Business for you: avril 2016

vendredi 8 avril 2016

The Pros and Cons of the Top 5 Marketing Attribution Models

Attribution has been the foundation of marketing analytics since the dawn of marketing. Every marketing team worth their salt has some variation of an attribution model in place so they can optimize and prove the ROI of their campaigns. But the modern digital world has caused an evolution of the customer journey. The legacy attribution models marketers have in place are ill-suited for this new customer journey that has expanded in both length and number of interactions.

Single-touch attribution models still have their place, but marketers need to embrace multi-touch attribution to effectively report and optimize campaigns. Here are the pros and cons of the 5 most popular attribution models.

Model 1: First-Touch Attribution

The first-touch attribution model assigns 100% of the credit to the campaign that initiated the very first interaction somebody had with your business. This model ignores the campaign that ultimately drove the conversion as well as each interaction after the initial touch.

Pros: Marketers who are solely focused on demand generation and don’t rely on conversions may find the first interaction model useful. This model highlights the campaigns that first introduced a customer to your brand, regardless of the outcome.

Cons: Using a first-touch attribution model offers very limited optimization ability to marketers. Without the ability to determine what ultimately drove conversions and revenue, marketers will have a hard time justifying their impact on the company’s bottom line.

Model 2: Last-Touch Attribution

100% of the credit goes to the marketing interaction that drove the conversion in a last-touch model. Marketers using this model will gain insight on campaigns that have the highest conversion rate, but lose sight of any influences leading up to the conversion.

Pros: This model can be powerful for marketers who are solely focused on driving conversions. If non-converting actions hold no value at all for your business, a last-touch model can be effective attribution strategy.

Cons: The last-touch model completely ignores influencers on the path to conversion. A lead may interact with your company a dozen times before converting and a last-touch model provides zero visibility into what can be very influential interactions.

Model 3: Linear Attribution

Linear The linear attribution model is the first step towards multi-touch attribution. This model assigns credit evenly to every marketing touch throughout the customer journey. If there are 10 touches, each will receive 10% of the credit. When there are 5 campaigns, each will receive 20%.

Pros: This model offers an easy way to start analyzing your marketing campaigns with multi-touch attribution. By assigning even credit to each marketing interaction, you can start optimizing for the customer journey instead of a single activity.

Cons: Linear attribution moves you past a single-touch attribution model, but still has many limits. Because every touch receives equal credit, you lose the ability to optimize for specific outcomes. Linear attribution assigns the same amount of credit to low-value touches like email clicks as it does to high-value conversion activities like demo requests, making it difficult to optimize for the demo request conversion.

Model 4: Time Decay Attribution

The time decay model is another big step forward in multi-touch attribution analysis. Time decay assigns the most credit to the interaction that resulted in a conversion. Touches leading up to the conversion event receive less value the further back they are from the conversion.

Pros: Now we have the ability to truly optimize. This model recognizes the significance of every interaction leading up to a conversion while still placing the most value on the activity that actually drove the conversion. The touches closest to the conversion become more valuable as each increases the likelihood of a conversion. Marketers can use this model to optimize for touches that drive conversions as well as the touches which increase the likelihood of a conversion in the near future.

Cons: While providing excellent attribution for conversion optimization, this model lacks the ability to recognize the interaction which originally introduced the customer to your brand. The linear model may also result in a low amount of credit for highly influential touches (like a trade show visit) if it happened too early in the customer journey.

Model 5: Position Based Attribution

The position based attribution model combines the best features of the linear and time decay models. Position based will assign 40% of the credit to the first and last touch with the remaining 20% being divvied out evenly to every touch in between.

Pros: This model ensures that every touch point in the customer journey receives a portion of the credit while still allowing you to optimize for the first and last touches. This means you can assign significant credit to the campaign that introduced your brand to the customer as well as the campaign that eventually drove them to convert. Bonus points for adjusting the weighting in your position based model to reflect your business needs.

Cons: Blindly assigning so much credit to the first and last interactions can be dangerous. This could easily result in two very low-value touches being given too much credit. Think about this: does it make sense for a first touch email blast to get the same amount of credit as the paid search ad that resulted in a conversion?

Bonus: Custom Attribution Models

Custom While it may be easier to simply rely on the readily available pre-built attribution models, you can vastly improve your marketing attribution by building your own custom model. With a custom model, you can make adjustments to the weight for each position based interaction, assign more credit to higher value touches, and optimize for the outcomes which hold the most value for your business.

At the end of the day, marketers who rely on single-touch attribution models cannot effectively optimize their marketing mix or accurately attribute revenue to the right campaigns. With the ability to report on every marketing interaction, capture both online and offline conversions, and connect all of the dots, the result will be truly powerful multi-touch attribution analysis.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

The Pros and Cons of the Top 5 Marketing Attribution Models

Social Media Ads for B2B: Where to Start?

Social media advertising is a heavy hitter in the consumer marketing world. But why haven’t social media ads for B2B taken off? One of the big reasons is that a lot of people think that a B2B product or service doesn’t belong on Facebook or Twitter, so they stick to the traditional tactics that have worked in the past.

The thing is, B2B decision makers and influencers are still people who have and use social media. It may not be as easy to find them or to grab their attention when they’re not in “work” mode, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. B2B social media marketing is a nut that Stryve has been cracking for a while now, and we’re here to help you get started.

LinkedIn is the most obvious social platform for B2B marketing; it’s built for the working world. While the targeting may be better suited for B2B, keep in mind that LinkedIn knows this and will charge a lot more per click than other social media platforms. When trying to find your target market on LinkedIn, go through these exercises:

List the types of companies you want to sell to
(What industry are they in? Are they large or small businesses?)
List the different job titles of decision makers and influencers that you’ve sold to successfully in the past
Find Groups on LinkedIn that your target market would be a part of
(eg. I’m selling a marketing automation software, so let’s find a lot of marketing & technology groups)

The answers you’ll get out of these exercises will be the linchpin of your Sponsored Content targeting on LinkedIn.

Twitter

Twitter is probably the next social platform you’d want to use to try social media ads for B2B marketing; it’s a place to discuss news and share articles. A lot of business chatter happens on Twitter. The way that you can find your target market on Twitter is to start by asking yourself these questions:

What websites, news sources, or experts would our target market go to for industry updates?
What products/services that are complimentary to ours would our target market have?
In our industry, what companies or people have a large social media following?

Take the answers you’ve jotted down and start finding these companies, organizations, and people on Twitter. Keep their handles handy, because you’ll use them for targeting your Twitter ads.

