Email continues to be a major workhorse when it comes to boosting engagement and conversion, particulartly in B2B. Heres eight tips for better email marketing.
1-Get Visual
Show prospects what you are offering, says Annalisa Church, senior director, marketing technology at Akamai. Include eye catching clickable buttons in your email to engage recipients. “If you’re offering a video, show a picture with a play button.”
2- Vary the frequency.
There’s no one size fits all rule when it comes to how frequently you should reach out to your audience. Stu Richards, CEO of BredIn, notes that the driver of email frequency should be determined by both how much your customers and prospects say they want to hear from you, and how much content you actually have to offer. “The driver of frequency is how much good stuff you have to share, and how much time it takes to come up with [relevant] topics and formats.”
3- Know the journey.
What do you want a prospect to do once they open your email? Know your ideal customer’s journey and create communications that will guide your audience on their way. “You have to have a sense of where you are trying to take somebody,” says Anthony Nygren of EMI Strategic Marketing.
4- Have clear goals.
Superior B2B email marketing results begin with a smart strategy, says John Sisson, president of HBT Marketing and a speaker at LeadsCon Las Vegas. Make sure you know what your business goal is before you launch your email campaign. And then measure against it. And keep in mind that business people are often on autopilot when looking at your email marketing messages. “They scan rather than read,” he says. “So use plenty of white space, really short paragraphs, bullets, lists, and super clear calls to action. Ideally, ask for only one action, but repeat that ask two or three times.”
5- Be interactive.
With the advent of technology like Google’s launch for AMP for email marketing, brands have more opportunities than ever before to get interactive with audiences in email, notes Jon Dick, VP of marketing at HubSpot. Experiment with in-email experiences like quizzes to boost engagement.
6- Don’t compete with yourself.
Make sure that the emails the marketing team sends out align with those coming from sales and other departments. “Sales teams create their own cadence, and it is counter intuitive if marketing is sending one message and sales is sending another,” says Randy Frisch, CMO and president, Uberflip. “Look at all your channels and keep things coordinated.”
7- Stress urgency and the need to avoid risk.
Subject lines that drive urgency, coupled with offer-related marketing pre-headers, increase opening rates, because of the basic human desire to not miss out, says Nancy Harhut, chief creative officer of HBT Marketing and a featured presenter at LeadsCon. Business execs don’t want to make a mistake when buying a product or service for their organization, because it can cost them in term of money and personal reputation. “Send emails that remove risk by highlighting guarantees, testimonials from people like the target, and credibility markers such as industry awards and press mentions.”
8- Make it readable.
People get a lot of email, and they may very likely be reading your message in a non-business setting, like while they’re waiting in line at the drug store or watching their kid’s soccer game, says Gordon Brott, founder of Gordon Brott Growth Marketing. Avoid big blocks of text that make it difficult to read, and keep the focus on the customer, not your product, to keep them engaged.
For many years, McKinney small businesses have understood the power of strong rankings in the search engines.
Indeed, achieving a strong page 1 ranking on Google can boost the number of customers for any business with an online presence.
But how exactly do you score a great ranking in Google?
With more and more small businesses in McKinney, TX turning to Digital Marketing, there is a growing need to understand the power of strong rankings in the search engines. The tactics have evolved from what they were just a few years ago. Let us outline 5 important strategies for small businesses trying to improve their exposure online.
Technical Onsite SEO
5 or 6 years ago, SEO was more of a technical exercise. Today this is still an important component of a small business SEO strategy. In fact, many of the same components are used.
Overall, you will not rank for a keyword that is not physically on your website. We know this sounds obvious, but many small business owners don’t have strong content on their homepage, and can’t figure out why they don’t rank well.
Keywords needs to be strategically placed in the Title Tag and H1 Tag. If you don’t know what these are, learn them. It isn’t rocket science. This will also make you better able to communicate with your developer. Or if your website is on the WordPress platform, you can adjust these yourself with one of many SEO plugins available.
Having a website that looks good is important. Many people believe that Google is monitoring bounce rates and dwell times as indicators of user experience. An outdated website or one that is just confusing will repel users, and may hurt rankings.
Ensure that your website is fast. Google explicitly tells us it does not like to rank slow websites. This hurts user experience, and rankings too.
Also build a mobile-friendly website. More and more users view websites on mobile devices. The latest stats available indicate that 58% of website traffic comes from a mobile device. Your business needs to be well represented on any digital device platform.
Google My Business
Google presents a map for many keyword searches. They do this for keywords they believe to have local searcher intent, where seeing the business in a map is more helpful. The catch here is that Google is not presenting the business website itself, but rather the Google My Business page listing for that business.
Because of this dynamic, it is important that small business owners claim their business listing and ensure all the information is accurately updated. Business phone numbers, addresses, hours and other relevant information is critical. The way this information is entered in the Google database has been shown to impact rankings.
