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Marketers Pay Attention to 5 Consumer Behavior Trends

By Peter

Consumers were actually predictable in a year that was unpredictable. Clear trends in consumer behavior have been evident over the last few months, even though circumstances have changed.

Marketers are looking for new ways to overcome the pandemic.

The new battleground for business is delivering on the needs of consumers (which, spoiler warning is what content marketing is all too about)

Let’s look closer at five consumer behavior trends that will be hot in 2022.

Take-outs

  • Consumers desire the freedom to shop online and in-person (from the same brands) at their convenience.
  • The temporary convenience options that were created as pandemic relief solutions are likely to stay around for the long-term.
  • People do more work from home than ever before and that is reflected in their purchasing preferences.
  • Brand loyalty has been less secure due to easier access to more products.
  • Consumers are looking for brands that reflect their values and beliefs.

Trend #1: A hybrid view of shopping

Although the pandemic has affected the way people shop, it is not the simple way you might imagine. It won’t be easy to shop online, while brick-and mortar stores will become the stuff of nostalgia.

However, 46% of consumers still prefer in person shopping to see and feel the products. Even those who prefer shopping online, they say they don’t shop exclusively.

Raydiant asked customers which shopping method they would use in 12 months. In almost all cases, the majority said in-person.

Source: Image Source

People will still want to shop in person long after the pandemic. The way that we collectively consumers think about online and in-person shopping has changed. We now see them as distinct categories for different types of products.

It won’t matter what product you choose to purchase online. It will be based on the individual’s needs at that moment.

Amazon is a great place to buy gadgets. This is the type of thing that people buy online.

But what about grocery delivery? This service was generally only used by niche consumers, such as older adults or young professionals who live in urban areas without cars. The majority of people simply went to the grocery shop. Online grocery delivery is now available to the masses.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that people will only use it. It is more likely that people will choose to use both and decide which one suits their needs best. Perhaps you have a list of ingredients that you need for a party and you order them for delivery. However, you still visit the store every week to shop for the groceries for the week.

No matter what the situation, there are always options. These retail trends are a great example of the variety of experiences customers will seek out.

There are certain consumer segments that prefer one method of shopping over another.

The behavior trend for most people will depend on their mood and other factors.

Trend #2: The Craving for Convenience

In a period when business models were being rewritten due to social distancing precautions, brands have had to be creative.

In the past year, there have been many changes in restaurants, including take-out and upscale sit-downs. Retailers also offer curbside pickup and hygiene-motivated measures such as cashless payments and contactless delivery.

These conveniences will not be abandoned by consumers in the future.

Brands will need to consider how they’ll reopen normal operations as pandemic safety measures become less restrictive. They also need to offer the convenience options that consumers have come to expect and continue to demand.

Consumers will choose brands that offer many convenient services. This is the behavior trend.

Trend #3: Homes Become Hubs

When people weren’t working, home was where they went. Now? You can do almost everything from here.

It’s where we live, eat, and sleep. But it also serves as our work space. It’s where we shop. Where we exercise. Our homes have become the hubs of our most important life activities and this trend is not going away anytime soon.

The way we live in our homes has changed. Accenture discovered that 46% of respondents plan to work remotely in the future. As more people exercised at home, the sales of expensive equipment such as treadmills and stationary bikes increased exponentially.

Smartphones, tablets, as well as other devices, have made it possible to communicate face-to-face and remotely with friends and family. We are fully integrated into the socializing process.

Consumers have made investments in their at-home activities and it is likely that they will continue to do so after the pandemic. Brands that can profit from this trend (like home offices furniture) will be able to capitalize. However, brands whose business models depended upon customers coming to them (like gyms that offer both in-person as well as virtual fitness classes) will need to adapt.

The bottom line: Consumers will experience a return to normalcy but will still do more at home.

Trend #4: Loyalty Isn’t a Given

Customer loyalty is a key way to increase revenue and sales. Is customer loyalty to brands experiencing a decline?

Raydiant’s State of Consumer Behavior 2021 Report found that 48% of consumers had replaced an item they normally buy in-store with an alternative online during the pandemic. A quarter of consumers say they are switching bands more frequently than ever.

Although they may not represent the majority of cases, these are significant numbers. It is important to consider pandemic situations (i.e. Store closures that prevent a store opening are a consideration, but brands know that it doesn’t matter what the original reason for the brand switch. It doesn’t matter if the customer prefers the new brand.

Consumers have greater choices and access to more options thanks to an increased online presence of brands from different industries.

What is the resultant behavior trend? Consumers will explore more options and choose the one that appeals to them most, regardless of their previous purchases.

While brand loyalty is important and still effective, companies shouldn’t assume that it’s an automatic outcome.

Trend #5: Customers want value — in more ways than one

Consumers are not only looking for quality products, but also customer experiences. Today’s consumers want brands that are aligned with their personal values.

Accenture’s survey of almost 30,000 people worldwide revealed that a significant majority of respondents felt that the company’s values are important.

Image Source

This isn’t a new phenomenon. But consumers now look more closely than ever at the way companies view and address social issues as well as implement environmentally-friendly practices — 89% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand they feel makes a positive impact.

Watch out for this behavior trend: Consumers will look for authentic and transparent brands to help them make informed buying decisions.

How brands can respond to consumer behavior trends

Consumer behavior trends have two common themes: higher expectations about customer service and increased brand visibility online.

These trends can be addressed by companies in a number of ways. They can use content marketing, which has been proven to be three times more effective than any other type of marketing, to keep in touch with their customers.

Consistent, high-quality online content helps establish your brand’s reputation and personality. This allows consumers to “experience” your brand, before they make a purchase or visit any physical location.


Marketing Insider Group will help you create a content marketing strategy that produces tangible results for your company. For more information, visit our Content Builder Services. Or schedule a consultation for a free!

Marketing Insider Group published the post 5 Consumer Behavior Trends Marketers Should Be Watching originally on Marketing Insider Group.

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By: Michael Brenner
Title: 5 Consumer Behavior Trends Marketers Are Watching
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/consumer-behavior-trends-marketers-are-watching/
Published Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2022 16:00:21 +0000

Filed Under: Features

The Insider Guide for Choosing a SaaS Advertising Agency

By Peter

Are I really going to need a SaaS-based marketing agency? You’re likely to have asked this question if you are the CEO or founder of a SaaS business. Your business has been successful because you and your team have handled marketing independently. You can surely continue to handle it in-house without having to hire an agency.

The truth is that you are likely to miss the mark in your marketing efforts if you are not a professional marketing expert. Digital marketing is a science that requires time and experience. This can be difficult if you are managing a large client load or a startup.

Marketing is something you don’t want to let go of. This could cause your company to fall apart after all the hard work. It doesn’t matter how good your products or services are, there is always the possibility that your competition has a better marketing strategy and lead generation strategy.

SaaS marketing agencies can help your company reach new heights of growth, while you continue to focus on the core business activities that have made your company successful. Before we get into the details, let me tell you a little secret. Usually, outsourcing marketing is cheaper than hiring an agency. It is not as expensive as you might think.

This article will cover everything you need to know to choose a SaaS marketing agency.

  • Signs you should hire an agency
  • SaaS marketing agencies offer a variety of services.
  • How to choose the right agency for you company

Let’s get started.

Take-outs

  • You should look into SaaS marketing agencies if you feel overwhelmed by your marketing tasks or are uncertain about your marketing ROI.
  • A SaaS marketing agency may offer services such as content marketing, SEO and PPC.
  • Begin your search for an agency by defining your company’s needs, and then asking for referrals.
  • It is important to ensure that your SaaS marketing agency works with your company’s culture and processes.
  • Agency services are expensive. A bargain agency is a red flag.

How can you tell if you have a SaaS marketing agency you need?

First, how can you tell if an agency is necessary? There are several signs that will tell you it’s likely time.

Feel overwhelmed

If you feel overwhelmed, it is a sign that outsourcing might be the right choice. Agency support is necessary if marketing is not your forte, you have too many responsibilities, or your company’s growth is faster than you can handle. SaaS marketing agencies have the resources and knowledge to quickly get you moving and help you scale up or down as necessary.

There is no plan.

Are you letting your marketing strategies fly by the nose? You’re likely missing huge growth opportunities. Consistency is the hallmark of a successful digital marketing strategy. You should hire an agency to help you create a plan that you stick with.

Your current strategy is not working

If you don’t see results from your plan, outsourcing may be the right option. SaaS marketing agencies can help you audit your strategy and recommend new strategies that will increase its effectiveness.

It’s not clear if your strategy is effective.

Poor results can be just as damaging as no results. Do not just throw spaghetti at the wall hoping it sticks. An agency might be the right choice for you if you feel like you are not getting the results that your hard work deserves. Marketing agencies must report regularly on their performance in order to demonstrate effectiveness.

Your metrics are declining

SOS! SOS! An agency of quality will help you quickly assess your situation, stop the bleeding and then create a strategy to solve your problems and turn the tide.

What services can a SaaS marketing agency provide?

It is important to understand the services that SaaS marketing agencies offer in order to fully appreciate the benefits of hiring them and ultimately choose the best one for you. Let’s take a look at each one.

Content marketing

Content marketing is without doubt the most important and effective part of any digital marketing strategy. According to research, content marketing generates 3x more leads than other methods and costs 62% less.

SaaS companies that operate almost entirely online need to connect with customers through content marketing. A blog with regularly updated posts is the heart of great content marketing. How often should you blog, then? It is best to blog between 11-16 times per year. Companies publishing at this rate get 3x as much traffic than those who don’t.

Source: Image Source

Content marketing agencies can create, design, deliver and publish content for you. Other types of content can be created by them, including videos, ebooks or infographics. They can also produce reports, newsletters, case studies and whitepapers. It is obvious that creating content takes time. Handing it off to an agency will allow you to focus on your strategic business priorities.

SEO

Search engines are essential for optimizing content for impact. Search engines account for 93% of all online interactions. Search engine results pages are a great way to make sure your brand is visible to potential customers.

A SaaS marketing agency is able to provide SEO expertise, which is one of the most valuable and common services. You can be certain that the content you publish will be optimised. An agency can also help you create an optimized website and integrate important SEO steps (such as keyword research) into your overall strategy.

PPC

Organic traffic is the best, and we are hearing a lot today about why brands should concentrate on organic. Sometimes, however, your brand may need a boost and pay-per click (PPC), advertising can help. Pay-per-click advertising is simply running ads across multiple platforms and only paying for clicks.

PPC is often associated with Google. However, you can also use paid ads on social media platforms that fall under the PPC umbrella. PPC ads are particularly effective in a few areas, such as remarketing to visitors who have visited your site, expanding into new markets or testing different messaging. It can also help you in your content marketing efforts to increase brand awareness and visibility for startup SaaS companies.

PPC campaigns require a lot of work, including copy design, keyword and targeting optimization, reporting metrics, and UX optimization. This process can be handled by a SaaS marketing agency.