Facebook

Facebook is probably one of the last places you’d think of for B2B marketing. Although finding your target market may be trickier on Facebook, it is the platform where you can get the cheapest clicks. To combat the difficulty in targeting, focus your effort on making ads that will really speak to your target market. This way, only people in your target market will click the ad (and you’re not spending money on getting the wrong people to click). Find the answers to these questions:

What industry terms would really get our target market’s attention?
What kind of visuals are really specific to our industry?
(eg. a specific type of tool, a CAD drawing, etc.)

At this point, you’ll have done a LOT of good marketing thinking. These questions and exercises will be an important start to making social media ads for B2B that really break through.

Author: Sarah Rosenquist

Blogger and Account Manager at Stryve Digital Marketing. Results-focused marketing in Kitchener, Canada.... View full profile ›

More by this author:

Follow Sarah Rosenquist:

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Social Media Ads for B2B: Where to Start?

The Price of Good Customer Service

Most businesses understand that customer experience is important to their trade if not the most fundamental principle of ‘good business’. A huge goal for many businesses in 2016 is improving customer experience. In fact, 91% of organizations said they aspire to be among the leaders of customer satisfaction in their industry (Oracle).

Customers make your business go round, without them you’ll never go anywhere.

This is why the voice of the customer must have a podium in order to be heard. The ability to listen to your customers is crucial to your ability to compete on service and adapt to demands.

Looking after your current customers is worth the effort as it is 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one (White House Office of Consumer Affairs). Not only this but the probability of selling to an existing customer is much higher the selling to a new prospect.

So what are you doing to stay top of the game.?

It’s reckoned that by 2020, 85% of customers will manage their relationship with businesses without interacting directly with a person (Oracle). However, it does seem that these customer facing technologies can let you down.

Customer feedback is perhaps the most valuable information when it comes to understanding your businesses successes and downfalls. You have to take the good with the bad.

You say you’ve tried before, sending out emails to reach customers, offering rewards in the post or email, tried to gain responses from customer surveys, – well have you tried mobile?

Very few of us can ignore the buzz of our phones, we simply must see what it is. It’s true that 97% of text messages are read (Juniper Research) which means your customers are more likely to respond to your marketing campaigns and offers by mobile than any other device, especially if it reads something a little like this…

And what did that text cost you?… somewhere between 2p and 4p! Just to gain the most valuable information that will help improve your business.

Start thinking mobile first, you won’t regret it.

Author: Jordana Makin

Jordana Makin is the Digital Marketing Assistant at Text Marketer and aims to raise awareness to the advantages SMS marketing can bring to both SME's and large commercial companies, internally and externally with various infographics, blog posts, ebooks and guides. At Text Marketer we simply promise to help you get the best possible results from SMS.... View full profile ›

More by this author:

Follow Jordana Makin:

Let's block ads! (Why?)

The Price of Good Customer Service

HTTP vs HTTPS? Actually, There’s a New Kid in Town

There’s a new kid in town, and that kid’s name is HTTP2. HTTP2 is an updated version of HTTP and is rapidly becoming an industry standard. The question is not really HTTP vs HTTPS, it’s HTTP1 vs HTTP2. And, like so much that is tech-related, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. In this case, the time is now to upgrade your site to the HTTP2.

HTTP2 is a Done Deal

When I asked Laurent Vergnaud, CEO, Themecloud.io, a web hosting company that has already adopted the latest standards, whether website owners and developers should be planning for HTTP2, he said “Yes, definitely. HTTP2 will become the new standard in 2016. Every modern browser is already supporting it and hosting companies are starting to also. The ones who are not ready will be left behind.”

Manish Champsee, Principal, Champsee Solutions, a web development company, adds “As a practical matter today, if you are accessing a site via HTTPS, it is likely going to be using HTTP version 2 as recent versions of web browsers and web server software all support it. Though if either the web browser is old or the web server software is old, you will be communicating using HTTP version 1.1.”

In a nutshell, your site could already be on HTTP2.

HTTP, HTTPS, and HTTP2 Defined

Without drilling into all the technical details, HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and it refers to how data (which is what IT people, developers, and other techs call the words, numbers, and images you see on your computer screen) is packaged and moved from your computer or website to a server, and to other websites. In HTTPS, the S stands for “secure.”

Websites are usually secured with Transport Layer Security (TLS), which means that the data you are transferring is encrypted, making it harder (but still definitely not impossible!) to read by hackers that may be snooping around looking for information like your credit card number (an important piece of data and a real hassle when it gets into the wrong hands).

You may have noticed that ecommerce and financial websites all use HTTPS. If you find one that doesn’t, you should not give them credit card and other sensitive information. How can you tell? In the website URL in the browser bar, you’ll see HTTPS in green, along with a lock.

As for HTTP2, like I said, it’s an updated version of HTTP1 that is designed to incorporate security measures like encryption, and deliver data much, much faster. The good news? HTTP2 comes with security baked in, so, if you go the HTTP2 route, you don’t have to worry about a second process to get your data encrypted. The bad news is that HTTP2 is not quite standard as of now.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and other HTTP2 Benefits

In a nutshell, Google has been favoring secured websites since at least 2014, and will most likely continue to go in that direction. With HTTP2, since encryption is included, you’ll get that SEO benefit.

Perhaps more importantly, HTTP2 is a much faster way to transfer data. Google has long been upfront about the fact that quick site loading times give your website a big boost according to the their algorithm.

In case it’s not obvious, site speed is also important for user experience, which affects the rest of your SEO. It makes sense that if your site loads faster, your bounce rate will be lower, your conversions (the amount of visitors who turn into customers or who at least give you their contact information) will be higher, and your revenue ultimately should increase. What’s not to love?

How Do I Get HTTP2?

In order to use HTTP2 now, you need to do the following:

Use a host that can give you dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) address, which means you are not sharing your data on a server (even with the new standards, many smaller hosts do not offer this option).
Purchase an TLS certificate.
Activate the TLS certificate.
Install the certificate.
Redirect HTTP links to HTTPS links.

Once your site is HTTPS-ready, you can use HTTP2 with a host that offers it.

To simplify things, check with your host to find out if they can do the above for you. If they can’t, you may want to consider moving to a host who can and does because life is too short to a) be behind on Google standards and digital marketing best practices and b) spend all day trying to figure out how to get an SSL certificate when you could be meeting with clients or sipping cocktails. If, however, you are feeling the DIY spirit, here’s how to get an SSL certificate and convert you site to HTTPS, in detail.