Additionally, the number of times the phone number on file with Google My Business is seen by Google’s spiders around the internet has been identified as a ranking factor. These are known as citations, and sometimes NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number). To give your business an edge over the competition, post your NAP everywhere you can. There are also numerous services that can help you with this SEO process known as Directory Listing Services. Luce Media can submit your NAP to dozens of different directories and get you quickly ranking. Click here and scroll down to Online Visibility.
Strong Content
At Luce Media, we know that Google has a strong preference for long-form, well-researched content. For this reason, it pays to write very long blog posts on your website. However, the content needs to be informative and helpful for users.
Many small business owners claim they will have time to write blog posts themselves. However, after a month or two, they stop blogging (if they ever started in the first place). This is a critical mistake. If you can’t produce the blog yourself, hire a service to do it for you. Luce Media provides blog writing and content marketing in McKinney, TX.
Content published on the website needs to be visually appealing as well as well-written. This means many pictures and graphics – sometimes called visual assets. These visual assets should give the reader a visual representation of the main concepts of the blog post. This will help keep lazy readers engaged.
Many of the top bloggers recommend something visual to break up the words between every fold of the screen. This technique is strong because readers have something appealing to look at as they get tired of reading.
Backlinks
For many years, backlinks have been known to be a critical ingredient in search engine ranking success. This is no less true in 2019 than it was a few years ago. Great content will not rank without strong backlinks to the content from highly authoritative and relevant websites.
Adam Stetzer, Ph.D. has been in the SEO business for 10 years and says: “Backlinks are one of the hardest concepts for small business owners to understand and execute. They understand on-site SEO and writing great content. They have a hard time committing to a great backlink building strategy because of the mathematical and conceptual nature of backlinks in the Google algorithm. Nonetheless, there are great places on the Internet to earn backlinks for free.”
Search engine optimization experts generally agree that there are 2 major components of a backlink that determine if it will help you rank: Authority and Relevance.
A backlink is considered to have authority if it comes from a domain with high Domain Rating or Domain Authority. These factors are easily queryable using free SEO analytic tools. In generally, you want a link from a high domain authority website.
Furthermore, the backlink will help you more if it is on a specific page on that website that also has strong authority. Several years ago, Google started distinguishing which pages on a particular website were the strongest. This, again, is determined by how many backlinks are feeding into a specific page on a domain. So while a link from a high authority domain is good, a link placed on the strong web page on that domain (usually the home page) is the best.
The second criteria for a backlink is the relevance of that link. You want links from websites that are about the same subject matter as your website. If you are trying to rank a website about cars, a link from another automotive website would be much more valuable than a link from a foodie website.
How to weigh the relative importance of categorical relevance vs domain authority nobody can really answer except the engineers at Google. Most SEO’s go for relevance over authority. Both is ideal.
Relationships and Reputation
The final parts of the small business strategy are relationships and reputation. This is a very important part of any SEO strategy as negative reviews often rank very highly in Google. Additionally, the more relationships you have the stronger your ability to earn great mentions, reviews and backlinks.
Many small business owners overlook the idea that building relationships will help their online presence. Indeed, it feels old fashioned. However, human relationships are at the heart of all business, and it is humans that place great backlinks into powerful stories online. Understanding the importance of online reviews is critical for the business owner in McKinney, TX.
Small business owners need to be active in their communities, regularly attend meetups and maintain ties with those who can mention them online.
Conclusions
Earning a top position for your small business in McKinney, TX on Google will bring in customers. Because these positions are so coveted, they are also extremely competitive. The 5 strategies outlined in this article represent an outstanding opportunity to move search engine rankings up and get the phone ringing.
This Post was originally Posted at: https://www.bmmagazine.co.uk/marketing/5-ways-to-improve-your-small-business-rankings-in-google/
https://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Googlerank.jpg31684752Mark Toneyhttps://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Logo-1-300x73-1.pngMark Toney2019-04-28 20:38:512019-04-28 20:38:565 ways to improve your small business rankings in Google for 2019
For numerous businesses, social media is a noisy and jam-packed place to try and build brand awareness. And the idea of social media management is overwhelming for some small businesses and organizations because there’s simply too much that goes into learning how to use social media to drive new business or product sales. Trust us, it is a business that is constantly changing and keeping up with those changes is often critical to success. To be successful your eye must always be focused on social media engagement.
Whеn it comes tо figuring out if what your business is doing on social media is working or not, you must set up reporting tools to track your ѕосiаl mеdiа ROI. Rеturn оn invеѕtmеnt iѕ mеаѕurеd in mаnу wауѕ. Uѕuаllу it can be dеtеrminеd thrоugh fасtоrѕ thаt аrе fаirlу straightforward аnd quantifiable.
