that only 13% of B2B marketers are very confident with their knowledge of AI, while 55% are somewhat confident, and 33% are not at all confident.

Gaining knowledge about how AI can improve marketers’ business on a daily basis can be of huge help for advancing their marketing strategy. With AI they can make better marketing decisions and attract more customers to their company.

As Paul Roetzer, a founder and CEO of PR 20/20, author of The Marketing Performance Blueprint and The Marketing Agency Blueprint, and creator of The Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute and Marketing Score nicely put it: “Your life is already machine-assisted, and your marketing will be too.”

How Marketers Use AI Daily?

Some marketers have already introduced AI into their marketing routines and their practices can show us how AI can be beneficial for improving marketing strategy.

Let's take a look at some of the ways in which AI contributes to the marketing industry and impacts marketers’ jobs on a daily basis.

Better Search Engine Optimization

Google started with AI search innovation back in 2015. They introduced RankBrain, a machine learning-based algorithm.

This leading company was the inspiration to many websites such as Amazon who also use AI for their search engines.

Marketers turn to AI to make product searching more accurate and smarter.

Semantic search and natural language processing find relevant search results and make more accurate suggestions. Even when the customer doesn't know what he is searching for, AI will help him discover products.

This eases up the pressure that marketers used to have when it comes to SEO considering that is one of the main aspects of marketing strategy.

Additionally to SEO, AI also provides image recognition and analysis so customers can use visual search. Visual search technology improves merchandising and shopping experience because it provides the customer with a more accurate suggestion.

Improving Customer Experience

Presenting the brand as helpful and people-centric is one of the main goals that marketers need to fulfill.

With the help of AI technology, companies will no longer have to wait for their questions, problems, and inquiries to be addressed.

The technology that is used for this purpose is chatbot technology that is powered by AI capabilities.

By using natural language processing, chatbots identify the question and provide the company with instant answers. This is the best choice for handling general questions in B2B cooperation.

Identifying Prospective Customers

For sourcing quality leads markets used to go through endless customer data manually. Obtaining, classifying, and reviewing data manually takes a lot of valuable time that marketers could put in use for other purposes.

AI simplified this process because it captures and collects a larger set of data from contact databases, websites, and social media platforms and identifies the best B2B target customers. It shows the best solutions for both inward and outward marketing initiatives.

AI enables marketers to capture data during consumer interaction and create customer profiles that are later used for targeting new customers.

Not only that it improves the quantity of leads, but it also improves their quality which makes marketers more successful.

Personalization

Personalization can be done on many different levels. Some companies like Instagram offer suggested sponsored ads based on your previous searches while others such as those you can find at TheWordPoint offer adapted translation prices.

AI-driven marketing analyzes the behavior of potential customers and provides marketers with a chance to conduct the hyper-personalization of the marketing campaigns. That is why 71% of B2B marketers are interested in using AI for personalization.

Marketers use AI to eliminate spam emails and messages by initiating personalized conversations. It independently crafts messages that upscale the customers’ interests.

Additionally, it collects historical data and analyzes the correct time of sending the right content to the right person

Brands have a chance to target customers one by one instead of targeting specific sectors. Consequently, when they use the personalized approach they have a better chance to increase sales.

Improving Conversions

Some research showed that 80% of the time of sales representatives is spent on emails and phone calls for nurturing and qualifying leads with repetitive activities which gives them merely 20% of the time for the closing of the lead.

Such an approach is slowly becoming outdated because AI offers a less time-consuming and more efficient approach.

Based on predefined characteristics, AI can identify new and existing customers that are more accurate choices for the conversion.

Instead of wasting time on uninterested prospects, AI directs marketers to ideal prospects that are more likely to seal to deal.

Some Final Thoughts

AI is clearly taking the world of marketing by storm. By understanding this incredible technology, marketers will be able to improve their strategies and make their job easier. AI also brings new career opportunities in marketing because it presents a completely different approach to marketing practices.

AI gives marketers an opportunity to identify customers, improve their experience, create a personalized approach, and optimize the search in the best possible way. No matter how marketers use AI, it is inevitable that this phenomenon leads to surpassing the competition and growing the business.

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ABOUT: ERICA SUNARJO

Erica Sunarjo is a communications professional with more than five years of experience. Erica runs her own blog BestWritersOnline and is proud of her an uncanny ability to explain the most complex subject in simple terms.

How to Increase Your Average Order Value Through Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are one of the most powerful selling techniques around. Think about a time you’ve visited a brick and mortar store. We all think we’re immune to salesmen. In reality, it’s hard not to be swayed by someone who knows more than you do.

Of course, in the world of online shopping, it’s harder to take advantage of this effect. However, there are still steps you can take to steer your customers towards the perfect product for them.

These days, product recommendations are still an effective way to boost order values on e-commerce stores. In this article, we’ll look at several ways that this can be achieved, as well as some concrete examples of product recommendations in action.

First, some background...

Why you Should Use Product Recommendations

The core of any good product recommendation strategy is figuring out which products are right for your customers. However, unlike in the past, this isn’t done with personal intuition or expertise.

Instead, the e-commerce sphere uses data on its customers to decide on the best product recommendations. This can be done with a native function in your e-commerce platform or using a third-party plugin.

This is great since you don’t need to be a data science expert to get the benefits of product recommendations. All the same, it’s important to understand a little bit of the theory behind these tools.

In practice, there are three main ways that these tools come up with product recommendations:

1. The Content Focused method - This uses cookies to track your customer’s behavior, to determine their likes and interests

2. The Collaborative method - This uses buying patterns from other customers to find trends as a basis for product recommendations

3. The Hybrid Method - This uses elements of the first two methods in tandem

Now you understand what makes product recommendation tools tick. Next, we’ll look at how to leverage these to increase your average order value.

There are two ways that these techniques will increase order values:

1. By steering customers towards a more expensive alternative product

2. Or by encouraging customers to buy additional products as accessories or add-ons

Now, here’s ten ways that this works in practice.

Suggested Products

The most common product recommendation you’ll find uses the ‘recommended for you’ format. This is a hybrid approach. To some extent, it can take into account the customer’s browsing history. Mostly though, it just recommends similar items.

The goal is to increase order values by directing customers to a pricier alternative.

As much as this is a popular way to recommend products, it’s also not the most effective approach. There’s generally very little real personalization, so these recommendations tend to have poor conversion rates.

The example above is from ASOS, but the only thing all of the products on display share is that they’re ostentatious shoes.