Be an Early Adopter

Fortunately, as HTTP2 becomes more standard, the average consumer will not have to worry about this at all. Unfortunately, businesses who already own websites and don’t know about these updates will be left behind. Being an early adopter of HTTP2, especially if you have an ecommerce site, allows you to provide the best possible user experience for your clients and website visitors while getting good with Google.

I call that a win.

Author: Anna Colibri

I help people and businesses shine online through brand strategy, SEO, copywriting, and all the best practices and new technologies the world wide web offers. In addition to managing projects, I help Do-It-Yourselfers with 1:1 and group trainings. I love writing, San Francisco, France, yoga, meditation, walking for transportation, and... View full profile ›

More by this author:

Follow Anna Colibri:

Let's block ads! (Why?)

HTTP vs HTTPS? Actually, There’s a New Kid in Town

Is Your Web Design Failing Your Video?

Truth: Online Video Keeps People on your Website (…when embedded correctly)

If you’re on top of your game when it comes to your online presence then you know the importance of having a beautifully designed website. Customer expectations continue to change with their online experiences, and without a great looking website, you’re giving off a message of being out of date and out of touch. But if you’ve spent the time getting a great looking website but haven’t got video, you’re giving visitors more time to check out other options.

Because the figures are in. It’s official. Websites with video keep visitors on their sites longer. And the result? They don’t go surfing off to visit competitors sites.

In 2016, video needs to be an integral part of any website design process. Without it, you’re just not providing the type of content that visitors want. They want to see you and hear from you. They want to be engaged and inspired by video. They don’t just want lots of text to read.

But a Beautiful Website Needs a Strong Video Presence

But there is a catch. Just like you invested in a beautiful website, you need to invest in video that is on brand, on message, and at a quality that represents the brand, and then ensure that the video is embedded properly into your site design. Too often I see investment in a good video wasted by not integrating that video seamlessly into the website. You need to showcase that video in a way that encourages your visitors to actually watch it.

So – here’s a couple of quick tips to get you started to ensure your videos are going to be an asset to your web design.

Put Your Video in the Right Place on your Website
Your video needs to be embedded ‘above the fold’. ‘Above the fold’ refers to the area of your website which is visible when the page first loads. You don’t want people having to scroll down to see it. And keep this area clean and tidy. You don’t want people wondering what to do next, you want them engaged and watching your video.
Encourage Visitors to Watch your Website Video
To get people watching, be sure your video has an engaging and obviously ‘clickable’ thumbnail. There’s no point investing in a video if you’re not encouraging people to watch it. Create a great looking thumbnail that is aligned with the videos content and preferably has a real human face in there. People want to engage with people you know!
Video Player Beauty Matters Too
If you’ve spent to make your website look beautiful, then make sure you style that embedded video player so it sits beautifully with the rest of your web design. Your designer should know a few cool tricks for this, but the simplest option really is just making use of the YouTube custom embed parameters to clean up the video player and get rid of most of the standard YouTube buttons, controls and functions.

That’s it. Provided you have a great, engaging piece of video content…

Embed it above the fold (no scrolling to see that baby!)
Use a custom thumbnail (so people just have to play it.)
Ensure a clean embedded video player (because style really does matter)

Do these three things and you’re bound to keep visitors on your website (and therefore in your sales funnel), rather than have them shooting off to visit others.

Note: This article was originally published at vlogpod.com.au

Author: Ben Amos

I'm Ben Amos. I'm an online video strategist, digital marketer, video producer, keynote speaker, entrepreneur, (Dad and husband) and founder of Innovate Media, a video production and online video strategy agency based in Australia. I've also founded Australia’s only purpose built video blogging studio space, and facility – Vlog Pod®. Through my ... View full profile ›

Follow Ben Amos:

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Is Your Web Design Failing Your Video?

20 Ways to Build an Email Marketing List

Author: Dan Forootan

Dan Forootan is president and CEO of StreamSend, an award winning digital marketing platform offering results-driven email and social media marketing, automated content curation and management, and behavioral automation. A recognized leader in the digital marketing community, Mr. Forootan frequently speaks and moderates panels at leading industry events and has... View full profile ›

Let's block ads! (Why?)

20 Ways to Build an Email Marketing List

6 Ways to Overcome Sales Productivity Pitfalls

We all have too much to do and too little time. Sales reps in particular have a full plate, from cold calling and following up with prospects to setting and preparing for meetings. It’s easy to get distracted, off-task, or even overwhelmed, and the end result is that sales productivity suffers. Unfortunately, the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of the sales force has a direct and significant impact on revenue.

What is Sales Productivity?

Sales productivity means maximizing sales results while minimizing the resources expended, such as cost, effort, and time. According to the 20/60/20 rule, only about 20% of your sales team are top performers who often meet or exceed quota, leaving a majority of your sales team with room for improvement. Therefore, optimizing sales productivity should be one of the most important aspects for a business to focus on.

Sales Productivity: By the Numbers

Studies show that industry-wide sales productivity is continually on the decline. While many organizations are growing their sales teams and increasing revenue goals, they aren’t scaling their processes, best practices, and sales productivity tools appropriately.

Let’s take a look at some of the data:

Sales productivity is the #1 challenge for almost 2/3 of B2B organizations (The Bridge Group)
The average sales rep spends only 15% of their time engaging with prospects or customers (Alexander Group)
2/3 of sales reps fail to reach their annual sales quota goal (Aberdeen)
Since 2007, sales quotas have risen 33%, but the percentage of reps hitting quota has fallen by 25% (TimeTrade)
The average sales rep spends over 50 full days away from core selling activities each year (Domo)

Productivity Pitfalls

Every sales rep and sales manager is sure to encounter one or more of these challenges, and in today’s competitive and fast-paced sales environment there is no room for mistakes.

Internal pressure to perform and expectations to overachieve
Misalignment and lack of communication between the sales and marketing departments
One-and-done sales training
Lengthier sales cycles
Hesitation to adopt new technologies, processes, or best practices
Relentless distractions (i.e. smartphone alerts, emails, meetings)

Sales Productivity Solutions

Fortunately, there are several steps that sales leaders and sales reps can take to overcome these pitfalls and turn their productivity slumps into productivity peaks.

1. Provide the right content at the right time

Sales reps spend about 1/3 of their day looking for or creating content – one of the biggest consumers of a rep’s time. Yet 70% of content never gets used by sales because they are unable to find content that is relevant and at a time when they need it. To make content productive, the sales team must know what collateral to use and when to use it. A sales enablement tool can recommend and surface best practice content based on the sales situation, saving the sales rep the time they would have spent looking for and / or creating content.

