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Showing posts from September, 2019

The Best Way to Balance Static, Dynamic and Interactive Content

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Whenever you start talking about content-based marketing strategies, static content, dynamic content and interactive content always seems to come up. Digital marketing relies on quality content that is personalized and keeps your audience coming back for more. It’s challenging. But understanding the differences between these three types of content, and knowing the pros and cons of using them can help. Let's take a look at some examples: Static Content Examples: social media profiles (not feeds), eBooks, whitepapers, emails, landing pages, PPC and social media ads, banner ads, one-way webinars. Static content never changes. Standard HTML pages are static webpages. Once a static resource is uploaded to a web server, it won’t change until you replace it with another static file. The other criterion that defines static content is authorship. If a piece of content is created and promoted by a brand or single author, it has no way to evolve or grow over time thr

Facebook Trends: 3 Predictions From the 'FB Queen'

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When it comes to predicting Facebook trends, there are few people who have gotten it right as often as Mari Smith. The internationally known “Queen of Facebook” has been leading social media marketing strategies for more than a decade. Forbes has named her among the list of top social media influencers year after year, and she trains business leaders around the world to be more successful on the platform. At this year’s conference, Smith shared her top three Facebook trend predictions and offered sound advice to help marketers get ahead of the changes. 3 Facebook Trends for 2020 and Beyond 1. Facebook Will Become A Private, Personal Message Platform Earlier this year, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other privacy violations, Facebook announced a series of changes it said would improve privacy for users. In addition to making the app more secure, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his vision includes moving to a more “privacy-focused commu

Key Moments Feature Added to Google Video Search Results

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On Tuesday, Google announced the release of a new feature impacting video search results. The search engine giant is calling this new roll-out “key moments” and it is designed to help searchers quickly find content within a video. Google said this video search feature will work for English videos hosted on YouTube where the creators have provided timestamp information in the video description. At the moment, this feature is only available for YouTube videos. Key Moments Announcement from Google “Starting today you can find key moments within videos and get to the information you’re looking for faster, with help from content creators,” Prashant Baheti of Google said in a release published on September 17. “When you search for things like how-to videos that have multiple steps, or long videos like speeches or a documentary, Search will provide links to key moments within the video, based on timestamps provided by content creators. You’ll be able to easily scan to

3 Revenue Boosting Email Automation Workflows for E-commerce

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Email marketing automation is a game changer for e-commerce. We already know email is one of the most ROI-rich channels for online stores, and if you sent each and every email manually, you would do literally nothing else. However, with email automation, you can send timely, relevant messages that will not only boost this channel’s revenue generation power, but also create a strong relationship with your customers. Here, we discuss three email automation workflows that will earn you extra revenue.Let’s jump in: #1. Welcome Emails: The Initiation Has Begun Welcome emails are an important first contact between your brand and the customer. They’ve trusted you enough to give you their email address, so it’s best to make a great first impression. According to a survey by BlueHornet, 74 percent of customers expect a welcome email when they subscribe to your site. If you’ve promised some kind of incentive to sign up, they’ll also get a higher open and click-through

How to Solve Marketing Problems with Keyword Strategy

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The No. 1 challenge marketers say they face today is generating traffic and leads. More than 62% of businesses are having trouble getting the right people to their website. With so many websites competing for the top spots in Google — both in organic and paid search — that first step of awareness feels increasingly out of reach for too many marketers. But there’s a not-so-secret weapon you can use to overcome this challenge, and many others: a keyword strategy.   And there’s proof it can make a difference. Over the course of just one year, Fisher-Titus Medical Center increased the number of relevant keywords they ranked for by 406 percent and saw a 110 percent increase in organic traffic. As they learned, a keyword strategy has a crucial role to play in search engine optimization (SEO), but that’s not the only common marketing issue it’s useful for. 7 Problems a Keyword Strategy Helps Solve Most businesses have been doing keyword research for years to support th

Marketing Spend: Surprising Insights From The 2019 CMO Survey

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When you’re calling all the shots, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you’re making the right decisions about your marketing spend year after year. It’s much easier to get complacent and make incremental adjustments that result in incremental gains, rather than risk failure. Historical data helps, but it won’t warn you of disruptive forces on the horizon — like changing business models — so you can adjust your marketing budget accordingly. That’s why benchmarking data is so important. The 2019 CMO Survey by Deloitte, Duke University and the American Marketing Association offers many valuable insights to consider as you think about your sales and marketing activities. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways. 1. The Customer Experience Is a Top Priority At a time when global internet sales have reached their lowest level since 2014 and marketing executives are less optimistic about the economy, they are focusing on growing sales by improving customer relat

Chatbot Examples and Lessons Learned

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When done right, chatbots can act as a concierge for your website, guiding your users on a journey toward helpful resources. When done right, chatbots can also be used as a consumer support tool, helping your customers get answers or resolve problems. When done right, chatbots can capture leads and generate revenue. When done right. When they’re done wrong, it’s nothing but a bad user experience. After a lot of trial and error for ourselves, we figured out some successful applications for clients. We think it’s important to be honest about our own journey, so we’ll share some of that below, along with our chatbot success stories and how other companies are getting it right. Chatbot Trial and Error We started our chatbot journey with the goal of gaining conversions because we learned through testing that not everyone wants to fill out a static form on a webpage. The idea was to use artificial intelligence as a conversion point that gave our audience a product in

Should You Create Less Content?

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Are you struggling to keep up with your competitor’s seemingly impossible levels of content output? Then you’re probably going to be pleased with what I have to say. It’s possible to create less content and still achieve the same (if not better) engagement with your audience. But don’t go slashing your content marketing budget just yet — you’re not completely off the hook. In fact, content is still just as critical to your marketing success, and likely always will be. The rules are rapidly changing, though. Search engines are saturated, content sharing has dropped dramatically in recent years and buyers are more distracted than ever. And all the while, brands continue to pump out more and more mediocre content, clogging up distribution platforms with tired concepts and regurgitated ideas. So how can choosing to create less content help you drive more engagement? Here’s what you need to know. Attention is the Most Valuable Commodity When I was in journalism

What Makes a PPC Campaign Successful for Small Businesses?

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What makes a  PPC campaign  successful? It’s not measured in pure clicks. It’s not measured in how little you spend on a click. We can’t even measure it solely by conversions. PPC campaign  success comes down to one all-important metric. What’s your PPC ROI? Turning clicks into conversions is what truly matters. To grow your business it all comes down to this question. What’s it cost to acquire new customers vs. how much is that customer is worth? How much money will they usually generate once they have converted to a customer? What kind of ROI do you need to see from your PPC campaigns? 5X, 10X, 15X? Let’s explore how to attain it. How to Launch a Successful PPC Campaign 1. Keyword Research Done Right To have a successful  PPC campaign , you must choose the right keywords to target. These aren’t just any keywords that relate to your business. They’re strategic and designed to maximize your PPC ROI.  Effective keyword research follows 3 essential ste