While a product recommendation like this is better than nothing, you have several much better options. A ‘recommended for you’ style recommendation is the bare minimum that you should implement.

Email Recommendations

Of course, product recommendations can also appear off your site. This is most often done through email marketing. The benefits of this are numerous. For one thing, it can help you to salvage lost sales through cart abandonment emails.

However, using email marketing to increase order values works a little differently. That is after you’ve optimized and sent your email with a great sales email subject line, you have a shorter window of opportunity to upsell extra products or upgrades. For physical products, this is before the initial order is dispatched.

If you sell services, this is a little easier.

In either case, the trick is to use your standard automated emails to recommend products. The great thing about this is that users are more likely to open something like an order confirmation than they are a pure marketing email.

Here’s a typical RyanAir booking confirmation, for example.

Frequently Bought Together

This is probably the most common way to increase order values by adding additional products to the cart. This is generally used when someone is viewing a high-value item. You then push additional low-value items as accessories or necessary add-ons like batteries.

These are pretty effective, but since they’re computer-generated, you can end up with some weird combinations. In the above example, it’s hard to say why anyone would need three pairs of headphones and a Bluetooth speaker.

This example would probably be more effective if they recommended lower value items, like a charging cable or carry case for the first set of wireless headphones.

Customer’s Browsing History

To utilize these product recommendations, you need to collect a certain amount of customer data and then track their behavior. As well as increasing order values, this is a handy way to eke out higher lifetime values from your customers.

The way this works is that a customer isn’t always ready to buy the first time they view a product. However, they might then forget about that product entirely. This type of recommendation is simply a gentle reminder.

Nobody tracks their customers like Amazon. On their homepage, they have a widget to display the last ten or so items you viewed, like so.

This can remind you of an item you previously considered. Equally, it can leave you scratching your head about why you were looking at banana slicers.

Related Item Recommendations

This is another technique aimed at increasing order values by adding on additional products. However, it works slightly differently from ‘frequently bought together’ recommendations. That is, they go together, but they aren’t necessarily bought together often.

Generally, this is because they’re items with a similarly high value, rather than one high-value item and one or more lower value accessories.

Equally, it could be a combination of many high and low-value items.

This is very effective in niches, like home improvement, where customers can be pushed from buying a single product to taking on an entire project. For instance, the example above would more than double the initial order value.

Bundles

Similarly, you have product bundles. With a product bundle, you offer a discount when all the items are purchased together. This type of product recommendation works best when the customer is going to need the extra items at some point anyway.

The goal then is to get them to buy them from you straight away, rather than someone else down the line. The discounted price incentivizes this.

Product bundles are also great, as you can offer flexibility. Budgets differ, so not every customer can afford everything they need all at once. Offering different tiers of product bundle helps to overcome this challenge by offering something in every price range. This is the kind of thing you see a lot of and is effective if you are pushing an offer to your e-store for affiliate marketing purposes.

Updated Products

Humans are simple creatures. One way to show this is how much we love shiny and new things. It’s easy to take advantage of this fact when selling goods. This works well with prestige goods.

This is precisely why car companies release a new model every year. Even if the changes are minuscule, a certain number of people will still splash out on the new model, because it’s the new model.

Similarly, this works well with high-value consumer goods, like computers, cameras, and phones.

Luckily, newer models also tend to have a higher list price.

What’s great about these recommendations is that they require very little effort on your part. Check out the example above. There’s no compelling copy or fancy calls to action. The fact that it’s a newer model is enough.

What Others Bought

One of the most sophisticated ways to use product recommendations is to display what products other people ended up buying. From a marketing perspective, this is gold, since it taps into the herd mentality.

The European music retailer Thomann uses this in a creative and impressive way.

There’s a bunch of things to take in here. Look at the pricing, for instance. Only one of the recommended alternatives is below the price of the item the customer is viewing. This has two effects. It provides a sense of choice while also directing the customer to more expensive alternatives.

Also, the percentage of customers who went for each option is displayed, providing a strong element of social proof to encourage conversions.

Finally, the most popular item is displayed first in the list, underscored with its availability in green text. This is a powerful way to encourage customers to commit to a purchase.

As a bonus, displaying alternative products like this is a great way to rank for long-tail keywords. This is an easy way to use your page structure to boost on-page SEO.

Best Sellers

Another easy to implement technique is directing customers towards the bestselling items in a certain niche. This works in two main ways. Firstly, it focuses your selling efforts on the most popular options. These are naturally the easiest to gain conversions.

‘Bestsellers’ recommendations also have a layer of social proof.

This works better in some industries than others. In particular, these product recommendations are effective in niches with a strong emphasis on trends. The obvious example is fashion.

The example above makes good use of star ratings, which you can add as a structured data markup to your search results. This helps to project quality and legitimacy.

Customers Also Viewed

This kind of recommendation is pretty simple, but if you’re only going to implement one of these techniques, it’s a pretty good all-rounder. The crux of this is that it displays both alternatives and add-ons to increase order values.

This example appears on a listing for a shirt.

As you can see, the recommendation points the customer towards other shirts, as well as hoodies and jackets.

You’ll also notice that most of these are pretty much in the same price range. This is a safe bet for this kind of product recommendation, as customers probably already have a certain budget in mind.

Recommending a Rolex wouldn’t be nearly as effective.

How to Increase Average Order Values with Product Recommendations

One thing is for sure. You’ve got a lot of different options when it comes to product recommendations. However, your best bet is to use a number of these techniques all on the same page.

There’s a reason that big ecommerce platforms like eBay and Amazon usually have dozens of different recommendations on every single listing. Each one builds on the last to boost order values and conversion rates.

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ABOUT: OWEN BAKER

Owen Baker is a content marketer for Voila Norbert, an online email verification tool. He’s spent over a decade in online marketing. He enjoys sharing his knowledge of content marketing across a range of websites.

Ranking Higher: 5 Effective Ways to Find and Implement Niche Keywords

Unlike many business leaders, SEO experts understand the importance of proper keyword research and implementation for the success of your content, PPC, and digital strategies in general. No matter if you’re launching a new business venture, or if you’re running a well-established operation and are trying to develop your competitive advantage, it’s imperative to rank for those terms that are relevant to your industry, business, and niche in order to elevate your brand’s visibility and reputation.

That said, successful SEO is not just about ranking for those general industry-wide keywords that everyone is searching for, instead, it’s about discovering those niche longtail keywords that will attract the right customers, put you on the first page of Google, and incentivize people to venture onto your site. With that in mind, here are the five effective ways to find and implement niche keywords into your digital presence.