2. Get social

The power of social selling can help sales teams relate to and engage more intelligently with buyers throughout the sales process, from networking and prospecting to customer service. With prospect insights such as demographics, company and industry news, and where buyers encounter pain points, sales reps can quickly and effectively drive an engaging and meaningful conversation. An Aberdeen study even shows that social-savvy sales reps are 79% more likely to attain quota.

3. Enable sales reps with the proper tools and technologies

High-performing sales teams have access to and leverage the best sales tools on the market to work smarter and more efficiently. Sales enablement technologies, for example, aim to align marketing processes and goals and then arm sales teams with the tools and content to improve sales execution and drive revenue. Sales enablement, by nature, empowers and enables sales reps to work more efficiently.

4. Don’t hesitate to automate

Less than 1/3 of a sale person’s time goes to core selling. For example, the average rep needs to update over 300 CRM records per week. Automating these unproductive or repetitive tasks will save steps and time so that reps can get back to core selling activities.

5. Make metrics matter

Many organizations are not consistently improving their sales productivity because they do not regularly track productivity gains and results. In fact, a CIO Insights report shows that 40% of organizations indicate that scattered information and limited visibility into data impair their sales organizations. Determine which metrics are most important (such as call rate, sales cycle length, pipeline conversion rates, and average number of touches until conversion), and use dashboards to visualize trends and gain valuable insights into sales rep activity. Then take a step back and use this data to determine what makes top performers so successful, as well as what is inhibiting under-performers. This is not to say that you should be cloning top reps and ignoring the strengths and weaknesses of individuals. It’s about identifying and leveraging the habits and methods used by the A team and adopting those best practices across the sales team. This strategy is effectively utilized by 89% of the world’s largest and most successful sales organizations, according to Miller Heiman.

6. Work smarter

A recent study conducted by Wrike, found that working on too many things at the same time is a problem for 60% of sales reps, and unclear priorities is a problem for over half of reps. When you are nearing the end of the month or end of the quarter, identify the most critical tasks you must achieve and then prioritize accordingly. Focus on quality over quantity for best results. For example, instead of prioritizing prospecting, reconnect with past customers and lost opportunities – those people who have already journeyed through a majority of your sales funnel.

Kick your sales productivity into high gear. Download this e-book to learn the secrets of the world’s most productive salespeople.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

6 Ways to Overcome Sales Productivity Pitfalls

Scantily Clad Women, Politics, Religion & Motivation

I know that since LinkedIn started allowing pictures, things got a bit well, Facebooky. That was bound to happen but pictures are important and for anyone in the a visual profession they are absolutely necessary. Of course, we now can see many motivational “photos” each and every day which does get a bit annoying. Motivational and inspirational quotes are great now and then but I really don’t need to see a multitude of them every time I log on to LinkedIn. It’s a bit of motivational overkill.

Then we have the political posts that are showing up on LinkedIn. Granted we have a very important (as if they all weren’t) Presidential election coming up but do we need to be bombarded with political propaganda everywhere we turn? I tell all my clients to stay completely out of the fray of this campaign because I don’t see any of it as a win-win for business development. Let’s please stop pontificating on LinkedIn about our political views.

Religion and religious pictures are also not what LinkedIn is about. Since LinkedIn is a business to business platform, it should fall under the same adage of not discussing religion and as we already mentioned, politics. I don’t need to know or really care what your religious beliefs are in order to do business with you.

Last but certainly not least, I do not understand the proliferation of scantily clad women showing up on LinkedIn all the time. People are posting these and then others are Sharing them. Seriously folks? While these women and these photographs are often stunning, what have they got to do with growing our business by building quality relationships on LinkedIn?

Let’s use LinkedIn for what it’s for, the ability to reach local, regional, national and global professionals to build relationships, educate and inform, learn and grow and as a result build our client base for our products and services.

Author: Debbie Harris

Social media has infiltrated all aspects of our lives and organizations have no choice but to use it. Understanding it and using it effectively is our goal. Working with management and staff, we create an environment where everyone understands how to help the organization, separate business from personal and utilize... View full profile ›

More by this author:

Follow Debbie Harris:

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Scantily Clad Women, Politics, Religion & Motivation

Donald Trump Holds Strong Lead in New York, Hillary Clinton – Bernie Sanders Race Tightens

Donald Trump

Despite critical losses in the recent Wisconsin primary, businessman Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continue to hold double-digit leads in New York, according to the most recent polling data available from RealClearPolitics.

The site of the next major primary for both parties, New York is a delegate-rich hunting ground for the remaining five presidential hopefuls. Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are fighting for the 291 available Democratic delegates, while Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich jockey for the 95 available Republican delegates.

Unlike a handful of recent contests, the April 19 New York primary is not winner-take-all, meaning that a second- or third-place finish could allow a candidate to pick up some delegates. That’s good news for Cruz and Kasich, who are down in the polls but could still add to their overall delegate tally with a strong showing in the Empire State.

As the InsideGov visualization shows, Trump polls at a strong 53 percent as of April 6. Kasich holds a slight lead over Cruz, 22 percent to 18.6 percent.

Trump, a New York native who lives in Manhattan in his eponymous high-rise apartment building, hosted a large and boisterous rally on Long Island on Wednesday. News outlets reported more than 15,000 people attended the event, and protesters outside were met with police outfitted in riot gear.

Kasich, who has kept his slight lead over Cruz for about two weeks, recently made a more low-key stop in the Bronx, where several hundred people gathered as Kasich got lunch at an Italian deli. At the beginning of the week, Kasich did two town halls on Long Island, where he shot back at Trump, who has been calling on Kasich to drop out of the race. Last weekend, Trump told reporters: “All [Kasich is] doing is just, he goes from place to place, and loses, and he keeps running. … Now if he wants to go and have his name put in nomination in the convention, he can do that. He doesn’t have to run and take my votes. Because he’s taking my votes. He’s not taking Cruz’s votes. He’s taking my votes.”

But it was Cruz who got an up-close dose of feedback from New York protesters. Cruz made waves in January when he dissed Trump with a comment about “New York values.” Protesters singled out that phrase, as well as Cruz’s stringent immigration stance, during the Texan’s visit to Sabrosura, a Latino-Chinese restaurant in the Bronx.

After his decisive win in Wisconsin earlier this week, Cruz called it a “turning point” in the GOP nomination contest. However, Cruz is still far away from the finish line — he has 517 pledged delegates, of the 1,237 needed to win the nomination.