Inbound marketing

All of these tactics are part of inbound marketing. SaaS marketing agencies can help you to develop a holistic approach to inbound traffic. What are your strategies working together to increase engagement? What are some other lead generation strategies you can use? What are the best ways to target your efforts and make sure they align with your buyer journey? These are crucial questions for effective B2B marketing strategies. An agency can answer them with proven reporting and results.

Branding

Many SaaS companies don’t do thorough branding. It is assumed that a great product/service will sell itself. While this may be true in some cases, it is not the case for all SaaS companies selling these products or services. Your brand is what you present to your customers. It’s what differentiates you from other companies and makes you stand out in the eyes of your potential customers.

Your brand should be consistent across all your marketing channels. This includes your website, content, and emails. It should have a consistent brand that authentically reflects who you are. These channels are a great way to connect with your audience, and make you stand out in a competitive market.

It is a difficult task that requires a lot of creativity and experience. SaaS marketing agencies can help you get to know your company, and create a brand that shines.

How to find the best SaaS marketing agency

Be aware of your needs

You must first identify your needs in order to choose the right agency. You may not need all services. However, you should know your most pressing needs. You might have a brand but need help creating and publishing consistent content. Or, perhaps you don’t have the time or resources to create content and you lack a personality to support it.

Second, set goals. This is something you’ll do with your agency after you have chosen one. But before you start looking for one, it’s important to know what you want. To set clear goals and keep you accountable, I recommend the SMART framework.

Source: Image Source

When you know what your goals and needs are, you will be better equipped to find an agency that offers the services you require.

Be aware of your budget

It’s obvious that hiring a SaaS-based marketing agency will cost money. It is money well invested to achieve the desired ROI for your marketing efforts. Before you dismiss the idea of outsourcing, remember that it is usually cheaper than hiring full time staff. Full-time employees have to pay for salaries, benefits and office space. They also have less flexibility and can be scaled up or down depending on what’s needed. Do your research on potential costs. You need to know what your budget is before you can decide how much you are willing to spend. This will ensure that you don’t waste time and money on potential agencies.

Refer to others

Referrals are a common way for 84% of B2B buyers to find new solutions. Referrals work! Referrals work because your peers know you and can recommend agencies that are a good fit. Referring can increase your confidence in the quality of the agency and their follow-through. A bad experience is not something that anyone would recommend.

Source: Image Source

Instead of starting from scratch, ask for recommendations. If you don’t know anyone, you can ask online referral networks like LinkedIn groups and industry discussion boards. Avoid “Top 10” and “Best X Agency” lists on Google. These lists often have hidden motivations, such as agencies that pay to be included.

Evaluate your compatibility

Before you meet with potential SaaS marketing agencies you need to assess your compatibility. This should be done from multiple perspectives. Is there cultural compatibility? Are their core values and goals in line with yours? Will your processes be compatible? Are their programs compatible with yours? How do they communicate, report, and operate the services they provide?

Good working relationships are built on mutual compatibility. Before you sign a contract with a new agency, it is important to evaluate your compatibility.

See their track record

An experienced SaaS marketing agency won’t hesitate to show past results. They will be more than happy to share client references and case studies with you, as well as show the metrics that back up their claims about what they can do. Do not be afraid to ask for these resources. You can also do your own research by visiting company websites. Most will have testimonials and case studies posted on their sites.

Ask them how they report results

Data-driven marketing leads to greater accountability and a better marketing ROI. Regular reporting, as we have already mentioned, is as important for your agency and their clients as it is for yourself. It is the main way they show their effectiveness. Not every agency reports on the exact same metrics, or does it in a similar way. Your goals and preferences should be reflected in the frequency, mode, as well as the metrics that your agency reports on.

Do not bargain for a bargain

This will be short and sweet. If an agency promises you the world for less than anyone else, don’t hesitate to run. This is a red flag. It takes a lot of time and experience to produce high quality content. Both of these things are expensive. You get what you pay when you hire a SaaS marketing agency.

Follow your gut

After you have done your research thoroughly and vetted all options, it is time to trust your gut. Even the most highly-regarded agencies may not be the right choice for every client. After comparing the capabilities of several options, you can choose the one that is most suitable for your company, your team and you.

Great content can help you grow your business

In today’s highly digital marketing environment, content is key to success. A great content strategy will showcase your brand and make you more visible to customers. It will also drive inbound organic traffic which will increase your leads, conversions and sales.

Our SEO Blog Writing Service is a great way to kickstart your content strategy. Our SEO team can provide you with optimized content that is ready to publish every week for up to a year. To get started, schedule a quick consultation.

Marketing Insider Group’s first article, The Insider Guide to Selecting a SaaS Marketing Agency, appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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By: Michael Brenner
Title: The Insider Guide to Choosing a SaaS Marketing Agency
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/saas-marketing-agency/
Published Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2022 10:00:47 +0000

Filed Under: Features

9 Best Practices To Optimize Your Calls To Action

By Peter

Your CTAs (calls to action) are the most important parts of your copy. CTAs are the key to guiding users through your marketing funnel and giving them clear instructions as to what they should do next. CTAs are crucial for converting leads into profitable conversions.

It is so important to have your CTAs correct. You should take the time to optimize them in terms of text, color, positioning and other factors.

Optimizing CTAs can be both an art and a science. It’s difficult to predict what will work, but split A/B testing will help. There are some best practices that you can use. These best practices will help you optimize your CTAs and ensure that you don’t waste time on ineffective copy or graphics.

Here are some quick tips:

  • Your CTAs should be concise and prompt “quick action”.
  • It has been proven time and again that personalization can increase conversions.
  • Buttons are more effective than links, text, and images.
  • Your landing pages should support your CTA with content and offers.
  • Keep testing your CTAs.

1. Be brief

CTAs that are too lengthy and complicated are not effective. Keep your text concise and to the point. If possible, keep your CTAs to no more than four words. Strong verbs can help you make the most of this small word count. You can use strong verbs to make short, generic CTAs such as “get started”, “learn more”, “join now”, and “buy here”.

2. Urgency

A well-known and powerful trick to increase conversions is creating a sense of urgency or scarcity. This can be done in a variety of ways.

  • Time-related language: Use “shop now”,’start now’, & “sign up today”.
  • Use words like: “limited”, “reserve your spot”, “last chance”, “sale ends tomorrow”
  • To show when offers expire, add a countdown clock.

You want to create an “FOMO” (fear or missing out) which will encourage users to take the action. Otherwise, they could lose what you offer forever.

It is possible to offer something in return for your actions. Incentives such as discounts or free shipping can be included. You can also offer this for a limited time.

A little extra could be all a prospect needs in order to purchase your product or service. You don’t need to go overboard. It should be enough to get visitors to click on the “buy” button and fill out your content offer form.

3. Try Reverse Psychology

This type of CTA is probably something you’ve seen on a website popup. This type of CTA has become extremely popular over the past few years because it works so well.

It is important to give the user two options. Instead of a simple “yes or no”, you can use reverse psychology to encourage the user to take the action that converts.

Neil Patel’s blog offers great tips and tricks for increasing traffic and conversion rates. One question asks: “Want more traffic?” There are two options: “Yes, I want to get more traffic” or “No, there is enough traffic.”

No website owner would ever refuse more traffic. This prompts the user to stop and consider the possibility they are turning down, rather than clicking “no”, to dismiss the popup.

4. Personalize your CTA

Personalizing CTAs can increase your conversion rate by more than 200%. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should use “Click Here [firstname]!” everywhere. However, it’s a good idea to make use of the data available to modify the CTA’s wording depending on the user’s location, whether they are an existing customer or a new lead, as well as other relevant factors.

5. Use responsive design

It’s probable that at least half your users browse your site or read your email via a mobile device. Your communications should be easy to navigate and read on small screens. This is especially important for your CTAs.

Before you publish, ensure that you have checked the appearance and placement of your CTAs across a range of devices and software agents. Your CTA should be in the middle of the page, at the top of the page. This is the place where most people look when they land on a landing page.

On a smaller screen, a button that has been reduced in size can be easily overlooked. It should still be visible and clearly distinguishable. You can even make your CTA visible on every page of the website. It is not a good idea to make it difficult for prospects to contact you.

6. Use Contrasting Colors and White Space

You must make sure that your CTA stands out from the rest of the pages in order to be effective. This is easiest to achieve by using contrasting colors. Your CTA will blend in with the background if it is the same color that the rest of the text.

Your CTA will stand out more if there is plenty of white space around it. It is important to make your CTA text larger than the surrounding text.

The CTA should be the first thing the user sees on the page. Don’t distract the user with images or other distracting elements. Make sure that the design draws attention to the CTA.

7. Turn Your CTAs into a Button

You can design your CTAs in many ways. However, buttons convert the most. Crazy Egg, a conversion rate optimization expert, says:

“The call for action is so vital, so crucial, and so powerful that you shouldn’t attempt to make it anything other than a button.”

Because the brain expects action from a button pressed, this is why we are wired to expect it. Buttons can be very tempting. We want them to be pressed. (Imagine the temptation of a large red button mixed with the reverse psychology trick of “don’t press that button!”

Although you can play with the colors and design of your buttons, it is best to use one type of button for your CTAs.

8. Double-check Your Landing Pages

If the CTA isn’t working, it doesn’t matter how effective it is. Once you have finished creating your website or email, be sure to click through all CTAs. Also make sure that all forms and links work properly.

9. You can test and refine

You won’t be able create the perfect CTA from scratch. This is a continuous process. You should test and improve your CTAs as you discover what works best for you.

This is what A/B testing looks like. Divide your audience and show them two versions of your CTA. The one that converts best wins. Do not change multiple elements at the same time. Instead, compare variables like color, placement, copy, and copy.

Another alternative to A/B testing is available that is worth exploring. Artificial intelligence software can optimize your CTAs automatically based on user interactions. This optimization method is as efficient as split testing, if not more effective. It also allows you create the optimal CTA faster than traditional testing and optimizing cycles.

Now that you know how to improve your CTA, it is time to ensure you have the right content. To learn more about improving your content marketing strategy, check out our SEO Blog Writing Services.

Marketing Insider Group published the post 9 Best Practices to Optimize Your Calls To Action.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Michael Brenner
Title: 9 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Calls to Action
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/call-to-action-cta-best-practices/
Published Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2022 15:00:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://internetlib.org/what-is-smart-content-how-can-you-make-it-work-for-your-business/

Filed Under: Features

3 Step System to Ecom Success with Case Studies and Free Guide

By Peter

Over the past few days we’ve been telling you about a simple 3-step system we’ve been using to generate up to $35,239 in a single day.

I hope you’ve managed to access all the downloads we’ve sent you so far.

However, today we’ve got 2 EVEN more exciting content pieces lined up (compiled into ONE special report).