Tracking your investment in social media is often less of a dollar figure, аnd mоrе оf a human rеѕоurсе invеѕtmеnt. Sоmеоnе (or a company like Luce Media ) hаѕ to create content, роѕt it, update it, оrgаnizе thе соntеѕtѕ, givеаwауѕ, etc. They nееd to respond tо inquiries on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, аnd еntеr into the diѕсuѕѕiоnѕ on оthеr соmраniеѕ’ ѕitеѕ.
Creating an effective social media strategy truly is a challenge that most businesses face today. The good news is, there’s plenty you can do to find out what’s really going on with the content and information your business posts to various social media platforms.
Measuring your strategy is simply proof that your social media efforts are working. You need to know that you’re efforts are working and that potential customers or clients are responding to those efforts. The best way to find that out is by assessing your efforts.
By now you likely know there are all types of ways to measure what you are doing in social media. You can track the number of followers on Instagram, the number of comments on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, etc. But as a business, these social media platforms open up a wealth of data on who is watching your activity on their social platform, what the demographic makeup of your followers are and all kinds of information about what interests them.
Are you using the right social media metrics and analytics tools to monitor, assess and improve your social media performance? What analytics are you measuring and what should you be measuring in your social media tracking?
Monitoring your social media analytics can make the difference between the success or failure of your social media presence. And while there are dozens of different metrics that can be measured in social media – the most important metric to track for any business is ENGAGEMENT.
The engagement rate for social media is typically defined as the total number of interactions with your content divided by the total number of impressions it receives. While this KPI (A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives and a key factor in social media engagement) can help you determine at a high-level if people engage with your social content, it won’t tell you if they do so in ways that are meaningful and profitable for your business. What counts as a meaningful social interaction varies from industry to industry, and even from company to company.
A report from Thunderhead said only one in four businesses feel confident in their ability to create strong, customer engagement. If you fall into that category, don’t worry–we won’t tell. Instead, let’s make sure you’re comfortable with how to engage and build your brand on social.
What is Social Media Engagement? How Do You Improve Engagement?
Social media engagement is essentially like a long-term relationship. You can imagine a committed and lengthy relationship takes dedication, readiness to adapt, the ability to think about the future and ensure the other party involved is happy for years to come.
Try not to think of social media engagement as just a single interaction with one of your customers. As Thunderhead shows, you’re creating an open line of communication over a period of time. While the term “customer relationship” may come to mind, engagement is different and on its own level.
Providing More to Social Customer Care
When we think about social media engagement, it’s about how you use networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter to build a great customer experience. You want to be there for your patrons through thick and thin.
As soon as customers decide to engage with your business on social media, they’re essentially putting trust into your brand to solve their problem.
As the clothing store Tarnish successfully showcases, reaching out to your customers when they have specific questions increases brand loyalty and even sparks the chance of a future purchase. All it takes is a bit of timely communication.
In the past, customers had to go to great lengths to get ahold of the brand to be heard. While the days of “we’re sorry–all of our customer service representatives are currently busy” still exists, businesses are getting better at making those troublesome interactions a thing of the past by enhancing engagement through social media.
Sprout Social discovered social media is the most preferred channel for customers to engage with brands. This means one way to dramatically improve engagement is to ensure every potential or current customer conversation ends with satisfaction or resolve.
3 Basic Steps to Improve Engagement
Improving engagement isn’t necessarily rocket science, but it does take effort. Try not to think of social business or social branding as something new. This type of marketing has been around for decades.
Now there’s a massive audience out there ready to be targeted, dissected and reached through social media engagement. The important thing is to know how to approach your audience, which is why we’re providing five tips to improve your social media engagement.
1. Start the Conversation
Like we mentioned before, try to think about social media engagement as a long-term relationship. Every great relationship needs someone to initiate the conversation to get things going. And if you are running a business, it has to be your brand.
A great way to open the conversation between both parties is by providing informative and interesting blog posts that your audience actually wants. Choose Chicago is perfect brand to watch for examples. They constantly post great Tweets with links to content about why you should visit Chicago. It helps to get people talking in their industry.
As with any relationship it takes time to get to know each other. In this case, you are introducing yourself to the other person. You know what your intent is – to get a conversation going back and forth so that you can show them why your business, product or service is valuable. So don’t expect them to react immediately and begin conversing. It takes time to build relationships and until they get to know your brand….they may say little or nothing at all. Just continue to deliver information that is useful and valuable. Soon the relationship will begin to grow.
However, it’s not always that easy to get a group together to converse. If you have issues with getting engagement from content, try hosting Q&As or Twitter Chats. But try joining a few first. Use your brand’s social accounts to join conversations within your field. Be active with questions and provide industry knowledge to users.