Despite being significantly short of the goal, Cruz (and Kasich, for that matter) continue to fight for every last delegate. The aim is, of course, to bolster their own delegate count, but it’s also to splinter as many delegates as possible away from Trump’s tally. In that respect, the Republican race has turned into a creativity contest on how to keep Trump from the finish line.

Cruz, for his part, is fighting tooth-and-nail for a handful of delegates in Louisiana, which held its primary March 5, and in Colorado, which this weekend hosts a state convention rather than a primary or caucus. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race on March 15, reportedly is lobbying the delegates he won to stick with him until the Republican convention in July. If Rubio keeps his delegates, that could put up a roadblock in Trump’s path to the nomination.

Indeed, after Cruz won in Wisconsin, odds increased for a contested convention, where delegates vote onsite for their preferred candidate. Winning in that scenario requires a highly coordinated and connected effort, often in concert with party operatives. That’s not a strength of the Trump campaign, which is disliked strongly by many establishment Republicans.

Although the Republican race has been more contentious and headline-grabbing than the Democratic contest so far, things took a sharp turn in recent weeks between Clinton and Sanders.

Clinton has been more open in her expressions of frustration lately. Sanders told a crowd at Temple University in Philadelphia this week that he doesn’t think Clinton is “qualified” to be president. And Sanders’ campaign manager swiped at Clinton’s ambition as divisive for the Democratic Party during a CNN interview. “Don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions to become president of the United States,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager. “We want to have a party at the end of this that we can unify.”

With a tightening race in New York, look for the heated back-and-forth to continue. As has often been the case this cycle, Clinton held a massive lead in the state for weeks until Sanders chipped away at it. On March 30, Clinton held a 34.5-point lead. Within five days, Sanders cut it to an 11-point lead, according to polling averages.

Momentum, fundraising, enthusiastic crowds — it’s all in Sanders’ favor in the run-up to the New York primary. Sanders has won six of the last Democratic contests, and out-fundraised Clinton for the third month in a row, according to news reports. But, much like the scenario that’s playing out on the Republican side, delegate math is complicating Sanders’ path to the nomination.

Clinton’s early-on and decisive wins — in Texas on Super Tuesday and her five-state sweep on Super Tuesday II, for example — gave her a critical boost of delegates. She has 1,280 delegates to Sanders’ 1,030.

But that margin increases when accounting for superdelegates, which considerably pad Clinton’s lead. Of the 2,383 delegates needed to win the party’s nomination, Clinton has 1,749 total delegates and Sanders has 1,061.

After the New York vote on April 19, another batch of primaries take place in the Northeast on April 26. For Republicans, 172 delegates will be up for grabs that day, while 462 delegates will be in play for Democrats.

Research More About the 2016 Election

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Donald Trump Holds Strong Lead in New York, Hillary Clinton – Bernie Sanders Race Tightens

What’s Missing From Your Multichannel Marketing Strategy?

We’ve come a long way from the belief that the same brand messaging should be present on every channel, but today’s marketers must consider ways to seamlessly and cohesively reach customers wherever they are. In our tech-crazed world, it’s easy to confuse multichannel marketing with multi-platform marketing that fills email inboxes, appears on social media feeds and entangles customers into your brand as they trek through the worldwide web. Although email campaigns, social media outreach and advertisements contribute to the modern customer journey, many customers opt to teach themselves about your brand before forging a relationship.

Wouldn’t it be nice to organically arrive in customer conversations? What if your target audience could access your brand using a recommendation from a trusted member of their network? That’s where word-of-mouth marketing comes in and here are three benefits that word-of-mouth will add to your multichannel marketing strategy.

Customer-Centricity

Multichannel marketing boils down to creating multiple avenues for your customers to access your content. By developing uniquely optimized campaigns across networks, brands become more engaged with customer behaviors. Instead of building a multichannel marketing strategy that tries to predict where your customers will be, word-of-mouth marketing empowers customers to further their natural inclination to share new information. A standard multichannel strategy will follow customers wherever they go, but with a focus on word-of-mouth marketing, your messaging can land in the hands of trustworthy and influential customers.

Insightful Data

Thanks to referral marketing automation, word-of-mouth recommendations have advanced to provide the same kind of information as other digital outreach. With an automated word-of-mouth strategy, your multichannel marketing strategy can incentivize customers, fans, and influencers to refer your brand. Your customers can continue along the path of searching across channels and industries, but shareable, trackable links will transform this behavior into useful insight across the multichannel networks that matter most to your brand.

A Complete Journey

The ads and outreach associated with multichannel marketing are often confined to grabbing a prospect’s interest, but what are successful brands doing to nurture a more sustained relationship? How can companies keep the heart of customers beyond the point of purchase? Word-of-mouth marketing allows brands to follow the buzz that their product or service is creating beyond the point of purchase. To stay ahead of the game, offer your customers various paths to reach your product and an easy-to-understand way to talk about it. What could be more multichannel than that?

Multichannel Marketing Strategy

For companies that are tired of chasing customers (and conversations) from platform to platform, word-of-mouth marketing may be the missing piece to your multichannel marketing strategy. As you work to find innovative solutions, don’t forget about the organic pathway that word-of-mouth marketing provides. Your customers are already talking and now it’s time to join the conversation.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

What’s Missing From Your Multichannel Marketing Strategy?

5 Marketing Management Pitfalls

marketing management process pitfall Most marketing managers would prefer to spend 100% of their time on marketing and 0% of their time on management. Unfortunately, the more senior the marketing manager, the more this balance must shift toward management over marketing. Marketing management means more than just telling people what to do and when it needs to be done. Marketing management means deploying a marketing organization and supporting marketing management process that enable marketing teams to thrive, because they provide the right balance of innovation and production to meet the overarching goals of the marketing department. Improper care of the marketing management process as a business grows leads to some all too common marketing management pitfalls.

This is the fourth post in a Markodojo marketing management blog series on marketing process management. The first three posts in the series focused on the importance of marketing leverage in driving sustainable revenue growth and the organizational options for scaling marketing teams as a business grows. This fourth post highlights five common marketing management process pitfalls that you should avoid at all costs.

Managing by Walking Around

marketing management process walking around

“I manage by hiring the best marketing managers and getting out of their way.” While a seemingly grand sentiment, this quote implies an abdication of marketing management leadership. The flip side is that if you lose one of these great managers, then that area of your marketing department comes to a screeching halt. If you manage by walking around and then simply hire great marketing managers who also manage by walking around, then your marketing organization will not adapt and will not scale. Hiring the best is always a good idea, but it is the senior marketing manager’s responsibility to provide an environment in which the best can thrive, including a robust marketing management process where performance is not dependent on a specific marketing resource.