​You can access them here (and DON’T FORGET to register for one of our live Masterclass sessions tomorrow either — seats are almost ALL taken)

  1. FIVE examples of highly profitable products that you can sell using this system. *Product #1* could potentially do $78K per month in profit… *Product #2* $33K per month in profit… *Product #3*…. $47K per month in profit… and that’s just a start.

(The EXACT products are revealed …and you’ll get ALL the critical data on them too). Just like this…

​(And this is the BIG ONE)… You’re also going to get access to a series of case studies that detail the incredible successes some of our students have had after taking action and applying this system.

>> Click here to download the report and read these student stories <<

But a word of warning…

These results, the product examples, along with the core book and “Blueprint” (which you’ll also get) will be taken offline permanently on Tuesday this week.

Meaning, you must take action and get access to everything right now.

> ACCESS THE CONTENT HERE <

Filed Under: Features

How to measure content marketing performance using key metrics

By Peter

Are you able to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing? Do you have proof? How about your content marketing ROI. What is the purpose of creating content?

Effective strategies and clear goals are essential for content marketing success. You must document your plan and track your results once it is established. This will help you determine if your efforts have been successful.

According to Semrush 84% of businesses have a Content Marketing Strategy, while only 11% believe they have an Excellent one.


Source: Semrush

All building blocks need to be stacked correctly: audience research, content scheduling and content repurposing. The results will start to appear once everything is in place. But how will they appear? How will you track them down?

Although content marketing is a well-established practice, many businesses, especially small ones, struggle to understand that the results of content marketing rarely translate into macro-conversions.

Content marketing is a significant contributor to the final step (a sale or lead). There are many other important metrics that can help you gauge the effectiveness of your CM efforts and determine its impact on your business.

The right metrics can help you spot poor-performing content and suggest ways to improve it. You will be able to identify your most successful content. Data analytics can be used to help you find the right “recipe” for content marketing and creation. You can then rinse and repeat to ensure content marketing success.



Quick Takeaways


  • Understanding your “why” is essential before you can set goals or track the right KPIs.

  • The ultimate goal of content marketing is to increase brand awareness online.

  • To measure success, your content team must track five metrics.

  • After you have a better understanding of the different metric categories, and how they work, you can use these KPIs to track your progress.

What are your objectives and key performance indicators for content marketing?

Before you can decide which marketing metrics you want to track, each member of your marketing team and your client (if you are an agency) must understand the objectives of each content campaign’s key performance indicators (KPIs).

This is in contrast to the “how do I measure content marketing ROI?” question, which we answer at the end of the article. It is essential to identify your primary goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) before you can determine which metrics will be used to track your content marketing activities.

After you have built your business case and convinced your client or business of the potential ROI, this question will be asked. Perhaps you need to explain what content marketing is at a simpler level.

Start with your “Why” to identify your goals and determine your primary KPIs for measuring performance.

Find out the higher purpose of your brand

This may sound like I’m not answering the question. But, please bear with me.

You need to understand why you business exists in order to know how to set objectives and KPIs to guide your content marketing.

Simon Sinek explains this concept in his Ted Talk: Start With Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Activity. He explained, “People don’t buy what your do.” They will buy what you do.

Before you can set your goals and performance indicators, your business must first understand why you do the things you do. You need to establish a top-level goal based on your overall business purpose and marketing goals.

Increase your “Share of Conversation”.

I’ve spoken a bit about share of conversation (or sharing of voice) before. It all starts with the belief that marketing can be described as a conversation. It encompasses any form of measurable brand awareness including online mentions, website traffic and PPC.

It shows how popular your brand is in comparison to other brands. It helps you to understand your market position.

While you can start a conversation online, it is more effective to join existing discussions. The goal is to guide them.

Content marketing is essential for this reason. Content marketing’s ultimate goal is to increase conversation.

What is the right topic for conversation that your brand should be leading? Once you know your brand’s purpose, you’ll be able to answer the question.

Customer-centric goals include sharing the conversation. This forces you to think beyond your business and to focus on your target audience by providing content related to your topic.

This can be measured by using the term “share of discussion” to describe the percentage of brand mentions related to the topic you would like your brand to be associated with. Start by measuring the share of conversation your business has (social + online). Next, increase that share.

Five Content Marketing Success Metrics You Should Track

Once you have an idea of the “why” behind your content marketing, you can start to look at the following metrics every content marketer should be closely monitoring.

1. Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood for online content. No matter how great your blog posts may be, if nobody visits your site, they won’t do you any good.

Traffic is a metric you must measure if you want to get it down to its essence. Traffic is an indicator of brand strength, but it also has some value beyond the abstract nature of “brand”.

You can also split the traffic into different categories. The metrics that you should be monitoring in Google Analytics are:

Users is the total number of unique users to your page

Pageviews The total number of times that a page has been viewed on your website

Unique Pageviews If a single user views your page multiple times, they are combined into one pageview in order to calculate this metric.

These metrics can be used to give you a rough idea about the traffic to each page of your website. The data can be broken down to show where your traffic comes from, how they found it online and what device they used to view it.

These data can help you plan your content strategy for the future. If you have primarily U.S. customers, but get a lot of traffic from the U.K. you can tailor your future content to suit U.K. users. You can also tailor your content to your social media followers’ data if you get a lot of traffic from one of your social channels.

2. Conversions

Your site is being visited by many people who enjoy reading your blog. What else do they do after they finish reading? Are they reading your newsletters and clicking on the links? Are they signing up to your newsletter? Are they completing an e-commerce transaction

B2B companies are best if they can convert leads into sales. A few buyers won’t buy from an article that isn’t about them. B2B companies should monitor the buyer journey, from click-throughs and subscriptions to more complex conversions such as offer registrations.

You decide what constitutes a conversion. Some content may be designed to sell physical products, while others might increase awareness and authority. You might consider focusing more on engagement metrics and social shares if this is the case.

If your blog is used primarily as a sales tool, it’s important to track the number of sales it generates. This can be done by activating ecommerce in Google Analytics. You will see the page value for all your content in the behavior section.

This gives you an average revenue for each page based on the number of users who have visited that page to purchase something or meet another goal.

3. Engagement

Sometimes, the traffic to your site is more indicative of how effective your efforts are to get people to click on your links than your content.

You can track how long people spend on your website and which pages they visit each session to really see if they are engaged with your content.

The goal is to keep them on the site for as long as possible, so that they can read more of what you have to offer (unless you plan to direct them to a sales page).

This information can be viewed under Audience Overview in Google Analytics. You can also see your total sessions and visitors.

You want content that is easy to read. This means you need a lot of pages per session and a long session time (depending on how long your content is) as well as a low bounce rate.

A great way to gauge your content engagement is by analyzing how it performs on social networks.

There are many metrics that you can track, but the most important one is how often your content has been shared across multiple social media networks. Shares indicate that other people find your content valuable.

Google Analytics doesn’t provide this information, but social sharing buttons placed on content will display the number of times it has been shared across different platforms.

BuzzSumo, another tool to track social media shares, is an easy way for you to quickly identify the most popular content on your website.

It is possible to track how much traffic your social media platforms are bringing you. This is another way to measure engagement. You will get more social media clicks if your content is being shared and interacted with by more people. This information can be found under Acquisition > Social > Referrals in Google Analytics.

4. SEO Performance

Social media is not the only source of traffic. Search must also be a major source of traffic. Google Analytics can be used to track how many people visit your site via search, but it doesn’t provide much insight into the performance of your site in search engines.

Instead, measure your SEO performance. You can track a variety of metrics here. The most important is SERP ranking. This is the position of your page in search engine results for a specific keyword phrase.

Rankings don’t stay static. They fluctuate. However, when you track your ranking over time you want to see whether it’s static (if you are already in a good place) or improving. This shows that you are building trust and authority.

Google Search Console can be used to identify terms that you rank for, and track how your ranking changes over the time.

Higher traffic, more leads and hopefully more sales will be the result of better SEO. Great content is the key to better SEO. This is what we cover in our coverage of Google’s report.

5. Authority

Although authority isn’t as easy to measure than most other metrics, it is still important to work to increase your authority.

A high authority status will not only increase your SEO and help you get more search traffic but also build your brand, trust and increase your conversion rate.

Moz provides its own authority metrics, which you can use to get an idea of how Google may judge your site and page’s authority. These DA (domain authority), and PA (page authority), scores are from 1 to 100. Higher scores correspond to greater authority.

There is no one right answer to what “good” DA or PA should be. You just want to score higher than your competition.


Source: Moz

8 categories of content marketing metrics and key performance indicators

You can gauge your authority and brand presence by measuring metrics such as the number of mentions of your brand in social media and links to your content. These specific scores are useful, but there are more impactful and campaign-specific ways to track your real-world authority.

You can use the following metrics as key performance indicators (KPIs), if you are familiar with their functions. This will help you create a tracking system that is more efficient and works for you business. These are just a few:

1. Consumption Metrics

Consumption metrics show you how many people have viewed and consumed your content, and how long they spend delving into it.

  • Pageviews This metric can be used to determine which parts of your content are most engaging. These types of content will be your future focus.
  • Unique visitors This metric can be used to determine the size of your audience and how many are returning visitors.
  • Average page time: Are your contents engaging? This metric should be relatively high. If your visitors are just skimming the content, you need to put in some effort.
  • Behavior flow: Using Google Analytics, behavior flow can help you to understand how users navigate through your website. This chart shows the user’s location on your site as well as how they navigate through different pages and exits. This will help you to identify and optimize drop-off points for user retention.

2. Website Engagement Metrics

Your audience and visitors should engage with your content. Your engagement metrics will show how interested your followers are in your content.

  • Inbound Links: A greater domain authority will be achieved if there are more sites linking to your site. You should assess how many links have been earned for a specific content piece. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz to assess the quality and quantity of links to your site. This will allow you to create more opportunities for link building. To create similar pieces, increase search visibility and rank, find the page that has the most links.
  • Duration of session: Each person who visits your website counts as one session. Session duration is the time a user spends on your website, regardless of how many pages they have viewed.
  • Page depth This metric (also known as “pages per Session”) gives you an average number pages that someone will click on when they visit your site.
  • Click-through rates (CTR): Every button and link on your site has a CTR, which is the ratio of clicks to view. Higher CTRs mean higher engagement.

3. Metrics for retention

You can see how well your website retains visitors by using retention metrics.

  • Return Rate: Return rates allow you to compare how many visitors you are getting with how many new visitors. Each group will be different, but it is important that you have a healthy mix.
  • Pages per Visit: How many people visit your page and spend time there before moving on? This metric will show you how valuable and engaging the bulk of your content, not just the part that brought people to your page.
  • Bounce Rate: The bounce rate of your website is the percentage that visitors leave after visiting the first page. The bounce rate is generally lower. This means that visitors tend to spend more time on your website. To repurpose and update content with a higher bounce, identify it.