Brainstorm topics related to your industry

Of course, there’s always the easy way, and then there’s the right way to do keyword research. You could simply pop a few general phrases into the Google Keyword Planner and act on the results it dishes out, but just keep in mind that your competitors will probably get the same results, the same suggestions, and therefore make similar if not identical decisions to yours. That’s no way to rank high for niche keywords or to get ahead in the competitive industry.

This is why you need to get creative (rather, your digital agency needs to get creative), and brainstorm alternative ways to get a hold of niche keywords. The goal of your marketing team should be to identify the smaller niches that are relevant to your business and your industry.

These sub-segments will yield interesting and unique topics that have their unique, niche keywords. It’s important that you put yourself in the minds of your customers, and think about the niche phrases they might be typing into the search engine. You can then plug those niche keywords into your keyword tool and see how they stack up.

Integrate a keyword research tool

If you’re not using a keyword research tool, then you’re just playing the guessing game, and chances are that your guesses are wrong. This will invariably lead to subpar performance and will fail to rank you higher in the relevant search engines, so you shouldn’t leave such an important element of your digital presence to chance. Now, there are many popular keyword tools out there, and many of them are free to use, however, you need to choose the best one for your needs.

Most keyword tools will display a basic list of relevant search terms, one that’s not broad enough to provide you with all of the phrases you could use in your copy. No, you need a whole host of niche keywords that you weren’t able to come up with on your own, so be sure to test out several tools to see how they compare, and choose the one that delivers the biggest number of keywords while preserving keywords quality.

Use niche keywords in your content strategy

Once you have managed to discover some intricate longtail keywords, it’s time to integrate them into your content strategy. This doesn’t just mean that these keywords should find their way into your blogs and articles, it means that you should integrate them into your entire digital presence, including your site’s headings and meta tags, PPC campaigns, landing pages, and more.

It’s important that this content is created by people who are knowledgeable about your niche and business, to make it as natural and appealing as possible. For example, law firm SEO content should be written by real lawyers in order to make the content as credible and authoritative as possible, and optimized by law SEO strategists to maximize the site’s ranking within its niche. Keep this important tip in mind when optimizing the content for your own business with niche keywords by having experts from your niche guide it to fruition.

Prioritize keywords according to your needs

When you’re optimizing your content, it’s important to prioritize your niche keywords. You can try to integrate every single keyword you found into the copy of every page on your website, but chances are that you will get penalized for keyword stuffing, and you might even get penalized for trying to rank pages that aren’t relevant to the keyword. That’s why you have to prioritize and know where to put your keywords.

Start by grouping keywords according to the types of services or products you offer. You should put niche keywords on the pages that are relevant to the phrase – such as “windshield repair “on the “auto glass repair” page instead of the homepage or the “about us” page. Bottom line, be sure to sprinkle niche keywords throughout your site wherever it feels natural, but make sure it’s relevant to the page.

Consider running an SEO audit

And finally, keep in mind that keywords, especially longtail ones, are constantly evolving with the online trends. This is why they require continuous monitoring and optimization. SEO is a long-term investment and a long-term commitment, so it’s important that you perform regular SEO audits and track the performance of these keywords on your site and assess whether or not they are helping you reach your goals. If not, it’s important that you act instead of hoping that things will change on their own, because you don’t want to lose precious time on the keywords that aren’t converting. Simply repeat the research process, and integrate new keywords into your content and site.

Wrapping up

While it is important to integrate those general industry terms everyone is searching for into your digital presence, finding and integrating niche keywords becomes even more important if you’re trying to surpass your competition and develop a strong competitive advantage. With these tips in mind, you can discover those keyword opportunities that your competitors haven’t found yet, and integrate them into your content with professional optimization to build brand awareness and reputation, boost organic traffic, and incentivize conversions.

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5 Pieces of Data Every Business Should Collect

Research says that the number of businesses investing in data-driven marketing is growing. This is not surprising at all, given that this practice can benefit your business in multiple ways. For example, it lets you create better customer experiences, builds personalized marketing strategies, generate relevant leads, and retain loyal customers.

Here are a few tips on what data pieces to collect and where to find them.

1. Collecting Basic Customer Data

When adapting your brand to your customers, you first need to get to know them. Modern customers focus on targeted buying experiences. They expect you to understand their needs, preferences, problems, and fears when marketing to them.

For example, if you’re a B2B business, you will need to seek the name of the contact employee, their position, as well as their contact information. Ask a few questions about the company, including its industry, the number of employees, its revenue, and so on. This kind of information allows you to build and cultivate more personal relationships with a customer, understand why a certain industry works (or doesn’t work) for you, and identify your key consumers in a broader marketplace.

When collecting the data about B2C customers, you should focus on their contact information and demographic data, such as their name, gender, age, location, household income, family status, profession, and so forth. This should be enough for you to create detailed buyer personas, understand your customers, and connect with them effectively.

2. How Likely Your Customers Are to Recommend your Brand

Your target audience doesn’t care about branded content. Instead, 93% of them say that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions. This is why it’s important to assess your current customers’ experiences with your brand and see whether they are willing to recommend your brand and products to their friends, colleagues, and families.

One of the most effective ways to answer this question is to conduct a Net Promoter Score survey. You ask customers to rate their likeliness to recommend your products on a 1-5 score. This is how you measure brand satisfaction, but also brand sentiment and customer loyalty. You can further classify your customers into three categories – detractors (dissatisfied customers), promoters (happy customers), and passives (indifferent customers). Calculating the NPS is easy – you need to subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

3. Tracking Transactional Data

Monitoring transaction information provides you with insights about your customers’ shopping habits and preferences. The idea is to store customer’s transactional data and see what products are popular among your customers. Sure, in the era of sophisticated cybercrimes, when collecting and storing customer transaction data, always invest in secure information sharing. This type of information will tell you a lot about your popular products, how often people buy from you, how many items they buy, etc.

4. How Customers Find Out About You

This is one of the most critical questions, as it gives you valuable insights into your marketing and lead generation strategies. Namely, your goal is to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and understand which ones work for you the best. For example, if you notice that most of your customers come from social networks, especially Instagram, this means you should focus on building a stronger brand presence there. If, on the other hand, customers find you by reading other customers’ reviews, then it’s time to focus more on encouraging customer feedback across multiple channels.