You’ll be shocked at how quickly users will follow you. When people understand there’s a human behind the brand, their trust level increases. To build brand awareness, it’s all about trust and engagement.
Pro Tip: Be careful with your early conversations. Don’t promote right off the bat or else you’ll find little interactions and participation. Provide something of value like your industry insights or previous experience.
2. Promote Your Brand Enthusiasts
Another way to show you’re willing to get the conversation going is by promoting your brand enthusiasts’ content. For example, if you’re on Instagram, you could ask for customers to @mention you or use a branded hashtag to show off a new product or service.
Vans regularly uses its branded hashtag #myvans to get customers involved and to post their own content with the hashtag. Try to get your customers to help by encouraging them to submit pictures of them using your product or service. When you post user-generated content, you’re essentially showcasing your customers and to further your social engagement. This also helps push others who are on the fence to interact with your brand by giving an avenue to communicate. It essentially becomes a type of product endorsement or review for you. Almost always, it is a strong, positive endorsement.
Pro Tip: Make sure you are completely transparent with your intentions and how you plan to use customers’ content if you do so. Try using social media contests to give away t-shirts, swag gift packs or your actual product. Encourage your audience to share your material and to use specific hashtags.
3. Hashtags are critical to finding new customers.
A hashtag is a label for content. It helps others who are interested in a certain topic, quickly find content on that same topic.
A hashtag looks something like this: #SmallBusinessSaturday or #ContentMarketing
Why do you want people to use a certain hashtag? It’s all about tracking.
You can use hashtags on platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. Anyone sharing content on a relevant topic can add the hashtag label to their message. People on social media frequently search for specific words that are used as Hashtags. So, by using the right hashtag, you increase the chance of a prospect or potential customer discovering your business.
Keep hashtags as short as possible. It’s best if a hashtag is an understandable word, phrase or abbreviation.
TAKE-AWAYS
If you are a business that is posting to social media in an attempt to grow, you must track how often and how much your audience is engaging with your posts. Sinсе mоѕt buѕinеѕѕ оwnеrѕ dоn’t ѕtudу thе impact оf thеir ѕосiаl mеdiа campaigns, thеу hаvе nо idеа thаt they mау be wаѕting a lоt оf time and effort on асtivitiеѕ thаt аrе nоt рауing оff.
If you have hired a social media company that is NOT providing you with this information on a monthly basis, then you should consider finding one that does. Luce Media ALWAYS provides clients with monthly reports that focus on social media engagement.
Once you have a reporting strategy in place, start building ways to engage with your audience and watch those numbers climb.
Hiring a knowledgeable marketing agency like Luce Media allows business owners to focus on running operations and increasing the bottom line, not messing around with Facebook, Twitter or trying to build out a website. In the end, the bigger question maybe isn’t can I afford an experienced marketing agency, but rather how much am I costing myself in time, money and lost opportunity by trying to do these marketing services in-house. For a FREE analysis of your current efforts in social media, please click here now.
https://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Social-Engagement3.jpg38405760Mark Toneyhttps://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Logo-1-300x73-1.pngMark Toney2018-03-23 19:46:222018-06-22 15:26:51What Is Social Media Engagement & Why Should I Care?
Welcome to Lucé Media. We are glad you stopped by.
Lucé Media is a collective of some of the best digital, social, video and innovation talent around. I hope you had a chance to read about our group on the Our Team page. Our company, Lucé Media is created to be a digital innovation consultancy designed to help business owners realize the true potential of this digital age. If you need a helping hand from experts in the world of digital innovation, our goal is to exceed all your expectations with our exceptional solutions for today’s digital world.
Our unique and forward-thinking company strives to venture into the unknown. We don’t tread the same ground as other companies in the digital world, and that’s why our business solutions can completely reinvent companies such as yours. Our experience is unparalleled and our level of customer dedication and satisfaction is what really sets us apart as the gold standard in providing the best services.
The team we have constructed can help in many different areas. Perhaps you have a special project that need a high level of digital expertise -whether that is in developing content, building software or as we have done before – taking the idea you have and building it from an initial visualization to launching it. We have the talent to build all the elements in between. So, a big part of what we do is analyze your touch points, evolve your brands and take advantage of “big idea” thinking.
We support our clients with digital strategy and innovation driven by data, web design, digital marketing, social media branding and video production…all guided by an overarching strategy. We use an integrated and flexible approach, utilizing the diverse skill sets across our team, and we dedicate ourselves to constantly improving results. Thanks to our focused approach we design digital experiences that meet the demands of your clients and customers.
https://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/LuceMedia-Image.jpg200200Mark Toneyhttps://lucemedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Logo-1-300x73-1.pngMark Toney2017-05-01 20:40:052020-06-10 15:35:02Welcome to Lucé Media - Social Media Strategy and Metrics