4. Social Metrics

Social media is another excellent channel to gain valuable insights from customers, leads, or followers.

  • Follower count Keep track of your social media accounts and know your total followers. This metric will allow you to track the growth of your social media audience over time.
  • Social media likes and shares: How does your content do on social media? Is your content likely to go viral? Or are you losing out on all the likes and shares that you have achieved? You can find out this information by tracking all shares and retweets. You can set up sharing buttons on many platforms to track the number of shares for a piece of content across social media. To understand your audience’s expectations, you can use the best content to establish benchmarks.
  • CommentsSocial media comment are a good indicator of engagement. You can keep track of the comments to see how people react to your content and get suggestions for new content.

5. Metrics for Content Production

These metrics will inform future content creation decisions.

  • Time spent creating content: Tracking your time spent creating engaging content will help you refine your CM strategy. It is possible to decide whether you want freelance writers or if you prefer to work in-house with a group of writers. To assess the efficiency of content creators, it is important to know how much time they put in.
  • Time and performance: Your article was shared over 100 times in the first week. How is it doing after a month? Are you still getting some traffic? Is your content created for an event or a specific purpose? Are you seeing a decrease in engagement and shares after a week of posting? Find the content that is most valuable to maximize the value of each one.

6. Email Metrics

An analysis of email metrics can help you increase engagement and decrease dissatisfaction.

  • Email open rates: It is important to track how many emails and newsletters were opened by your prospect before you send them out. This gives you valuable information about what content to focus on and when it works best.
  • Click-through Rate (CTR: Your email CTR is the percentage recipients clicked on at least one of your emails out of all the ones sent.
  • Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of people who did the desired action (like buying a monthly subscription). It determines your email conversion rate.
  • Asset Downloads: Track forms completed and gated content to measure ROI. You can determine the success of each asset by going through every one. Marketo, a marketing automation tool that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing adjustments made, is a great way to do this.
  • Email-subscriber rate: The email churn rates refers to how many people unsubscribe from emails you send. You must be aware of every unsubscriber as you increase your email subscribers.

Source Campaign Monitor

7. Cost Metrics

Keep track of the cost of your content marketing program to your company so that you can assess how effective your overall efforts.

  • The cost per content piece: Track the invoices of freelancers to calculate the cost per piece. You will need to add up salaries, benefits, overhead costs and other overhead costs to track internal expenses. This can be a bit more difficult to do. If you are resource-constrained, consider the pros and cons of outsourcing vs. in-house content creation. It is helpful to calculate the cost per item when planning for the content budget.
  • Distribution costs It is important to increase the visibility of your content. This metric should be kept track to see the costs associated with promoting it on social media or ad networks.

8. Sales Metrics

You can see how your content marketing activities directly affect your sales funnel, and your revenue.

  • Leads generated How can content support lead generation through a funnel? This metric can be used to identify new leads and assign them to content. The combination of your CRM and your marketing automation tool will show you how many leads have been generated by a piece of content. It will also tell you how those leads reacted to your brand on what platforms.
  • Lead quality/score Although you might feel fortunate to generate leads through your content offerings, it is important to not overlook leads’ quality. The lead quality is important because content creation takes time and money.
  • Leads that have been influenced by your content: How many leads were influenced by your content and what content? This will allow you to determine how often your leads must contact you on an average before they convert.
  • Funnel conversion rates: You want to find out which content is helping you push prospects further down the funnel, all the down to the do phase.
  • Pipeline generated To calculate the dollar value for every opportunity you can identify to a piece of content, use the first touch method.
  • Revenue influenced At the end you can see how much revenue came from buyers who started their buying journey by coming in contact with your content, or interacted with your material at any stage.

Depending on your industry, there may be more metrics that are useful.

How to measure content marketing ROI

This simple process will help you calculate your content marketing ROI in just five steps.

  • Step 1 : How much have you spent on content creation? Include software and tools, as well as employee salaries and outsourcing costs.
  • Step 2 How much have you spent to distribute your content Add paid advertising, social media advertising and costs for tools and software.
  • Step 3 Add up all your expenses to calculate the cost of producing your content. This is your total investment.
  • Step 4 : Add all sales that were generated by your content. This is your return.
  • Step 5 Calculate the content marketing ROI by using this formula.

Balance is essential

It is not easy to understand user behavior. There is no magic bullet. You can start moving in the right direction by implementing actionable metrics. If you want to thrive in the digital age, it is essential that you continue to adopt metrics that explain why certain content gets shared.

It’s possible to “game” these metrics by focusing on just one. Many publishers use tricks to manipulate their metrics.

Reach is something you can always purchase. You can increase pageviews by including page breaks in your content and creating slideshows that have multiple pages. Then, force your visitors to click through. Over-promotion of offers can make every visitor take some action to convert. You can also refuse to allow links that lead visitors away from your page, even if they are citing research.

But you shouldn’t.

These methods can have a negative impact on the user experience, and may even cause damage to your brand’s value.

It is important to balance the importance of each metric in order to reward the right behavior. To ensure that you don’t sacrifice too much, look at all areas when testing content marketing designs, topics, and content types.

Content marketing success is a combination of strategy, quality and consistency

MIG’s Content Builder Services package can help you create a strategy and implement it to reach your goals. It will also track important KPIs.

Our team will produce high-quality, optimized content that you can publish on your website regularly. We will promote your content to increase visibility and track its ROI so that you can see how it is performing.

Find out more about our Weekly Blog Content Services.

Marketing Insider Group published the post Key Metrics to Measure Content Marketing Success.

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By: Michael Brenner
Title: Key Metrics to Measure Content Marketing Performance
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/metrics-to-measure-content-performance/
Published Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Filed Under: Features, news

15 Effective Ways To Reduce the Cost of Acquisition

By Peter

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is the cost of advertising or marketing money used to convert leads or acquire them.

In simpler terms, you can ask: How much marketing budget must be spent to acquire a paying customer? Use the following formula to calculate your CPA: CPA = cost/conversions.

CPA reduction can help increase your ROI (return on investment) in a short time and without the need to spend additional money on traffic acquisition. You can control costs by prioritizing the acquisition of new customers.

Marketers often focus on gaining sales and traffic, rather than optimizing costs. Marketers often begin projects by thinking about ways they can make more money. They neglect cost optimization until too many resources are effectively wasted.

It’s easier to reduce CPA at the beginning than it is to find ways to increase conversions. It’s easier and better to find ways to lower marketing and conversion costs before sales numbers start to pour in.

Lowering CPA is more important than ever because “search marketing” has been deemed to be the best way to reach a specific demographic.

Effective Strategies to Reduce Your CPA

These are some best practices that you can use to lower your PPC marketing campaign’s acquisition costs.

1. Optimize Your Landing Pages

Since childhood, we have been taught that the first impressions count. This is true for your website as well. Your landing page is the first page visitors see after clicking on an ad. This page can have a significant impact on overall conversions.

Consider doing an A/B test to determine the effectiveness of your landing pages. This will allow you to compare the success rate of different characteristics.

You could use Test A to drive traffic to one page regardless of what type of ad is being run. Test B could be used to target a more targeted audience.

Analyze the results by running both landing pages, splitting traffic 50/50. This will help you to determine which landing page has the best conversion rate and lowest CPA.

2. Take advantage of online video

Video is one of the best content types to drive engagement, and increase ROI. Half of B2B decision makers report using YouTube to research future purchases. 89% of marketers agree that video marketing has brought them good ROI.

Video marketing is a great way to drive people to your site, increase their time there, and generate leads. Video marketing can also seem daunting. Video marketing doesn’t need to be intimidating. However, it should be strategic.

You can combine this with other search campaigns to dominate the majority of searches with less competition. YouTube searches can be targeted by keywords, location, gender, age, and target audience.

3. Use Retargeting Techniques

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, allows you reach people who have previously visited your website by showing them relevant ads from other sites within the Google Display Network.

By displaying ads on other websites, you can make connections with potential leads and encourage them to return to your site again.

Retargeting works by placing a code known as a retargeting tag onto your website. Everyone who visits your website will be tagged and added into your retargeting database.

These hot leads are great for you to return to with a compelling offer. Retargeting can be very profitable and will increase conversion rates as well as lower your acquisition costs.

4. For those who abandoned your shopping cart, you can run retargeting campaigns

There are many ways to use retargeting in marketing, but the most important audience is those who have abandoned shopping carts.

These visitors are the most important segment for retargeting. These visitors have a strong desire to purchase something from your site. They would even go so far as to select exactly what they wanted and add it to their shopping cart.

This segment is more likely to make a purchase if they are given the right message or if they have an appealing enough offer.

5. Temporarily stop targeting locations that generate little to no sales

Pareto applies to all situations. This is no exception. This means that 20% of sales come from the locations and 20% from the others.

It is also a good idea to concentrate your marketing budget on cities that can generate more sales than others. You might reconsider returning to no-sale areas once your revenue is more liquid or your budget is larger to make a bigger share of your sales.

6. Get a better quality score

The quality score is Google’s rating for the quality and relevance of your keywords. It is used to determine the cost per click, multiplied with your maximum bid to determine where your ad rank will be in the ad auction process. (Source: Wordstream).

It will increase the effectiveness and clickability your ad by creating more relevant and tighter keyword groups.

This will lead to a higher clickability and relevancy, which in turn will improve your Quality Score, leading to lower costs per Click, lower cost per Conversion, and pricing discounts.

7. Make sure to regularly check your Search Terms Report for negative keywords

Always check your search terms report for unqualified or irrelevant searches. You should eliminate keywords that do not align with your marketing goals.

You might have to look at your reports more often if you are working with a brand new or just getting started in your online presence.

Negative keyword evaluation is a way to ensure that your ads don’t target users who aren’t relevant to your offerings.

8. Make sure to update your ad copy

Have a look at the copy in your ad copy. Are your messages aligned to your ad objectives. What is your campaign’s performance?

To better target qualified leads, you might need to make small adjustments to your CTA and current copy. To make a strong impression, you should first look at the research behind optimizing your CTA. To get people to take action in your favor, add urgency to your ads.

9. Keywords: Lower your bids

To find out how your keyword keywords impact your click through and conversion rates, run a Google Experiment.

Based on the results, adjust the keywords that you use and eliminate keyword bids that are not effective or causing an increase in marketing costs.

10. Temporarily stop non-converting keywords

As you consider pulling the plug on certain keywords, make sure you have thoroughly analysed your target cost per convert and your site’s conversion rates.

It is important to evaluate the profitability and potential leads of keywords.

You should review your keywords and use your search terms report for top performers.

11. Optimize with a clear objective in mind

Even though you don’t have a specific goal, it can be tempting to optimize your website quickly. Random optimization is when you make small tweaks every few days or implement changes as a reaction to what you see on the website. This happens without looking at your analytics.