5. Purchase Decision Data

When targeting your customers, you need to know what inspires them to make a purchase. Is its brand popularity and convenience? Maybe they are looking for online reviews, testimonials, and influencer insights. The majority of customers also prefer stable, user-centric brands that constantly provide large discounts, competitions, and giveaways. Knowing what tactics resonate with your audiences, you will be able to refine your strategy and ensure greater conversion rates and customer loyalty.

How to Collect Customer Data?

• Now that you know what kind of data matters to your business, it’s time to start collecting it. Here are a few channels to use.

• Website orders – when a customer makes a purchase for the first time, you should save their name and contact information. That’s how you will start building their transaction history and be able to track their journey and experiences over time.

• Surveys are still a powerful way to learn more about your customers and collect fresh and honest feedback. Now, there are different forms of surveys, including open-ended surveys, customer satisfaction scores, customer effort scores, etc. You should also pick the right channel to distribute your survey, including email surveys, mobile app surveys, website surveys, SMS surveys, etc. Test different options and always choose the surveys and channels that work for your customers.

• Run a competition – this is where social networks shine. Namely, you could start a massive giveaway. To enter the contest and win the prize, a customer needs to provide their contact information, tag a friend, or answer a question.

• Social media monitoring – use social listening tools to track relevant customer discussions and measure brand awareness and sentiment.

• Observe website behaviors – accessing this information will help you understand how many people landed on your site, where they clicked on, how much time they spent on a certain page, etc. In the era of GDPR, you should always inform a customer about the cookies you’re collecting and ask them whether they agree.

Over to You

Collecting customer data gives you the opportunity to learn more about your target audience and their expectations from your brand. Knowing who your customers are, you will be able to focus on the right marketing tactics and personalize your relationships with customers. This will not only help you attract new customers and boost sales but also allow you to retain loyal customers.

What customer data do you collect? We’d like to hear from you.

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Employee Engagement: The Untapped Power Source at Your Disposal

About 3 million Americans quit their jobs each month. In fact, a third of them leave even before completing six months into their roles. Research by Glassdoor in 2016 found out that 53% of employees quitting their jobs were confident about finding alternative positions in six months.

Top reasons include a poor onboarding experience, not satisfied with their roles and responsibilities, and their lacking engagement with their employers and organization as a whole. This means that unless you give them a compelling reason to stay, they are more than happy to go looking elsewhere.  

With only 33% of employees reporting that they felt engaged at work, led to the sudden rise of employee engagement strategies being adopted by companies across sectors at breakneck speed.

Purpose of Employee Engagement

With competition being fierce, retaining top talent is a challenge, and so is the rising hiring costs. That's why employee engagement is something that modern-day organizations cannot turn their back to. All they need to do is to weigh in the benefits – higher profits, innovative and productive workforce, company success.

In an employee engagement survey, approximately 71% of managers believed that employee engagement was one of the most vital factors that could determine the overall success of the organization.  

Employee engagement is fast turning into one of the most trusted indicators of gauging employee satisfaction at their workplace. With the infusion of this sentiment, employees are happier and put in energy, enthusiasm, and purpose into their allocated roles.

Employee Engagement Is Key to Business Success

Salary and compensation whilst important to employees are not the core issues of turnover. The foundation needs to be built on connection, communication, and engagement. According to the Harvard Business Review, engaged organizations have doubled their rate of success.

Therefore, let’s take a look at the strategies that can work in favor of your business:

1. Business with Engaged Employees Have Superior Financial Health

All the key parameters of business success, such as increased growth in revenue, net profit margin, earnings per share, customer experience, are directly correlated to employee engagement.

Employees who feel invested in the business feel like business owners. Hence, creativity and efficiency are traits that easily come forward as they feel a sense of purpose. Having a platform to communicate challenges and being a part of working out the solution creates a better work environment for all.

Priorities, commitments, goals become shared objectives. With a sentiment of cohesion, the workforce acts in the company’s best interests.

2. Productivity Flares When Employees Are Engaged with The Business

Companies who wish to progress to the next level all strive towards high levels of employee engagement. This is because engaged employees are frequently able to find solutions to handle challenging business and customer requirements that, in turn, drives organizational success.

For instance, a productive employee understands the importance of customer experience. They are the best judge of unearthing consumer needs, guiding them towards purchase decisions, and delivering top-class customer service.

Regardless of their position in the company, committed employees have a higher probability of going that extra mile to ensure greater levels of customer satisfaction.

3. Employee Turnover Possibilities Are Minimized for Engaged Employees

Statistics say that a disengaged employee is 12 times more likely to quit his or her job in the first year of employment. As an organization, you need to invest in employees developing a strong connection with the business to retain good talent.

High-performing companies that invest in employee engagement allow their employees to take control and do what they are great at. The idea is to keep challenging them and offer lucrative opportunities for growth internally.

Ensure that you address every stage of an employee’s life cycle within the organization. For example, if you start with a poor onboarding experience, the chances are that your employees will feel disengaged within three months of joining the company. This disengagement will translate into other areas of their work, ultimately forcing them to look for alternative options of employment. You can also perform an employee credit check to ensure that you are hiring the right applicants from the beginning of the process.

4. Invest in Employee Feedback

Use employee engagement surveys to learn what your employees think of the leadership and by business extension. If unsure of what to ask, get the HR department to look up survey question examples online.

Readymade templates are available with the help of an online survey maker. Circulate it amongst your employees and assess the results once you get their responses. These insights are essential as it can help the business measure employee engagement levels and identify critical gaps and opportunities for improvement.  

These insights emphasize the importance of taking a holistic approach to the employee experience, from onboard to exit, and key points in between.

Building A Better Workplace with Engaged Employees

Being employed today is more than just a 9 to 5 job. Moreover, employees can change over a while as they progress across crucial stages of their lifecycle. With a holistic approach, companies can approach employee experience through a custom-designed strategy that is right for your business.

Whatever that you do, you must ensure that employees feel more involved and enthusiastic about their roles and overall be more committed to the organization. That’s the recipe for success.

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A 5-step Guide to Improve Your Site’s Technical SEO

Technical SEO is responsible for optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO help, search engines will have no trouble accessing, crawling, interpreting, and indexing your website. In fact, technical SEO is a vital segment of search engine optimizing. If something goes wroth with t, the whole content optimization will fail to generate the expected results.

Understanding how technical SEO works and improving it is important for anyone involved in digital marketing.  Performing a technical SEO audit of your website will detect all the problems and fix them in a way that they won’t reoccur. Before all, improving your site’s technical SEO is a process that takes several steps to complete.