Thinking One Process Fits All

marketing management process one size

You can’t growth hack a trade show. As your marketing organization scales, it’s essential to deploy marketing management processes that fit the strategic needs of your business, which can vary dramatically by market, product, geography, etc. Globally applying a single marketing management process methodology, such as agile marketing, optimizes some areas at the expense of others. Similarly, over-reliance on simplistic tools, such as spreadsheets, constrains marketing performance because they don’t enable creativity, efficiency, automation or adaptability in your marketing management process.

No One Knows What Marketing Is Doing

marketing management process black box

Marketing managers usually think a lot about customer communications and very little about marketing management communications. Effective communication is the oil that keeps your marketing machine running, whether it is creating budget buy-in with upper management or motivating sales reps in the field. If no one knows what marketing is doing, then even successful marketing programs can fail to meet management expectations. Each audience that contributes to marketing success: marketing teams, agency partners, sales reps and mangers, engineering teams, executives, etc. should get the right marketing management communication to meet its needs.

Losing Touch with Customers

marketing management process losing touch

In theory, marketing provides leadership grounded in superior understanding of customers. In reality, marketing is a corporate function that can easily lose touch with customers as it scales. Moreover, the increased focus on marketing analytics brought about by online marketing makes it easy to forget that customers are real people. When it comes to understanding customer needs and motivations, clickstreams just don’t cut it. Your marketing management processes should encourage personal customer relationships and funnel customer feedback directly into marketing programs to enable continuous improvement.

Always Reinventing the Wheel

marketing management process reinvent wheel

Without a clear marketing management process and dedicated marketing management systems, marketing has no organizational memory. Knowledge evaporates on flash drives and important marketing relationships lie hidden away in email boxes. Without history, it is impossible to establish benchmarks. Without benchmarks, it is impossible to improve. Staff turnover compounds this lack of marketing memory. Onboarding is slow. Mistakes are repeated. Rework becomes the rule. And, critical marketing relationships with customers, vendors, and industry influencers erode. Without marketing memory, marketing is always reinventing the wheel.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

5 Marketing Management Pitfalls

20 Top Content Marketing Ideas for Brands

Why Content Marketing Is So Important

Creating content is extremely important for online brand marketing because done correctly it presents a valuable opportunity to content with your audiences. Brands that use content marketing effectively use it to help build trust in their brand and generate extra website traffic from organic search results.

Good content marketing can also help businesses generate leads and potentially take prospective clients further down the purchase funnel.

Key Differences Between B2B & B2C Content Marketing

Different types of businesses will have different approaches to content marketing. B2B brands for example are typically harder to produce content for, compared to B2C. This is because they have different audiences, objectives, purchase values, decision makers and time frames.

Content marketing for a consumer brands makes great use of social media profiles to distribute content, within a short content cycle. B2B content in comparison takes a longer time to research, produce and distribute. B2B content marketing also concerns itself with creating link worthy content to gain reputable links from trusted sources. To positively improve online visibility in organic search engine results and by means of referral traffic.

Consumer brands have a much faster turnaround of content and typically need a stack of ideas that are easier to produce more cheaply. B2B content marketing however, targets decision makers for businesses, not decision makers who are acting as consumers. B2B content marketing therefore requires a more thorough detailed approach, to add more value and gain higher levels of trust from the audience and their superiors.

Another reason why B2B content marketing requires a robust approach is because the prospective client/key influencer receiving the content would typically need to involve another decision maker. Likely a technical departmental figure, HR or Purchasing. So B2B content has to also work on multiple department levels, otherwise the content may leave a company exposed to another department not being interested, aware or even willing to sign off.

Planning Your Content Marketing

In order to produce great content that resonates with your target audience, you will need to plan around your specific audiences personas, their cultural references, preferred social platforms and their time zones.

It is best practise to create a content calendar so you can plan ahead of major events in the year and create a rhythm of content suitable for your audiences. Regular content generally achieves greater results. It is thought that at least 4 articles a week is required to be acknowledged as a news provider and gain additional SEO benefit from major search engines.

Content Creation Tools

There are a bunch of brilliant online tools that can help you create brand content more easily. These are some of the more well know sources of creativity and inspiration for content marketing ideas and production: Canva, Piktochart, Giphy, Infogram, Contently, Adobe Post, Adobe Premiere Clip, and ContentForest Ideator, Visualy, Easelly, Hubspot Idea Generator

Content Formats

Content marketing requires that you consider the different formats that your content could be produced in e.g Video, Whitepaper, Podcast, etc.. If you are not sure which content formats are best for your brand, this is a useful info-graphic – content formats for brand marketing . This shows the best content formats based on your type of business/ brand, budget, objectives and resources.

Taking all of this into account, you are ready to get to work creating your own content calendar for your brand marketing using our 20 top ideas.

20 Top Content Marketing Ideas For Brand Marketing

A comprehensive list of industry statistics/research
A Top 10/20 post on a relevant topic
Respond to a controversial article or video
Predict trends in your niche or industry
Create a decision guide (text, image, tool)
Ask your readers/audience to submit their content relating to the brand
Update existing successful posts
Interview leaders in your field
Poll or survey your audience
Create content based on trending topics
Create an ultimate resource or guide
Write a content curation post
Write a comparison post
Take surveys and publish results
Top 10 resource lists (blogs, hacks, tools)
Create a ‘hack’ post: A list of workarounds for a common problem or issue
Create a beginner’s guide with helpful, actionable information and tips
Write a post inspired by a blog comment
Review a recent book/movie that would be relevant to your audience
A list of inspirational or motivational quotes
List of useful articles/resources on a topic
Write a behind-the-scenes post at an event

Collaborate & Get Approval

Creating content for brand marketing is a collaborative process and it is important to involve the right people from different departments and agencies. Be sure to get input from technical, creative, legal, sales, marketing, publishers or any other departments you may need to involve. That way you can avoid any blockages in production or distribution and you never know, they might have some great ideas too.

Author: John Kennedy

John Kennedy is a Chartered Marketeer driven by communications and technology. Having worked for leading brand marketing agencies in the UK and the US, he is now the Digital Marketing Director of Brands on Digital.... View full profile ›

Follow John Kennedy:

Let's block ads! (Why?)

20 Top Content Marketing Ideas for Brands

4 Reasons You Need a Content Marketing Agency

Every business, no matter what it produces or sells, needs content. Your business needs content. In an economy that relies so heavily on the Internet, websites and social media, your content is what draws in new customers and what keeps them. Consumers are savvy these days, too savvy to be fooled by low-quality content, spam disguised as a press release, or a keyword-stuffed article. They are looking for good, quality content with useful information.