Random optimization is simpler. It’s not necessary to spend time planning, preparing, aligning and coordinating your objectives with your optimization efforts. This type of “on-the-fly” optimization can have negative consequences more often than it is good. These losses include lost time, missed sales opportunities, and money going down the drain.

It is better to plan your next strategies in advance. Begin by mapping out your daily goals and objectives for the next week, each month, quarter, and year. You can manage uncertainty and reduce risks more effectively this way.

This will give you an advantage over others who rely on random optimization to react to seasonal changes. Instead of implementing strategies and planning at the last minute, it’s better to have a plan.

12. You can increase your email list by making an effort

Although email marketing may seem old-fashioned, it is the only marketing strategy that produces consistent results. It also offers the highest return of investment (3800%) and the lowest cost per acquisition rates, compared to other high-tech or sophisticated marketing channels.

It would be a mistake to not include this cost-effective option in all your current marketing campaigns.

When collecting information from website visitors, make sure you at least try to get their email addresses. Your marketing budget will be less if you have more contacts on your email list than you do renting advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google.

Don’t forget to nurture your email list once you have built a strong following. You must ensure that your email list is maintained and continues to offer value to your subscribers. This is a proven method to build a relationship with clients and encourage loyalty among your subscribers.

13. Optimize your Checkout Process

The average abandonment rate for online shoppers at checkout is 68%. This is an alarming rate, especially when you consider that hidden fees are the main reason people abandon their online shopping carts.

It is essential to build trust with your customers. Extra charges added to the order can cause shoppers to be disoriented. This can be reversed by being clear about the purchase’s total cost, including shipping costs.

Other issues that can turn off buyers include website time-outs, site crashes, screen freezing, and website time-outs. These problems create a bad buyer experience, which can lead to people abandoning your website. These issues can make a big difference in lowering your cost per purchase.

14. Temporarily stop any unprofitable paid campaigns

Are you running paid ads that are currently losing money over the last three months? Stop them.

Paid marketing campaigns like ad groups, keywords and other ads that haven’t generated any sales in the last few months should be stopped until you have a data-backed reason for why they aren’t converting.

After you have identified and corrected the problem, you may want to revisit these campaigns in order to find new optimization strategies.

15. Optimize your ads for mobile devices

Mobile-optimized ads improve the user experience, when potential leads view them and interact with them on their mobile devices. There are many reasons why it shouldn’t impact the user experience. It doesn’t mean that the ad is mobile-friendly just because it can be rendered on a smartphone.

How can you tell if your mobile-friendly ad isn’t improving, but actually detracting from the user experience Your conversion rates.

Did the quality of your mobile ads improve? If they didn’t, it could be not truly mobile-friendly. Optimize your chances of success with a mobile ad. It doesn’t just render properly in a mobile browser but also elevates the buyer experience on a smartphone.

Things to keep in mind

You already know that there is no one-size fits all solution to lower acquisition costs. Some of the above tips might work for you, while others may not. All of it depends on your individual situation.

The most important thing is to take the time to talk with your team about these strategies. These tips can be applied whenever you have the opportunity and it is important to keep track of how your project performs.

These tips and the rigorousness of A/B testing are the best ways to reduce costs. Analyze how your project is performing and use that data to improve your paid advertising strategy. To optimize your costs and lower your CPA, you need to find the right combination of tactics.

Continuously monitoring, optimizing, and analyzing can increase profits while reducing acquisition costs. The right mix of tactics will produce quality leads faster than ever before.

To learn more about our content building services, schedule a consultation today.

Marketing Insider Group published the post 15 Effective Ways To Reduce Cost Per Acquisition.

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By: Giana Reno
Title: 15 Effective Ways to Reduce Cost Per Acquisition
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/15-effective-ways-reduce-cost-per-acquisition/
Published Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Filed Under: Features, news

6 Principles of high-converting landing pages

By Peter

Landing pages that convert well are a key component of your brand’s online presence.

They are often your first impression with potential customers and your best chance to capture leads. They are essential for capturing web traffic, as visitors will abandon your site without taking further action.

This is what you need to know: Brands that use landing pages heavily as part of their conversion strategy (30-40 landing pages) receive 7x more leads than those who don’t (1-4 landing pages).

Depending on your company’s size and website, you may need 30-40 landing pages. However, the main takeaway is that landing pages that convert well drive brand results.

What is a landingpage? What makes them different from other pages of your website?

Landing pages are designed to convert web visitors into leads. You can use lead-capture tools to get users to take action. They offer valuable content and discounts in return for their contact information. They are often linked to a campaign or program that piques interest in your brand.

Your landing pages should be able to convince your target audience to convert. It is crucial that landing pages are strategically designed. You should have a compelling message that encourages visitors to take action.

This post will cover 7 principles for high-converting landing pages. These can be used as a guideline when creating new landing pages or as a checklist to ensure your existing landing pages are on the right track.

Let’s get started.

Here are some quick tips:

  • The headlines are the most important indicator of whether a visitor will stay on your site long enough to see your offer.
  • Landing pages that convert well focus on brand and value first.
  • Landing pages must be simple and visually appealing, with the most important messages clearly displayed.
  • Social proof can be used on landing pages to include testimonials or reviews.
  • Landing page performance is dominated by lead magnets and other conversion tools.

7 principles for high-converting landing pages

Make a great headline

Did you know that your website visitors only have 10 seconds to make a lasting impression? People will leave your website after that time, unless you grab their attention with a compelling headline.

The headline is a critical component of landing page success. Web users move fast today and if your headline doesn’t grab their attention immediately, they will move on.

Your value proposition is the most important thing to consider when writing your headline. What value proposition are you giving your visitors to make them want to stay? It should be prominently displayed in your headline to make sure people don’t miss it.

These are some easy, proven ways to create headlines that grab attention.

  • Use numbers – Headlines that include numbers are most popular and clicked the most. They also convert the best. Highrise, a CRM software firm, discovered that landing pages converted at 30% faster rates when the headline contained a number.
  • Use Negative Language – Although it sounds counterintuitive, this is actually very effective. Use words such as “never” and “no more” to draw your customers’ attention to the problem or need you are trying to solve. Your headline should make your customer want to read more.
  • Avoid being wordy – Studies show that headlines with fewer words perform better (usually between 5 and 10 words). Google displays only 60 characters of your headline. That’s about 10 words.

Neil Patel, marketing guru, takes a deeper look at great headlines:

It’s not enough to keep people interested in the beginning. Research shows that 90% of people who read your headline also read your call-to-action (CTA), which is the message that informs them what next step to take.

Your brand is irrelevant – focus on your value and not your brand

You can’t rely on your brand name alone to achieve results unless you’re Amazon, Disney or Coca-Cola. Landing pages are not meant to inform prospects about your company, but to direct them to offers and programs.

Landing pages that convert well focus on value and not brand. Your headline and copy should reflect your value proposition.

This is a great tool to create a value proposition that is clear and precise:

Make sure your landing page messages have the same value proposition as the ones in your headlines, ads, and CTA buttons that led them to your landing pages. People don’t like to be misled or feel they are wasting their time on a page they don’t expect.

Make sure you are specific! Be specific!

Remember that people are first and foremost concerned about their needs. This is almost always the reason we use the internet to find things. While we all love our brands, the best way for others to love them is to clearly show how they can improve their lives or make their lives easier.

Keep it simple and clean

It is impossible to include everything on a single landing page. This will negatively impact the performance of your page. Research shows that multiple offers on a single landing page can reduce conversions by more then 200%.

Did you remember how landing pages with more conversions convert better than those with fewer? This is most likely the main reason!

It’s not about adding more content to one landing page. The correct strategy is creating multiple landing pages that focus on one campaign, program or offer.

Design is no exception to the keep-it-simple principle. Design is important, but so are compelling words. Too much of either can make your page look cluttered and make it difficult for visitors to find the most important messages.

Low-converting landing pages are more effective than those that convert well. Your goal is to make it as easy for your visitors as possible to move on to the next step.

Prioritize the most important information you want to convey to potential customers. You want a page that is attractive but not too busy. This will help you to highlight important information rather than hide it behind too many visuals and design elements.

Social proof is a great way to prove your worth

Social proof is the best strategy to convince consumers to take action. Social proof is when people mimic the actions of others. They want to follow the example of others.

This is not a new phenomenon, right? FOMO is something we all experience. It also applies to consumer behavior. 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations as well as reviews from strangers. The average consumer reviews 10 reviews before purchasing.

Social proof is a key element in building consumer trust. You should include it on your landing pages to highlight the benefits of your offer and show how others have benefited from your brand.

One way to include social proof on your landing page is to include a testimonial or a few — but don’t make your copy too cluttered. Linking to your customer review page or social media feed can help visitors see other opinions about your products.

Test your landing page’s performance

Don’t assume your results are over. It doesn’t matter what best practices you use, it’s not a good idea for your current results to be accepted. You should instead test your landing page and measure its performance. You can make small improvements and tweaks to improve performance.

Google Analytics is the best tool to achieve this.

This is the Google Analytics landing page report. It provides crucial information such as the number of sessions, new users and the average session length.

Source: Image Source

Alt-Text: Google Analytics Landing Page Report

To ensure that your website is always optimized, you should incorporate performance analysis into your content strategy. It’s also possible to make informed decisions about which areas you can A/B-test to optimize every aspect of your website. CTA copy, CTA positioning headlines and form fields are some of the most commonly tested web components.

Make use of a conversion tool that works

Last but not least, any landing page with high conversion needs a conversion tool that captures contact information.

Your value proposition can be powerful if your message is compelling and visitors are interested in it. This will help you capture leads. This is how many landing pages go. They promise high-quality content and offer email updates.

Lead magnets can be an even better option.

Anyone who clicks on a landing page’s CTA will be able to fill out a form or subscribe to emails by using lead magnets. Lead magnets are more valuable than standard content. Lead magnets are designed to address a problem or challenge that your visitors may be experiencing.

The most common types of lead magnets are PDF checklists and how to guides, whitepapers, ebooks and video webinars. These lead magnets are highly effective and can increase opt-in rates up to 85%.

Make content that converts

Marketing Insider Group’s SEO and writers can provide you with optimized content that is ready to publish every week for a year.

To learn more, visit our Content Marketing Services or to schedule a consultation with me immediately!

Marketing Insider Group published the post 6 Principles of High-Converting Linked Pages.

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By: Erin McShea
Title: 6 Principles of High-Converting Landing Pages
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/8-principles-high-converting-landing-pages/
Published Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Filed Under: Features

13 Biggest Content Marketing Challenges in 2022

By Peter

Brands face multiple obstacles when organizing the content function. They must grapple with content proliferation; inconsistent and uncoordinated content creation; the lack of strategic direction in the content insights process; and the difficulty for consumers, customers and prospects to find content that is relevant and timely.

Content marketing is a journey, and it’s not easy. In fact, it’s freaking hard. Too many of the marketing professionals we know are miserable. They try to fight every day to do work they can be proud of. Marketing that works!