Checking the sitemap and indexing

After you get a better understanding of what technical SEO is, you need to review your website’s infrastructure, so to say. If you still haven’t created a sitemap, now is high time to do so. It is responsible for informing the search engine of your website’s content structure, allowing it to discover fresh content.

In general, the sitemap should be clean in the sense that it shouldn’t contain errors or blocked URLs. It should be updated in its entirety every time content is added or removed from the website so search engines would be able to discover novel content fast. Finally, the sitemap should be registered in Google Search Console. This can be done either manually or by specifying its location in the “robots.txt file.”

Once your website’s sitemap is fully functional, it is time to turn to individual pages indexed by search engines. This figure determines the strength of the domain and in ideal circumstances; it should be close to the total number of pages on the site. If the gap is bigger gap than expected, you'll need to go through your disallowed pages.

Crawlable resources

Powerful as it might seem, the “robots.txt” file is just one way to restrict pages from indexing. For instance, JavaScript and CSS files are critical to a webpage’s rendering and they need to be tuned as well. For this reason, you’ll need an SEO crawler used by digital marketing agencies like GWM to run a comprehensive crawlability check.

By using an SEO crawler, you’ll be able to find which pages and resources are restricted from indexing. Once the full list of blocked pages and resources, you’ll be able to fix the ones that aren’t intended to be blocked.

Finally, you should check for orphan pages. These are the pages that exist on your site but feature no internal links. Search engines seldom discover them and even then, they’re likely to crawl them quite infrequently. To check your website for the presence of any orphan pages, you need to rebuild your WebSite Auditor project. After the rebuild, you’ll have no problem listing all the orphan pages.

Restricting indexation and adding URL parameters

Going back to the topic of indexation, there are going to be pages that have zero SEO value. Such pages should have indexation restricted to save on the crawl budget. Usually, these are the pages that you wouldn’t expect to appear in the search results.

If someone types in “hand cream” then they are interested in purchasing this product, not reading about the terms and conditions posted by the manufacturer. The same goes for expired promotions and privacy policies which are both of little or no interest to a visitor. That’s the reason why such pages should be excluded from search results.

Speaking of search results on Google, we have already mentioned the Google Search Console. There is a high probability that Google will crawl the same page with different URL parameters separately. This would result in two pages being portrayed as one, which is not the goal of SEO. That’s why you should add URL parameters to the Search Console to let Google know that it’s the same page so crawling can be performed in a more efficient manner.

Auditing internal links

The more shallow and logical the structure of the website, the better will the user navigate it. A useful navigational tool is internal linking which should be audited from time to time in order to check click depth, broken links, and orphan pages.

A general rule of SEO states that the most important pages should not be more than 3 links away from the homepage of the website. Again, WebSite Auditor will help you determine your website’s click depth. Once you get an overview of all the URLs, determine which links are vital and move them up the chart, to the aforementioned 3 clicks away from the homepage.

Your crawl budget can be put to waste by broken links. More importantly, they trick visitors into eating up your pages’ link juice, i.e. ranking power. The infamous “404 Not found” error is what frustrates visitors the most, so make sure there are no broken links due to a wrong code or temporarily moved pages.

Improving pages’ speed

It is not just our society that seems to have sped up but Google as well. It has officially recognized that the loading speed of a page is a ranking signal. This means that your page needs to load in two seconds or less; otherwise, you’re going to start dropping from the rankings. Another aspect of speed is its impact on UX because pages that are slow to open receive higher bounce rates and their conversion rates aren’t particularly impressive. No wonder then that responsiveness is taking priority in the web design of e-commerce platforms.

Speed should be a top priority because the page’s ranking signal plays a role both for desktop and mobile search results. Checking if your pages are fast enough to pass Google's speed test, use the Content Analysis feature in the WebSite Auditor project. In the case of any pages failing the speed test, study the reason in detail and take the editing tool’s recommendations on how to increase the speed.

There are several techniques to improve your site’s technical SEO but this 5-step guide is more than enough to get you started with. The trick is to find reliable tools, programs, and marketing agencies that will help you facilitate the effort to improve the technical SEO of your website. As our knowledge and understanding of SEO increase every day, novel tactics for improving technical SEO are bound to surface so be sure to follow all the trends search engine optimization.

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5 Trends in Influencer Marketing that You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Influencer marketing is here to stay. That’s hardly surprising considering that it typically delivers an ROI 11 times greater than other, more conventional, marketing methods. What company wouldn’t want to take advantage of these numbers?

Some forms of influencer marketing have been around for a long time. But today we have the technology that makes becoming an influencer a lot easier. It also means that gaining recognition can happen at lightning speed.

Here are some of today’s trends in influencer marketing to keep your eye on.

1. Brand Ambassadors

In the past, you could have quite easily had a one-off campaign with a specific influencer to get a quick boost. Going forward, however, it’s best to work with one or two influencers on a long-term basis. Considering that  47% of buyers will only make a purchase decision if they’ve seen three to five pieces of content, it makes sense.

By turning the influencer into a brand ambassador, you’re taking the first steps to create a long-term relationship with their followers. It could also be the key to making your campaigns more authentic.

2. Authentic Campaigns

Most consumers realize that influencers want to earn money doing what they love. So, they generally expect some advertising. That said, they’re also on the lookout for fake endorsements. They want to know that the influencer truly believes in the product. Essentially, followers want to know that the influencer would use the product, whether or not they are being paid to do so.

Creating more authentic campaigns is a top priority. To make your campaigns seem more sincere, it’s important to get your influencer’s input from day one. This is an area where you’ve got to hand over some control. The influencer needs their voice to shine through in your campaigns instead of being handed a strict script to follow.

The results might be a little less polished than a professional ad campaign, but, in this instance, it’s going to work for you.

3. Fake Followers

Marketers have been cottoning onto the benefits of influencer marketing. As a result, influencers can rake in some serious money. This, in itself, has boosted the “influencer as a business” model as well. There are a lot of would-be influencers out there and a lot of people peddling courses on how to become one.

The problem with this is that there’s a real drive to take shortcuts. Most influencers are paid according to how many followers they have. The downside is that it’s possible to blur the lines here. In one study, researchers found that 24% of influencers had manipulated their numbers at one stage or another.

An influencer might, for example, join an online community designed to boost page stats. These usually work on a reciprocal basis. The community gets together to promote each other’s pages and to increase engagement. So, I’ll like your page, if you’ll like mine. I might also engage with posts on your page on the same basis.