If you think you can create your own content, and do it well, while also creating and integrating a sound content marketing strategy, you might be right. On the other hand, there are many reasons why you should consider letting the experts handle it. Here are a few reasons why hiring a content marketing agency just makes sense.

Experience is everything in content creation.

Are you an expert in writing, in creating a content calendar, or in creating content with marketing and social media campaigns in mind? Maybe you are, but if not, you will be several steps behind your competition if you try to tackle your own content. By hiring a content marketing agency, you get the expertise of content creators and content marketers who focus solely on these skills. In short, you get the best.

Take great content and brand it.

By partnering with a content marketing agency, you get the best content, but you also get to put your spin on it. Your company gets to present the content to the world as if it were your own. You can focus on branding your name and your product and service without needing to worry about the hassle of creating the content to attach to your brand.

Focus on what you do best.

If you don’t need to worry about creating content, what will you do with your time? Focus on what your business actually does. Instead of stretching your time and other resources beyond your capabilities, focus them on your core offering. Focus on making the software you sell better, on researching SEO terms, or on the financial services you offer. Whatever it is you do, do it better instead of spending resources on content.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

When it comes to creating content and content marketing strategies, someone else has been there before you. Someone else knows how to do it better and has already made the mistakes and learned from them. Instead of wasting time reinventing this particular wheel, let someone else take over for you and give you great content.

Companies have been working with content marketing agencies for years. As the market changes, though, the way you can use content marketing and writing services is changing. Content has become more important than ever, and if you aren’t making the most of yours, you could be falling behind your competitors. With a content marketing agency, you can keep stride with or even surpass those competitors.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

4 Reasons You Need a Content Marketing Agency

How to Find the Perfect Explainer Video Company for you

How-to-find-the-perfect-explainer-video-company-for-you-459ee8

Creating an explainer video is not a light investment, so it’s important to find the perfect company…

An explainer video is the perfect weapon to add to your online marketing arsenal. According to 76% of businesses interviewed in a recent survey, video provides a good ROI.

And consumers like videos too!

A staggering 98% of users say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service. So, as you can see, it pays to have an explainer video.

Creating an explainer video can be an exciting process, or a terrible one — it all depends on the company you work with.

A video is not exactly a light investment. A typical explainer costs thousands of £££ and it can take weeks, or even months, to get it perfect. So it’s important to find the perfect explainer video company to work with.

In this article, we’re going to run through three of the most important factors to consider when looking for an explainer video company.

Alternatively, if you want to create your own explainer video (DIY style!), check out this article: What is the best animation software?

1. Cost

Cost is often the most important factor in every decision we make, whether at work or in our home lives. If something is too expensive for our budget, we simply can’t afford to purchase it.

Some marketers tend to feel this way about video, with 15% saying they don’t use video because it’s too expensive. But the great thing about video is that the price is highly variable. You can make an explainer video for as little as £1,000 to as much as £25,000 — depending on the style of video you’re after, and the company you work with.

If you’re happy creating a video from stock images, then you may be able to make it for as little as a few hundred pounds. However, it probably won’t give you a return on investment because it’s unlikely it will be engaging enough to attract viewers.

On the other hand, if you have a huge budget with thousands to spend then maybe you want to get in touch with a renowned director and a few of your favourite actors. A video like this will surely be engaging, and may even reach viral success. But again, it may not give you the ROI you’re looking for. An all-star cast is definitely capable of attracting a lot of people, but maybe not the right people for your brand.

2. Style

Whether you are an established brand or a startup, it’s important that you have a unique style that helps you stand out among competitors. Seeing as your explainer video will be sitting on the homepage of your website, your unique style needs to be transferred to your video.

Just like your brand has a unique style, so do explainer video companies. Some are energetic, colourful, and fun; others are more corporate and straight-talking. To find the perfect one for you, you need to find a company on your wavelength, and one that can emulate your style into an awesome explainer video.

There are many different styles of explainer video, but the main three are as follows:

Animation
Live Action
Screen Recorded

These three styles all have pros and cons. I guess it all just depends what you are looking for as a brand. Let’s take a look at these styles in more detail:

Animation

Animated videos are fun, engaging, and enable you to tell a story. Animation is often a popular choice for companies making an explainer video because there are no limits to what you can show on screen.

Want to show a guy jumping from a plane and landing on a unicycle?

With animation you can!

Take a look at this video example to see what’s achievable with animation:

We’re a little biased towards animation at Wyzowl, after all, it’s what we do!

However, there are some cons to animation. With animation, the video becomes more about the story and less about the specifics of your product, service, or brand. This is great for engagement, but not exactly ideal if you want to drill down and show customers exactly what they’re getting.

Live Action

Like animation, live action videos are great for storytelling. Here’s a hilarious example that I’m sure you’ve seen before:

[embedded content]

Live action videos can help prospects relate to the specific problem that your company provides a solution for. The main problem with live action videos is that they are generally a lot more expensive than the other two video styles in this article. It’s also important to note that, once you choose an actor for your video, they may become the face of your brand whether you want them to or not.

Screen Recorded

Screen recorded videos are perfect for showcasing the features of an app or website. They allow users to take a detailed walkthrough of the product or service before committing to purchasing.

A positive thing about screen recorded videos is that they are usually much more inexpensive than the two styles above. A negative is that they don’t look as good. With a screen recorded video, you are literally just showing your product — nothing else. No funny characters, no eye-catching animation, just your product. But this can be a positive thing, particularly if users have been struggling to understand what your website or app does and why they need it.

3. Reputation

There is a saying that goes: “Build your reputation by helping other people build theirs.”

This quote sums up exactly what a perfect explainer video company should do for you. But how do you separate the good from the bad?

With more and more information being available online, it’s easy to thoroughly research a company before contacting them. You can visit review sites, watch video testimonials, and see what people think on social media.

If you take the time to find an explainer video company with a good reputation, then it is more likely that you are going to end up with a video you are happy with.

Usually, all you have to do is type a company name into Google to find reviews:

wyzowl-Google-search

Be sure to read reviews in detail to give you a better idea of what you would be getting if you chose to do business with this explainer video company:

Wyzowl-Google-Reviews

Video testimonials can also give you a more in-depth view of how the company works, and the specific trials and/or benefits that others found from working with them:

wyzowl-video-testimonial

However, video testimonials are usually always very positive — companies wouldn’t put them on their site otherwise!