So we asked our clients to tell us what are the biggest content marketing challenges we help them overcome. And how we help them solve for those challenges.

The insights below represent what we hear from our clients, the content marketing community, and our unique perspective. our goal is that you too can see a way past these challenges. Whether you work with us or not.

The major themes that emerge include tying content marketing efforts to business value, limited resources and internal tensions that hinder the content production process. Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest challenges that are keeping marketers up at night.

1. Determining Content Marketing ROI

Many marketers are struggling to show the ROI of their content marketing efforts. Marketers from the agency side, for example, shared that some of their clients are wanting to know how many conversions can be attributed to a specific piece of content or channel. Often times these are brands whose digital conversion paths cannot be tracked or analyzed.

To combat this, marketers use a purchase intent model that assigns different weights to customer interactions with a piece of content, but they admit that this model isn’t perfect.

For other marketers, their biggest challenge is tying content to conversions and defining relevant, appropriate metrics to measure and evaluate the impact their content marketing programs make on the business’ bottom line.

Content ROI is subjective and driven by the business mission or objectives of the content marketing program. An integrated approach to measurement yields a value story as opposed to simply tracking activity metrics

Defining your value story requires a methodical approach.

  1. Clearly identify KPIs aligned with business mission.
  2. Identify the metrics that will work as a unit to tell a value story.
  3. Identify the sources of those metrics and pull into a dashboard using connectors.
  4. Create an algorithm that weights each metric in relation to their importance to the “story.”
  5. Analyze performing and non-performing metrics for each KPI on a periodic basis and use to calibrate approach.

Check out this video from a recent marketing keynote speech where I explain this dilemma:

For More:  10 Examples To Prove Content Marketing ROI To Your CEO

2. Video Content Marketing Virality

As my friend Todd Wheatland once said, the only answer to the question on how to make a viral video is STFU! He’s Australian so please forgive his potty mouth. But you gotta admit it’s somewhat true. You can’t just “create” a viral video. But anyone can create quality videos that reach, engage and convert.

But how do we guarantee that these great videos are seen by our target audience? How do we guarantee that the message of the video was viewed? The cost of guaranteeing that messages are seen is becoming increasingly more expensive, and the industry needs to be prepared for the increased cost.

Other marketers are facing time and resource constraints to produce quality videos. Some marketers also struggle with building out a sustainable video content strategy that can product videos which can live and scale across multiple markets.

Read More: How to Grow Your Audience with Video Content Marketing

3. Figuring Out How to Feed the Content Beast

Many brands spend too much of their time worried about creating the perfect piece of content. Or they worry about creating only the kind of content their boss or sales, or product people want (see point #1). The real goal is to create content consistently mapped to the buyer journey.

Buyers are searching online every day. And their search patterns reflect the need for basic education. Exactly the kind of content you are too afraid of publishing because you think your target audience already knows the basics. Or because you don’t realize how many people your target audience has to convince to buy your stuff.

Your content needs to be published frequently, based on your buyer’s journey, and mapped to keywords that relate to your business. That’s why our clients outsource content creation to us: because we provide foundational content that meets buyer needs, and delivers business results.

There are always obstacles to consistent publishing in content marketing. This can be due to a lack of resources, ideas, organization, and more.

The number one goal of content marketing for organizations is to generate more quality leads. They also said this was their biggest challenge.

It’s easy to create a lot of content. It’s very hard to do this at scale and to maintain high quality. Even if you have a good number of resources, keep in mind that without high throughput, you’re always lagging.

Research on blog frequency tells us 11 per month is the “magic” number—can you produce that amount of content on your own? That’s not the only content you’ll be creating—video, social posts, infographics, eBooks, etc. Do you have a “machine” to accomplish this? And how confident are you in its quality?

These are two big questions that content leaders need to ponder. Even the biggest organizations would have trouble with consistency and frequency. But we have a framework that allows us to deliver.

When you engage with us, we’ve already done the topic and keyword research. The content strategy informs voice and tone and considers audience profiles. Then we execute on it by using our own subject matter expert (SME) writers, SEO optimization best practices, and buyer’s journey funnel goals.

Sure, you could go on platforms and hire a freelancer here or there, but fair warning, you’ll likely be disappointed. In most scenarios, the quality won’t be up to your standards, nor will it be relatable to your audience.

For example, we write for a lot of software as a service (SaaS) companies. To write about SaaS subjects requires experience in the industry, a healthy technical aptitude, and the ability to understand how and why customers use the platform. Sorry, you’re not going to find this for $10/hour.

Here’s an approach for making your content resonate deeply at the point of discovery:

  1. Start with an insights process that provides deep understanding, fresh perspective and a honed vision of what will resonate and fulfill a specific need. In our experience, there is no dearth of available background information to inform story ideation and road map development, but typically information is scattered throughout the organization with no systematic way to capture, analyze and apply it
  2. Model the insights process for a specific need and use the results to create a COE methodology for content insights. This involves overlaying inputs from multiple points such as SEO reports, listening scans, CMS & CRM data, conference reports, sales insights, customer insights and research reports, etc. Overlay inputs and create a topic “Venn diagram” to determine topics best suited for brand differentiation and marketplace resonance.
  3. Use results to create a content roadmap. Audit existing content to identify holes and get new content needs into the content production cycle.

Read More: The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas for Content Marketers

4. Proving Credibility And Authority

For many marketers, they struggle with finding and establishing a credible and authoritative voice for their brands, and cutting through the noise to capture their target audience’s attention. The financial space, for example, is filled with “experts” offering advice and insights to consumers, which makes it extremely difficult for brands to stand out with their content.

Marketers are thus looking to develop an effective content strategy that will allow them to maintain the brand’s identity and boost marketing ROI, while improving their brand’s authority and thought leadership in the space.

This is where effective thought leadership comes in. You use your people and their passions and expertise to share what they know with your target audience. The result? Credibility and trust.

Read More:

How to Increase Your Authority with Evergreen Content

What Is Authority And How Can You Build It?

5. Set Your Content Marketing Budgeting

Budget remains one of the top challenges marketers face when it comes to justifying the cost and investment in their content marketing programs.

Many senior leaders want immediate results. Content marketing takes time to show ROI. Finding the budget for content marketing doesn’t need to be as challenging as it sounds: look at the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Chances are most of them don’t have any.

What are you spending on paid search because you don’t rank organically? Shift that budget in to content marketing.

Yes, investment in content is rising with more organizations realizing the value of it. According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers are doing so.

While they understand the importance of content marketing and want to invest, companies often face challenges here. They may have budget limitations that prohibit them from adding to their team.

These limitations may have become more of an issue during the pandemic. Or, they may have the majority of the budget allocated to paid channels to boost content but not focused on actually producing it.

Even when faced with COVID-19, B2B organizations still shifted dollars to content marketing from their advertising spend.

Looking ahead, companies said they would invest the most in content creation. Figuring out how to allocate this well isn’t an easy endeavor, especially if you’re trying to put resources into lots of buckets—writers, SEO strategists, etc.

The Solution: Spend Less, Get More

We’ve got it down to a number: $8,000 a month is all the budget you need to achieve your content marketing objectives. What do you get for that amount of money? A lot, including:

  • Content marketing strategy
  • One year of content ideas
  • SEO: An audit, keyword strategy, and external link building
  • Conversion funnel development
  • Paid promotion

For that investment, we see a 7x return for every dollar spent, which equates to $56K in revenue each month. These results won’t occur overnight or even after 30 or 60 days. Content marketing is a long game, and you must keep doing it.

Brands that invest in us to guide their content marketing will see returns. The returns are tangible metrics such as increased traffic, conversions, and revenue. Content becomes an important tool to attract, engage, nurture, and retain customers. Its value far exceeds filtering these dollars to paid ads only. Those ads only return when they are running. Content returns for as long as it’s live.

Read More: How Much Budget Do You Need for Content Marketing?

6. Approval Processes

Marketers on the agency side shared the same sentiment when it comes to their client approval process being too long. Some stakeholders are wanting to provide input at every step of the content creation process, which creates bottlenecks and delays in production timeline.

At the same time, different teams and organizations within a company all produce content to support various programs and channels they own, and this creates content quality and consistency issues. Marketers are looking to manage and govern their content creation process more efficiently to ensure all content produced is compelling, consistent and effective for their target audience.

For both agency and non-agency marketers, staying timely and relevant with the long, clunky approval processes they need to go through with content creation is one of the biggest challenges that’s keeping them up at night.

Read More: 5 Ways to Provide Better Feedback and Improve the Review & Approval Process

7. Branding

Marketers face various branding challenges when it comes to content marketing. Some struggle with maintaining their brand voice as brands expand their in-house teams and outsource content creation to external agencies and partners.

Others struggle with maintaining their individual brand identities while working under a bigger umbrella brand. The real goal with content marketing and branding is to think of content marketing as the platform to tell your brand story.

Read More: The Best Example of The Value of Storytelling You Will Ever Find

8. Maintaining Volume, Quality, Speed

One of the biggest challenges many marketers share is figuring out how to deliver engaging, compelling content with speed, without compromising on quality and volume. Trying to stay nimble and agile within a large corporate structure also proves to be a big pain point for many marketers.

For marketing a startup, the challenge is mainly time and resources. Regular content publishing is recognized by many startup founders as important, but they don’t have the time.

We always start by looking at the company blog. How often are you publishing? Sre you getting more traffic? Are your keyword rankings improving over time? How often is the competition publishing? Is their content long enough? Good enough?

Then we follow this process:

  1. Start by looking at keywords your audience is using in the buying process and keywords where you can win vs the competition.
  2. Create a list of the content headlines our amazing writing team thinks will resonate with this audience. We also ask them to create a list of things they are interested in writing about. This aligns writers with clients and audiences.
  3. Finally, we ask our clients for feedback and actual ratings of what they want to see published.

From there, we create a calendar of weekly content planned out for the entire year!

Read More: How Weekly Blog Content Solves the Top Challenges

9. Content Management

An Accenture study of over 1,000 marketing executives from 17 countries and 14 industries found that 73% of respondents are spending more than $50 million on content every year.

While 100% of marketing leaders surveyed all agreed that content is vital to the success of their businesses, content overload has become a top challenge for many organizations.

  • 92% said the volume of the content their organizations are producing is higher than it was two years ago, and 83% expect the volume to continue to increase in the next two years.
  • 50% said they currently have more content than they can effectively manage. Individual teams often create messaging and coordinate distribution of content on their own, which leads to organizational silos and program inefficiencies internally.
  • Less than 50% respondents felt they are fully prepared to manage the content they have today. The top three reasons marketing leaders attribute to their unpreparedness are a lack of skilled talent, technologies and clarity in content management and production processes.

The content calendar is the forcing function of every good marketing plan.