Another issue is the outright buying of engagement. You can find a follower platform that uses bots to increase engagement. These bots can be quite intelligent – they will like a page, and then share or engage with posts over a period of time. This mimics how real users might react to posts. The influencer will pay for the number of shares and posts.

It’s something that was, up until now, difficult to detect without digging into each follower’s account. It’s becoming easier, though, as social media platforms are cracking down on fake profiles.

There are also companies tackling this issue head-on using AI. Companies like Social Chain are offering their services to audit influencers. This is a good thing for the industry because it’ll make it possible to get verified reports on followers.

Good influencers will be happy to have their statistics verified. Those using fake followers will soon get sniffed out. While it will still be possible to trick the system, it will continue to get harder and harder to do so.

4. Improvement in Measurement Tools

At present, it’s not that easy to measure the organic results of a campaign. You can see how many likes and clicks there are. But how can you measure the organic exposure you’re actually getting?

Last year, Facebook made a step in the right direction.

By allowing marketers to use first-party cookies, Facebook has made it that much easier for marketers to track their progress. Users do need to opt-in to allow marketers to use this type of cookie. If they do, though, you’ll get a whole lot of statistics to draw from.

5. The Importance of ROI

Part of the problem with influencer marketing is that it’s difficult to quantify the ROI of each campaign. But things are changing. Social media platforms are now able to calculate the ROI of each campaign if they have API access.

Reporting measures will improve as we go along. This will allow companies to calculate exactly how much financial value they’re getting for their campaigns. This, in turn, allows companies to be more effective when it comes to tailoring their campaigns. If they see that the campaign is not delivering the required results, they can tweak their content and strategy.

Final Notes

Influencer marketing is a firm favorite amongst marketers today. It’s effective because it’s seen as a recommendation from a real person who has gained the trust of their audience. This is not some far-removed celeb that lives a glitzy life.

These are real people like you and me. They have attained some sort of celebrity status, but they’ve also built a good relationship with their followers.

Taking advantage of that relationship could lead to a profitable alliance between your company and the influencer. As long as you’re willing to put in the effort upfront to find a good match, you should see some promising results. But, be sure to keep an eye out for more influencer marketing trends to know what to avoid, and how to best optimize your strategy.

5 Tried and Tested Tactics for Retaining Customers

Even though attracting new customers is important, retaining existing ones is even more significant for your company’s growth. Research says that 40% of your revenue comes from only 8% of your customers.

Given that, it’s not surprising that the 5% customer retention rate may boost your organization’s profits by up to 95%.

Here are a few proven tactics that will help you maintain a competitive edge and increase customer retention rates.

1. Provide Exceptional Customer Support

World-class customer support is the backbone of your business success.

Today’s customers are tech-savvy. They use multiple devices and platforms to do their research, compare brands, and make buying decisions. When interacting with your brand, they will probably check your website, social media profiles, contact forms, online reviews, etc.

And, no matter where they land first, they will expect you to provide them with real-time, 24/7 customer support. Stats back me up on that. Namely, 77% of customers highlight that valuing their time is the most critical thing a brand can do to provide spotless customer service.

For starters, make sure that your support tabs are prominent on your website.

Next, encourage customers to solve problems themselves. Research says that 67% of consumers prefer self-service over connecting with a customer service representative. For example, you could create a detailed FAQ page that features your customers’ frequently asked questions. Optimize it for your top-performing keywords to make it easily findable, provide detailed answers, and link back to valuable guides on your blog.

Combine live chat with chatbots. While live chat is always a good solution during your work hours, chatbots provide exceptional customer experiences 24/7. They are constantly learning about your customers’ needs and preferences, striving to provide them with highly relevant and personalized purchasing experiences.

Social listening can be useful here. Social media monitoring tools let you set the keywords you want to track and inform you when someone uses them on social networks. This is a great opportunity to track what questions your customers are asking and provide them with instant support.

2. Create a Magnetic Customer Loyalty Program

A loyalty program is one of the most effective ways to show customers that you care about them. Knowing that they’re going to be rewarded for buying at your store, they will feel compelled to come back again and again.

Research shows that the average U.S. family participates in about 30 loyalty programs. Furthermore, 84% of consumers say that they’re more likely to stay loyal to brands offering rewards programs.

Many big brands are starting to understand the importance of loyalty programs for their customer retention rates. For example, Sephora provides the Beauty Insider loyalty program that has attracted 17 million members that can get reward points for each purchase and choose how they will spend them.

Now, your loyalty program doesn’t have to be complicated or fancy. It will work as long as your rewards are relevant and valuable to your target customers.

Source: Pixabay

3. Regularly Ask for Customer Feedback

To retain your customers, you first need to learn more about their preferences, expectations, problems, and frustrations. This is why you need to collect their feedback regularly:

• Ask online customers for post-purchase feedback. When they complete the purchase, send them a brief survey and ask them to tell you about their buying experience.

• Create a customer satisfaction survey to collect unbiased customer feedback. In addition to popular email surveys, SMS surveys are also gaining lots of popularity as they have incredibly high open rates and answer rates.

• Monitor your brand mentions across the web. Aside from the abovementioned social media listening tools, you can also use tools like Google Alerts to stay on top of your brand mentions online.

• Observe chatbot transcripts to collect customers’ insights directly from their conversations and understand the common problems they face.

• Ask your customer support teams or account managers to call each customer. This is a simple call, where they should ask them about their experiences so far, the issues they face, their expectations, and so forth.

• Form a customer advisory board. This is a chosen group of loyal customers. They should meet once monthly or quarterly to exchange their experiences with your products and help you improve them over time.

4. Continually Create Valuable and Helpful Content

Your customer engagement strategy doesn’t end with the onboarding strategy. Once they start buying from you and coming back to your store, you need to keep delivering value to them. This is where your content creation strategy can help.

Start by publishing long-form and valuable blog posts regularly. Use tools like BuzzSumo or Google Trends to track the hottest industry topics. Don’t pack your articles with fluff text and spammy links. Instead, focus on the value they bring to a reader. They need to inform, educate, and engage a reader. Most importantly, be it an ultimate list or a how-to guide, an article needs to help a customer solve a specific problem.

In addition to blog posts, you could also create comprehensive, step-by-step guides. They should be written in a simple and understandable language and be full of actionable tips readers can implement in real-life situations.

With the help of case studies and customer success stories, you will build trust with your potential customers. Namely, the purpose of the case study is to emphasize the problems your customers faced before buying your product and how you helped them solve these issues.