If you want to dig up some dirt on a company then social media is the place to go. When customers aren’t happy, they take to social media. In fact, over 1 million people view tweets about customer service every week, and roughly 80% of those tweets are negative or critical in nature.

So, if you want to find out if the explainer video company you’re thinking of working with really is perfect, then go to their social sites and find posts from users.

On Twitter, posts to a company from users can be seen under the tweets and replies section. Or you can search for the company name in the top right-hand corner and see what comes up. On Facebook business pages there is a section down the left-hand side that allows users to post, so it’s always a good idea to look here for any complaints. If you can’t find any, then great! The explainer video company you’ve chosen really must be perfect!

Closing Thoughts

Finding the perfect explainer video company is important to ensure that you end up with the perfect explainer video! For more information on explainer videos, contact Wyzowl today!

Let's block ads! (Why?)

How to Find the Perfect Explainer Video Company for you

7 Simple Steps for a Solid SEO Strategy

Your company is redoing its website and you’re in charge of the content. Pretty exciting, right? Then your boss tells you you’re responsible for search engine optimization (SEO), too. Suddenly, the project doesn’t seem quite so exciting anymore. You’re not a SEO guru. You don’t have years of experience with SEO. The panic sets in.

Hold on! Believe it or not, whether you’re taking over, improving, or just starting your SEO strategy, the basics of SEO aren’t that hard. In fact, they’re mostly just common sense. I’m not trying to take anything away from the rock stars who have made a career around SEO expertise. We need those folks. Their expertise is incredibly valuable because there is a lot of science to SEO, and it is constantly changing as search engines like Google continue to update their algorithms.

What I’m saying is that you don’t have to have a master’s degree in SEO to ensure your website is well positioned for organic search engine traffic. Check out these seven simple ways to build a strong SEO strategy:

1. Know Your Keywords

First things first. You can’t do much without knowing what keywords your target market is using to find solutions to their problems that your company solves. This requires a little research. Step inside the shoes of the potential customer of your product or service. How would you find solutions to your problem? What would you search for in your search engine? For example, if you sell organic dog food, your potential customer is probably concerned about her dog’s health. Maybe her dog has food allergies and she’s concerned about the chemicals and byproduct in most dog foods. Start searching. What sites pop up? Look at the words used in those snippets.

SEO Example

In my “dog has food allergies” query above, words like “sensitivities,” “natural,” and “balanced” show up. Don’t forget to think about related words, like synonyms (thesaurus.com can be your best friend) and groups of words. Back to our dog with food allergies search. You could consider key word phrases such as “food sensitivities,” “all natural diet,” “complete balanced nourishment,” and “only natural ingredients.”

2. Write High Quality Content (Naturally)

The key here is to use your marketing spidey sense and create engaging content that is valuable to your target market. Valuable content includes content that answers the questions that your buyers have, provides them with insights they can use, and educates them so they can be better at what they do. Within the great content you’re creating, remember to use appropriate keywords naturally. Don’t try to stuff your pages (i.e. adding keyword terms over and over again in your content, in your meta tags, in your Alt descriptions, etc) in an attempt inflate your site’s ranking. It won’t help your search ranking (in fact, it could hurt it). If search engines catch you (and they will because their bots are super smart!), they can penalize your site by lowering your ranking or completely removing your site from their index. Plus, it won’t impress your website visitors. Who wants to read the same words over and over: “Are you looking for organic dog food? If you’re looking for organic dog food, look no further. Our organic dog food website is the best place to order your organic dog food.” Keep it real—you’re writing for a person.

3. Use Keywords in Your Website Page URLs

Be sure you don’t overlook your page URLs because they’re important for your SEO. This is where your keyword research comes in handy. For example, if a page talks about your solar financing product, then the URL for that page should be products/solar-financing. Focus on the most common and most searched appropriate keywords. If you are trying to decide between “solar financing” and “solar leasing,” choose the one with the highest search ranking.

There are a couple quick and easy (and free) ways to check search ranking. One is to use Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Simply enter your keywords to get an idea of how popular they have been historically in terms of search volume. You can also use Google Trends, which is a truly fun site to explore. Compare different keywords to see a quick graphical comparison of interest over time.

Google Trends

4. Don’t Overlook Page Titles

It’s critical to create engaging and interesting titles for your web pages. Be sure they grab your target market. If they don’t, people are not going read all the great content below. I find that answering “What’s in it for me?” for my visitors helps me focus on what to highlight. Ask yourself: What’s the benefit they will get from the content on this page and why should they care? Once you have that nailed, shorten your title, use strong words, and make it sexy (try a little alliteration for fun). As you’re creating these attention-grabbing headlines, ensure your keyword is in the headline (the H1) and/or the subhead (the H2). Using the solar financing example above, your H1 might be “Solar Financing Made Easy.”

5. Review Every Page for Additional Keyword Placement

Now that you’ve created high quality content that your target market needs (and wants) and have attention-grabbing headlines to engage them and encourage them to read further, go back and review everything you wrote. In your review, look for additional places where you can naturally place keywords. Can you switch a sentence around to include a keyword? For example, on a page about marketing automation, “Identify the best customers and convert more” could be changed to “Marketing automation helps you identify the best customers and convert more.” Also, consider whether you can create a keyword phrase by adding a word in front of a keyword? If I have a sentence talking about “marketing campaigns” and “marketing automation” is a keyword for my page, I would add “automated” to “marketing campaigns.” Do several review passes. You may be surprised at what opportunities you miss the first, and even the second time, around.

6. Improve User Experience

This is beyond website content, but good user experience is becoming more and more important in strong SEO rankings. According to Robert Berris in his blog Three UX Principles That Help Your Website Do Its Job Right, “During the last two years, Google has evolved to place much higher emphasis on sites that deliver quality user experiences across platforms and devices. Though traditional ranking factors are still king, search engine optimization is increasingly becoming user optimization.” So, work with your web developers to be sure that your website is easy and intuitive to navigate and that each link works and takes your visitors to the next bit of information they’re looking for.

7. Hire an Expert

As I said earlier, basic SEO is mostly common sense. However, if you can afford it, it is wise to hire a SEO expert to ensure your site is truly optimized. A SEO consultant or agency can audit your site and look at how it is performing against your most important keywords. They will provide you with a prioritized list of action items to help you take your site to the next level.

Here’s the great news: You don’t have to have to be a SEO wizard to make sure your website is well positioned for organic search engine traffic. Simply use your common sense and the seven simple tips outlined above.

Do you have any additional tips for building SEO into websites? I’d love to hear about them in the comments section below!

Let's block ads! (Why?)

7 Simple Steps for a Solid SEO Strategy