10. Strategic Business Alignment

For many brands, there is a lack of alignment in digital strategy and messaging across different platforms, which can hurt the customer experience and content marketing success. Cross-team collaboration becomes a big challenge for marketers when individuals and teams are working in silos and towards different visions and goals.

78% of leaders surveyed by Accenture felt they need better alignment between Marketing and IT teams to improve content marketing success. Marketing is more about digital now and requires technology more than ever before. New technologies are also available for marketers to experiment and innovate their practices in new ways. Another reason why marketers need better marketing and IT alignment is because technology today plays a central role in helping marketers deliver a seamless, compelling customer experience to reach, convert and retain customers.

Organizations create content in a dispersed structure, often resulting in multiple pieces of content being created by multiple areas of the company with little awareness that other content objects existed or were in production. In addition, often no master editorial calendar drives the content creation or amplification process. The lack of a chief content officer or well defined governance process results in no central authority to lead and direct the content creation process.

Only 19% of marketing leaders in the Accenture survey felt they have clear objectives established when creating new content assets. Nearly half of respondents say they do not feel their organizations have an effective content strategy that meets their current and future needs. 53% said they spend more time on the operational details of managing content than on strategically aligning their daily marketing efforts to a bigger picture. This goes to show that many brands have yet developed effective content marketing strategies or invested in the right resources to fully realize content marketing’s potential.

A Semrush study revealed that while 77 percent of organizations have a content strategy, only 9 percent say it’s excellent. The average rating in the survey was 3.5 out of 5. Just having a strategy isn’t good enough. You have to have an effective content marketing strategy. You must consistently execute on it and adjust it when necessary.

Why is that so hard? Many reasons come to mind—stakeholder interference (and not in a good way), there’s no time to be strategic because you’re always in the logistics, and you don’t have expertise in the area.

The data and the reality of what we see every day in the field are true. It comes down to budget, consistency/frequency, and strategy. We’ve developed a proven recipe that resolves these challenges for our clients.

That’s why the content marketing strategies that we create for clients are full of details. It’s not a document full of fluff; it’s one of action. It defines:

  • What content marketing means for your brand
  • The tactics you’ll employ to develop and promote content
  • Content production frequency and workflows
  • Your audience: demographics, motivations, challenges, objections, and more
  • Content clusters, which are the themes all the topics will roll up to
  • Distribution methods
  • What to measure and why

Without an actionable and well-defined strategy, you simply can’t achieve content marketing ROI. The strategy is the guiding light. Without one, you’re in the dark; with an ineffectual one, your light is very dim. The strategy tells you and delivers the path to success.

Further, here are five things that brands should do before beginning to create their content organization, in order to organize their content creation and distribution process:

  1. Map the current nodes of the content eco-system across the entire enterprise. This requires the authority to create a cross-functional view of how content gets produced.
  2. Analyze the map to determine if there is a logical flow and uncover interdependencies between groups that can impact efficiencies and approvals.
  3. Study the delta between current and future state and create a step strategy for breaking down siloes and working cross functionally.
  4. Create a content governance structure that aligns with future state.
  5. Adopt a center of Excellence approach that is both dynamic and inclusive.

Read More: How to Create and Align Your Content with the Buyer Journey

11. Continuous Learning

The ever-changing marketing landscape means marketers need to dedicate themselves to lifelong learning and innovation to reinvent themselves, or risk extinction. Training their teams on the latest marketing practices is another top challenge for many marketers as they are also trying to navigate the learning curve themselves.

12. Content Marketing Promotion

Identifying influencers to help amplify content is another marketing challenge many marketers face with their content marketing efforts.

Creating great content is not enough anymore, you need an effective content promotion strategy to help customers find and see your content.

Read More: 18 Content Promotion Tools for Every Strategy

13. The Biggest Challenge in Content Marketing: Developing a Customer-Centric Mindset

This may sound surprising to some, but convincing brands to put customers first is still a challenge many marketers face when creating content. They need to help brands change their mindset about the value of content and understand that content marketing isn’t the same as advertising. Content marketing is about being helpful and providing real value to customers, by giving them what they want and need at each stage of the customer journey.

If you go to most company websites or read their marketing content, you’ll notice that they do an excellent job of telling you all about the company and telling you all about their products. But they don’t answer the biggest questions their customers might have. In other words, they make the biggest marketing mistake and make it all about themselves and not about the customer.

Almost a decade ago, C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman) predicted that companies will become better at this when he begged to see “more brands interacting in real time with their customers.”

Barbra Gago (@BarbraGago) also suggests marketers stop trying to “re-invent the wheel with every piece of content” and should instead focus on helping prospective buyers find “the right information–the content that is going to help them move through their purchase process.”

In an article on CMI, Alison Bolen (@alisonbolen) explained that the greatest challenge in content marketing is “understanding your customers well enough to develop content that is useful and relevant for them.”

And Marcus Sheridan (@TheSalesLion) gets to this same point when he asks content marketers to “write and communicate in a way that is completely and utterly on the level of their audience, not the level of the industry professional.”

So how do we help address this challenge?

Ardath Albee (@ardath421) suggests we need to “Take a Customer Field Trip” and try to look at our marketing and our content as a customer might see it.

I also answered one of the biggest marketing challenges for small businesses, How To Create Killer Content: Speak To A Customer where I tell very simply how you can use your customer stories to tell your story. But most importantly, to tell it using their words and by showing how you are solving real customer problems.

25 Signs Your Business Is Not Ready for Content Marketing

One question I get asked a lot is, “How is content marketing right for our business?” Well, the right question business owners should be asking is, “How do we know our business is ready for content marketing?”

I try to answer that question regularly on this blog. We talk about culture and brand publishing and I try to point to examples of great content whenever I can.

But sometimes, it’s better to define the signs that show you are not ready to change your direction.

And that’s what I’m doing here, with these 25 signs your business is not ready for content marketing. I’m sure there are plenty more. But these are the ones that just flew right off the top of my head.

  1. You don’t have a corporate blog.
  2. You have a corporate blog but only publish company news on it.
  3. Social listening and share of (search) voice does not drive your marketing strategy.
  4. Your social channels are only used to promote and push your webinars, white papers and events.
  5. Your content talks more about your products.
  6. You ask “How can we create a viral video?”
  7. You haven’t mapped your existing or future content to buyer stages.
  8. You don’t have any early-stage or thought leadership content.
  9. You haven’t defined an appropriate next step or “call to action” for your content.
  10. You think content marketing is expensive.
  11. You think hiring a bunch of journalists can help you.
  12. You constantly try to re-create your own viral Tiktok moments.
  13. You don’t track how much of your content gets used and which does best.
  14. You don’t monitor the content your competitors are creating.
  15. You don’t know what keywords your customers are using.
  16. You think content marketing is a campaign.
  17. You don’t have resources to publish on a regular basis.
  18. You don’t have dedicated testing resources for your content development and landing pages.
  19. You haven’t defined any kind of editorial workflow.
  20. Your business doesn’t train your employees on effective storytelling.
  21. You’re resistant to “giving away” content for free (without registration).
  22. You don’t think about the”shareability” of your content. Your website gets less than 5% of traffic from social networks.
  23. You don’t create visual content (videos, slide decks, infographics).
  24. You create content without thinking about how to distribute and amplify it.
  25. You do content marketing because someone told you to.

Over to You

Is your organization or agency currently facing any of these content marketing challenges? If so, how are you solving them? I’d love to hear your ideas, please share them below!

Are you interested in engaging and converting new customers via content? Contact me and let’s talk about how we can help.

Check out the photo of the full challenge board below:

We’re content marketing challenge solvers. Let’s talk about how we can get you out of reactive mode and into a proactive approach to content. If you’re ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.

The post 13 Biggest Content Marketing Challenges in 2022 appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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By: Michael Brenner
Title: 13 Biggest Content Marketing Challenges in 2022
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/biggest-content-marketing-challenges/
Published Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 15:35:00 +0000

Filed Under: Features, Summary

Here are 10 digital marketing tips and tricks from top brands

By Peter

Digital marketing is essential for any business’ success, regardless of industry. What are some digital marketing tricks and tips that can be used by larger brands with better funding?

Many businesses have realized the importance of digital marketing in attracting new customers due to the pandemic. eMarketer predicts digital marketing will increase by 36% between 2020 and 2022 and consume 54% of marketing budgets.

Why? Because digital marketing allows us to see exactly what our customers want. It is now easier than ever to understand the online behavior of customers and make adjustments. Businesses can now gain valuable insights into customers’ minds through digital marketing.

Digital marketing can help your business reach and target customers, classify new customers, increase sales and enjoy lasting growth if done correctly.

These digital marketing strategies will help you make your business more visible online to existing customers and connect with new ones. Let’s take a look at the top 10 digital marketing strategies you can use to grow your company.

What is Digital Marketing Today?

Digital marketing refers to the use of the internet, social networks, websites, emails, and other electronic devices to help your business get found by new customers.

As more people use social media and the internet to do their work and have fun, digital marketing is on the rise.

Marketing is all about connecting with potential customers in today’s digital age. It involves building trust, educating them about the latest trends, and positioning your business to be a solution to their needs.

This means you must be found, shared and grow your business on the terms of your customers, where they spend most of their time, and with the answers to all their queries.

Digital marketing strategy includes a variety of marketing activities, including content marketing, email marketing search engine optimization, mobile market and more. We’ve compiled a list with the most popular digital marketing techniques used by the top business brands around the globe.

1. Combining SEO and Content Marketing

SEO is not a new concept. SEO was for a long time a function keywords and coding. Google became smarter. While SEO is not a great marketing strategy, we found that SEO combined with Content Marketing is one the most effective trends in 2022.

Google’s algorithm includes many metrics that are related to content. Even Google admits it. It is much more effective to use multiple types of content than one type.

More content. As more businesses embrace content marketing the competition is getting tougher. Every online activity is flooded with noise and information overload. Every business must publish more and better content to be successful.

HubSpot data shows that publishing at least once per week is essential for your ROI. ROI falls pretty dramatically when you publish less often. It’s not about quality vs quantity, but a perfect mix of both.

Valueable content Content should be informative, entertaining, and empathetic. It should answer the query asked by the search engine. However, it must also be structured so that engagement is encouraged such as email subscriptions, comments, sharing and other actions that can increase ROI.

Original content– You can use audio, video, or text content. However, make sure it is original and good quality. You can also hire experts to create compelling, original content for your website or social media channels. You will need to create a strong content marketing strategy like never before.

Proper content – This infographic by Occam’s Razor shows this smart guy! You need to create content that is appropriate for each stage of the conversion process. Your metrics should match your goals with each piece.

Image courtesy of Occam’s Razor

It can be difficult to know where a visitor is at any given point in the conversion process. However, if you have done a good job of coding content (applying track codes so that you know what content drove them to your site), and used tools that allow you to track where visitors have been previously, it is possible to make an educated guess about what content they require.