Don’t forget that your knowledge base is also an educational source. Therefore, the content and links found there should also be easy-to-understand, helpful, and practical.

There are many forms of interactive and immersive content that may also educate a reader, such as free training videos, infographics, or podcasts.

5. Build an Active Online Community

When launching a business and promoting it online, your goal is to increase brand awareness, grow your industry authority and, above all, to increase customer loyalty. And, this is exactly where building an engaged social media community may help. Just like its mere name says, this is a place where the online users with similar goals, passions, and pain points connect to exchange experiences and help each other.

As for your brand, it adds a sense of exclusivity – people considered your top fans or prime customers will feel good about their titles. Your goal as a community creator is to target the right audiences, help community members get to know each other and foster the culture of respect and helpfulness.

Sure, it all starts with the choice of the right platform. LinkedIn is, for example, perfect for connecting with other professionals in your industry. Slack lets you create different channels customers can join according to their preferences, while Facebook groups are an ideal place for actively engaging larger groups of customers.

Over to You

The key to retaining customers lies in putting yourself in your customer’s shoes’. To build stronger relationships with them and encourage their brand loyalty, you will need to understand their needs, backgrounds, and problems.

For starters, ask them for feedback and use it to improve your marketing and customer support strategies in the future.

Provide them with amazing customer support and let them know that they can rely on you 24/7.

Use your blog as a valuable source of information and a relevant customer support channel.

Create strong customer loyalty programs to celebrate and reward customers’ loyalty.

Finally, build and nurture a vibrant online community of both prospective customers and loyal ones.

What tactics do you use to retain loyal customers? Let us know in the comments!

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The Next Step to Your Successful E-Commerce Business

A short while ago, we published the post, “E-commerce Marketing: Build a Successful E-commerce Business Using Social Media.” If you’ve been applying those tips, you’ve already an improvement in traffic. Would you like to know how to rev up sales even more?

In this post, we’re going to approach marketing with an oldie but goodie – email marketing. We’ve got an information-packed infographic, created by the team at EveryCloud that will give you a great grounding in email marketing and some excellent tips to improve open and CTR rates.

For now, though, we want to focus on just one of the tips on the list – segmenting your email list. We’re focusing on this in particular because it is something that few of us ever think about. That’s a pity – get this right, and you’ll be able to create one killer email campaign after another.

What Do We Mean by Segmenting Your List?

Running an e-commerce store, you’ve got a big advantage over a lot of other businesses. In order to buy from you, the client needs to provide their names, addresses, date of birth, phone numbers, and a range of other information.

In other words, where most companies have to rely on a simple opt-in form with minimal the information completed to build their lists, you’ve got a wealth of information. What’s more, information is highly accurate. You’ve hit the jackpot.

Now, naturally, you’ll also want to build your list using a simple opt-in form on your site. If people want to subscribe to your newsletter, but don’t want to buy, they won’t go through the full registration process. It’s wise to have a backup.

For those people, you’ll be in the same boat as other businesses – looking for an alternative way to get more data. Fortunately, this can be quite simply managed. You could send a simple form out after they’ve signed up, to gather the rest of the information you need.

Now you’re going to take that information and find a logical way to group together similar clients on the list. You could sort them by age, geographic location, last purchase, marital status, and so on. Find something that works for you.

Now Create Your Campaigns

The reason that segmentation works so well is that you create a separate campaign for each group. Each message that is sent will be personalized to speak to that group’s needs. This makes your messages more relevant to the recipient and increases the chances of them finding something that they’re interested in.

Give it a try and see for yourself – you’re bound to love the results.

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Ten things you should know before digging into Instagram Marketing

Instagram was launched in 2010, and since then, it has taken the social media world by storm. A regular user of Instagram may have intimately experienced the growth of this social media platform from a simple photo-sharing app to one of the most prominent social media platform. Since Instagram has grown into a powerful platform and now it is more than just a photo-sharing app. If you are looking to boost up your Instagram marketing, then it will be better to know about some Instagram marketing tips. A lot of people and businesses are moving into Instagram and growing like the biggest social media platform, Facebook. If you are willing to show your product in front of millions of people, then you need to focus on social media networking rather than SEO.

A social media enthusiast and senior SMO services expert at Tangensys said - there are more than 500 million people across the world are using Instagram every day and use it for sharing content. You can sell your products by posting photographs, videos, or sharing stories. In case you are a novice in designing and creating content, you can easily display some beautiful stories for the audience. But before digging into Instagram marketing, you must know some essential things that will help you to grow your business in Instagram. What are those? Let's check it out.

Switch to a business account

The main thing you must know and execute is to switch your regular Instagram account to a business account. It's quite an easy job to turn a regular account into a business account. Just go to your settings and click on the "Switch to Business Profile" to get the job done. There are so many benefits of having a business profile. For example, followers can quickly get in touch with you by just clicking the contact button right from your Instagram page. A business account always lets you create and circulate Instagram ads without using Facebook's advertising tools. You can also use Instagram analytics tools named insight, which provides all the stats about the impression and reaches of your post.

Always try to use free Instagram tools

The Instagram business account is not more different from the Facebook business account. By using the analytics tools of Instagram, you will get to see impressions, data engagement, and many more. You will also be able to get so much information about the follower like their age, gender, location, and activity. These tools are free to use because you can use them to realize precisely how users are interacting with your posted content, the more you can understand about this fact, the better you can arrange your post to improve attention.

Post some teaser of your product to attract people

Instagram may be the best place to promote your product, and you will be able to boost the promotion by posting a teaser of the product. And if you could do that well enough, then more and more customers will attract towards your product. When you post a treasure of any product that people are interested in, you don't have to do anything to let them purchase your product they will automatically buy it. If not, then at least they will like and comment on your product or share it with a friend.

Creating sponsored ads

Instagram ads have become a crucial part of increasing marketing, the best part of creating sponsored ads is you can control precisely how much you have to spend on them by establishing an ad budget. You can showcase one or more sponsored ads by using the carousel feature. For sponsoring ads, you have to select an engaging content while also disputing to the target demographic, in front of whom you want to post the ad. Try to run several posts to different customers simultaneously for engaging more. Remember, there are several forms of sponsored ads to post photos, stories, videos, and carousel, etc.

Use Instagram stories for advertising the product

If you want to boost up your marketing, then Instagram stories are there to help you. Instagram stories are slightly different from a regular post because they are in the slideshow format and live only for 24 hours, but it can be saved to any of your devices to use it later. The benefit of using Instagram stories for marketing purpose is it displays at the top of the follower timelines where users can see your story. Instagram stories can only be viewed through the mobile Instagram app, and you can't send any Instagram Stories as a direct message.

Make any influencer as a partner

Do you want to obtain a conceivable buyer on Instagram? Then probably an influencer can help you to do this job quickly because they have already composed an audience with a vast number of followers. People are buying those products more, what they see in their feed from the influencer they follow and they trust them. The thing you have to do is to try and identify a few influencers that have an audience that is appropriate for your product or services.

Make a collection of the user-submitted images

There is a simple method to create great content for your Instagram page without doing any hard work, and that is through user-submitted photos. Since you already have an audience of hundreds or maybe thousand to generate useful content for you. You might be thinking about how to do it? It's so simple, indeed. Just let them know that you are going to tag them in your post, then they will have a reason to post user-generated content on a steady purpose.

Make an engaging branded hashtag

If you are facing any problem in creating instant engagement, then, a branded hashtag is a great way to overcome this problem. Customers can use your tag to post user-generated content that allows any user to search through all posts communicating to your product. It also allows you to search easily using images that you might want to assess posting again on your page. And if you already have any famous brand slogan or phrase, use it as your hashtag.

Try to post at the perfect time and prevent over-posting

Over-posting on Instagram may decrease the number of your followers. If they only get to see only your post on their feed then, there is a strong possibility of following you. All you have to do is to post consistently so that they won't get irritated from your post and you stay in their news feed regularly.

Be sure to track the perfect metrics

You will not be able to boost your Instagram marketing performance unless you know how your post and page are performing. When you get the perfect result, then only you will get to know precisely what is working and what's not.

Conclusion

There you have ten important tips to know before digging into an Instagram marketing, and I am quite sure that following these steps can help you a lot in boosting your Instagram marketing. Finally, I want to say that Instagram is a massive platform for marketing and if you're going to put your feet in this field

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About : Manish Kumar

Manish Kumar is a digital marketer by profession and an avid blogger in free time. Currently, he is working with a digital marketing agency- Tangensys. In his 6 years digital marketing career, he had helped many brands to grow digitally.

E-commerce Marketing: Build a Successful E-commerce Business Using Social Media

Social media has taken over the business world. With all businesses now having their own social media accounts, taking advantage of the audience reach that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn has throughout the world. With this in mind, it only makes sense for businesses, no matter how big or small they may be, to dive into the social media world to promote their brand. This is especially true for e-commerce businesses.

Whether you are a college student making money online or a seasoned businessperson who have decided to take on the challenge of technological advancement, there are a number of things that you should know about in terms of e-commerce stats and social media marketing.

Why is social media important for e-commerce?

It is projected that by 2020, 90% of businesses will be using a social media platform to connect with their consumers. At the same time, data shows that customers tend to spend 20-40% more for companies who interact with customers through social media. This proves that social media interactions can help increase traffic towards your business and help you create a good reputation for your brand.

How do you drive traffic from social media?

The social media is the perfect place to build three important things for businesses:

• connections

• relationships

• engagements

By connecting and interacting with your customers, you get to create a positive brand reputation and provide your consumers with a venue for them to express their opinion about your products and services. By providing your customers with a positive experience, you get to foster better relationships with your consumers, receive recommendations and drive sales towards your business.

Tactics for eCommerce Social Media

There are a variety of ways for business owners and social media managers to drive traffic towards their brand. No matter what products or services you are offering, it’s still important that you have a better grasp of how social media works and how to take advantage of it.

1. Position Yourself Uniquely

What particular aspect of your business differentiates you from your competitors. One thing that you have to understand is because social media is a great way to reach out to more people, you will not be the only one promoting their brand online. So to stay ahead of the game and to really make a mark in your industry, you should decide what you want to be for your consumers and use that idea when you create a compelling brand story. Your aim here is to improve the customer experience and promote a positive brand that people will remember.

2. Increasing Friends and Followers

Followers are more than just numbers. Yes, the algorithm of some social media platforms does look into the number of your followers and subscribers, but more than that, your followers can actually be your most loyal fans and customers who will do everything to share their happiness towards your brand and recommend you to as many people as possible. To be able to gain more followers, you should create a content that will help you promote your brand, reach more audiences and rise above your competitors. You might also want to ride the trend of automating your Instagram interactions through one of the 10 best Instagram bots of 2019.

3. Promotional Posts

First of all, you need to understand that promo posts are aimed towards your prospective customers. You should keep in mind that the promotional post you will be making should be geared towards gathering more followers and potential clients. Thus, you need to make your posts more relatable to the public, depending on what your brand is all about.

4. Live Streaming Videos

Live broadcasts can help enhance and maximize your direct communications with your customers, followers and community partners. Live streaming an event gives you the opportunity to reach out and interact with more people across the world. Live streams also take less time to produce and this gives you and your customers the opportunity to share your thoughts about your brand and everything in between.

5. Instant Messaging

The great thing about your business having a social media channel is that it also provides you and your customers with a means of communication. Be it for customer support, inquiries, complaints, etc., taking advantage of the instant messaging app is a great means for you to maintain better relationships and interactions with your followers.

6. Facebook and Instagram Stories

Another means of improving your interactions with followers and gaining more potential customers is by using the Instagram Stories bar. This feature allows users to post a content that will remain live for 24 hours and will disappear thereafter.

Many social media managers and brands are taking advantage of this feature to post live and timely updates about any particular event or interesting story that they would like to share with their followers. This can also help increase your one-on-one communications with customers as any interaction they do on any Story that you post, you will get a direct message from them.

7. In-app Purchases

The best innovation ever made available in various social media platforms is the option of buying products and making payments in-app. This feature allows e-commerce businesses to make it easy for their potential clients to place orders and purchase any product or service that they are promoting.

Among all generations, millennials have the most spending power online. They are more open to doing in-app purchases, while social media users of higher age demographics are still more comfortable with doing in-store purchases. But the good thing about the availability of social media stores is that they can also drive more customers to the stores. This means that an online store is a great way for businesses to acquire more customers.

Whether you are selling products or offering professional services, and no matter what industry you may be in, social media has proven how much of a valuable tool it can be. Whether it’s for customer relations, retention, or support, data gathering, or sales, your business can gain a lot of benefits from creating a social media account. By having a better understanding of how you can better harness the power of social media, you can start gaining more potential customers and achieving business success online.