Delivering the right content at just the right time will increase your chances of converting visitors into buyers.

Reach is crucial. Your ROI will increase if you have more visitors to your site. This is why it’s important that you have multiple social media platforms and links to your content. Visitors can share your content easily. We recommend following this schedule to share your content after it has been published:

My daughter will tell me: if you post more than once on Instagram, she’ll unfollow your account! You should not only share your content but also content created by great experts and companies. Experts recommend that you share 20% of your promotional content, and 80% of any other valuable content that you find.

2. Be visible on relevant social media platforms

Online visibility is key to business success, especially in this digital age where nearly all businesses are online. It’s one way to be different from the rest.

You need to increase your online presence through relevant social media networks. There are many social media networks, but you must identify the most important ones for your customers and then target them there. You can choose the ones that are most relevant to you and your prospects, and then build your online presence there.

Remember that social media is not the right place to pitch your products (unless your last name is Kardashian). Social media can be used to share and engage. However, social media isn’t the best channel for digital marketing to show business growth.

3. Optimize your website for mobile-first browsing

Your website and social media platforms must be mobile-friendly in order to ensure that your content is accessible on both desktops and smartphones. Most customers access the internet via smartphones and tablets.

It is important to make your website and contents accessible on all devices. Use the most recent trends and colors to update your website design.

4. Make sure you have the right tools

Digital marketing is a combination of many strategies that aims at various channels such as SEO, PPC and social media.

You need to have the right tools for digital marketing to run successful campaigns and ensure you have an integrated marketing strategy. It is also important to have the expertise and knowledge necessary to use them in the right context.

5. Design is Awesome

Digital marketing is a success because of its design. You need to be able to design a website, landing page, or create an image for your website or ad. There are tools that can help you design your website.

Canva is a great tool to create social media images, whether they are for your profile or images you want to use in posts. Canva’s templates are a great feature. They allow you to create beautiful images, even if your knowledge is limited on layout and fonts. You’ll find new images and tools constantly being added to Canva, including infographic templates.

Photoshop – Although it is expensive, Photoshop is an excellent design tool. The entire Adobe creative cloud can be purchased for $29 per month for students and for a bit more for businesses. Photoshop used to be difficult, but there are many tutorials available on YouTube. Photoshop also includes mini tutorials when you hover over the buttons.

6. Make an email list

Email remains a powerful driver of digital marketing ROI. Email delivers $36 in ROI per dollar! But you gotta do it right.

Your website should include an opt-in form for your email newsletter. Not just promotional content, but valuable content. Tell stories.

7. Digital Advertising: Spend money

Listen, there are many people spending money on digital ads. Few are able show any ROI. (If you’re one of them, let me know. (I would love to hear your story!)

You can test many things to make digital advertising successful, such as PPC (pay per view) Google Ads and YouTube Ads.

We have tried everything. We have tried everything. The only thing that has brought us relevant traffic, engaged visitors and converted leads is contextual content promotion. We locate your target audience wherever they may be on the internet and serve them an advertisement. It’s not an advertisement for your product. Ad for your content.

We then gather this audience into a pool for retargeting. We then send them offers such as e-books and webinars. We can deliver CPCs up to 80% lower than the average and CTRs up to 4-5 times more than the average.

8. Use infographics

Infographics are very popular because they are visually appealing. Our brains are able to process images much faster than text. People will share pictures more often than text because a picture is worth 1000 words.

These are just a few examples of some of the most powerful content infographics that great marketers have created to connect with their audience.

9. Keep an eye on your analytics

Analytics is almost at the opposite end of creativity, but it’s the right combination to make digital marketing a success. Google Analytics allows you to understand the key elements of your website as well as how visitors navigate it. You can use the Google Data Studio to test it using data from Google’s online e-commerce site.

There are many great tools that can be used for analytics other than Google Analytics. Each social network can be used to generate individual analytics (e.g. You can use individual analytics from each social network (e.g., Facebook, Pinterest), or you could pay more to get more insight.

10. Integrate strategies and campaigns across channels

It can be difficult to integrate these strategies, especially in larger firms where different teams manage different platforms and where different agencies handle different aspects such as paid marketing or content marketing. To achieve digital marketing success, you need to integrate.

Frequency is a key component of conversion. If efforts are not coordinated, frequency will be lost.

Let’s discuss how to integrate these different tactics into digital marketing success.

Strategic planning

A strategic plan is the first step to integration. If you don’t already have one, this link will help you create one.

Strategic elements like messaging are key to coordination, but even elements like mission and goals can help integrate efforts by providing a framework under which teams can create posts, infographics and the metrics that will be used to evaluate them.

Creative meetings

It is vital to bring everyone together. Everyone should be able to share what they are working on, and receive feedback from the group on ways to expand that effort across multiple platforms or creative efforts.

A style guide is essential. The style guide should list your preferred colors, fonts, and approved variations to ensure consistency in all marketing efforts, including traditional advertising. The style guide may include copies of different sizes and types logos, images from the leadership team, or other graphic elements.

Master plans

A point person should be responsible for digital marketing success. This person will coordinate efforts between teams. There are some organizations that require approval from the top before anything goes live. This approach can be slowing down the process and, unlike traditional advertising media, digital media flows fast. Putting in a dam can cause the flow to back-up and allow for accumulation of flotsam or jetsam which is both unpleasant and further clogs the pipeline.

It’s better to use a digital master schedule or another device such as an app to let everyone post what they are working on, what assets they plan to use and when the creative effort will be live. It’s not enough just to post plans. Everyone should check the master calendar daily to see if their plans match those in the work.

Reusing graphics from other teams can save time and money. It also creates visuals that help customers (potential customers and current customers) to associate the two.

Your Turn

We believe digital marketing is essential for any business’ success. Here are some tips to help you get started. These tips have been tested and proven effective. You can stay ahead of your competitors by implementing them effectively.

These digital marketing tips will help you make your business succeed in today’s digital age. Would you add any tips to this list? Comment below!

Marketing Insider Group published the post 10 Digital Marketing Tips & Tricks from Top Brands.

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By: Michael Brenner
Title: 10 Digital Marketing Tips and Tricks from Top Brands
Sourced From: marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/10-digital-marketing-tricks-used-by-famous-business-brands/
Published Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://internetlib.org/is-your-team-in-the-performance-zone/

Filed Under: Features, Summary

The Digital Shift is Changing the Way Leaders Think, Work, and Learn

By Peter

Digital isn’t just changing the way we work, it should change how we approach work. Emails, telecommuting, and data-driven reporting are just tools. If you still think, communicate, create and lead the way we did 20 years ago, then you’ll be just as irrelevant in the modern workplace as a typewriter.

Industry experts have forecast how digital will transform industries, organizations and teams – and what you need to do to stay in the game.

The shift in how you lead

Steve Jobs may have been instrumental in triggering the digital shift, but his notoriously authoritarian leadership style would never work today. That’s because nobody has all the answers anymore. Every year there are new trends, technologies, and competitors – a dictatorial and overcontrolling manager simply stifles and slows everyone down.

So leading isn’t about how much you know and do, but how you encourage people to ask, think, learn and do on their levels. Deloitte’s paper on The Changing Role of People Management in the Digital Era lists the leadership values that creates a culture of innovation:

  • Adaptable. You understand their individual work styles and strengths.

  • Tolerant. You allow people to share ideas, take risks, and give feedback.

  • Empowering. You encourage leadership at all levels. Your role is to give direction and remove barriers to their success.

  • Collaborative. You are the orchestra conductor who knows who to bring together for a project, and then makes harmony out of their different backgrounds, skills and cognitive styles.

  • Communicative. You make communication and feedback part of your team culture and daily processes.

The shift in how you think

“What is currently referred to as knowledge work—the formulation of plans, completion of forms and coordination of data files—will soon be done by software guided by algorithms. What remains is judgment work: balancing opposing views and stakes, crafting a plan of action and making decisions,” says Accenture’s report on how digital technologies are changing the way we work.

This means two things: you need to understand data, and then use it to make decisions. Many managers lie in the extremes. There are people who are paralyzed by data and demand definitive clues and zero-risk, high-profit solutions. For them, everything is based on numbers. On the other hand, there are those who fear data and resist it. They don’t like the technology, reports, or sudden demands to back up their insights with analytics. They’re offended that a machine may know more than they do. Or they claim that understanding data is the role of the Technology or the Research department, unable to see that in the digital age, everyone’s job now involves technology and research.

“No one disputes the value of contextual knowledge and human judgment, but it is a limited perspective—being able to see only what’s out your own window—that has most often prevented managers from seeing and exploiting opportunities for great gain,” says the Accenture report.

In reality, the best leaders lie in the middle. They are familiar with data, but use it to gain insight and take creative risks. They make “smart experiments” through a process of:

  • Checking data to make an informed strategy

  • Testing the strategy in a controlled selling

  • Analyzing the results to create a better strategy

  • Retesting and refining

Yes, you can fail. But you fail fast and learn fast, which allows you to move ahead of competitors and stay attuned to what really works for your market.  “Managers will have to recognize that their real value-added contribution will increasingly take the form of judgment rather than knowledge creation. Judgment requires insight drawn from experience, and experience often involves a form of experimentation.”

The shift in how we learn

Too much training is focused on learning the technology, and not developing the culture, values and  attitudes. This doesn’t happen over one seminar or team building exercise, but through continuous learning – driven both by the management, and the employees themselves. Everyone should be committed to a learning mindset, creating a supportive environment, and most importantly, making everyone on the team feel that you’re all in it together.

“Learning through and with technology is something we embrace in Grow,” Rudi Ramin, Grow Co-Founder, says. “Our platform encourages that, as well as collaboration and support.”

This sense of learning and growing together can also help you and your team find solid ground: a positive company culture.

It’s easy for change to weaken a company and a team. The stress can lead into conflict, communication breakdowns, passive aggressive behavior, and power plays. This leads to lower productivity, poor morale, higher employee turnover – and generally, makes for a rather depressing workday.

That’s why it’s critical for teams and team leaders to reaffirm positive values and encourage stronger relationships. According to OEB, a global conference on technology-supported learning,   “You must integrate technology appropriately to support the culture, yet not let technology cannibalize the culture. Culture plays a critical role in fostering these methods, and the learning organization has a unique role in helping to bring the culture alive. By delivering learning experiences that encourage people to interact with each other, to understand what the overall business objectives are, and to ensure that everyone understands the value of their contribution, the learning organization can encourage community and foster a deeper connection to company values.”

—-

Grow develops leaders and their teams to their fullest potential. Click the link below to find out more.


CONTACT US

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By: Edu Legaspi
Title: The Digital Shift: Changing How Leaders Think, Work and Learn
Sourced From: grow360.com/blog/the-digital-shift-changing-how-leaders-think-work-and-learn
Published Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 07:19:00 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://internetlib.org/?p=3667

Filed Under: Features, Summary

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