online marketing

4 Steps to Building Your Online Presence

If you are just starting a business, or are looking to refresh your website and online marketing options, then here are just four steps to help you build your online presence.

In the modern age, having a good online presence is incredibly important. Not only does it allow customers and clients to easily find you, it means you can interact with customers, promote new services or products to huge audiences at a low cost and constantly keep your followers updated. If you are just starting a business, or are looking to refresh your website and online marketing options, then here are just four steps to help you build your online presence.

Have a well-designed website

Your website is the place where many of your potential customers and clients will interact with your business for the first time, and first impressions are vital. Having a well-designed website that is up to date, eye-catching, easy to use and navigate, and has working links will keep people on the site for longer and hopefully cause them to return. The aesthetics of your website should appeal to your target audience and showcase your services or products in an informative way. Using a web design company like Bluelinemedia.co.uk will allow you to have assistance and support for the entire process, from the initial designs to follow-ups, and they are the experts who know what makes a great website, so you will be in safe hands.

Write engaging copy

Copy and website content needs to be relevant and informative without being too overwhelming. People often do not have much time and are looking for answers quickly and concisely, so the information on your website needs to provide this. Furthermore, your copy should include SEO keywords and phrases to make sure your site appears on the first page of SERPs. This will increase organic traffic to your site, which should, in turn, increase your customer base.

Use your social media platforms

Social media is an incredibly useful tool when it comes to online marketing. Not only is it very low cost, if not completely free, but it also allows you to reach a huge number of people with just one post. Gone are the days of printing and posting brochures and flyers, putting them through every door, and hoping for a response. Online marketing is now much more targeted to those who want to receive it, saving you time, money, and resources. Social media lets you interact with customers, and they can also help your marketing efforts by liking, sharing, and engaging with your posts.

Attend virtual tradeshows

Online tradeshows are a great way to get your business out there, network with potential clients and see what other companies are up to, all from the comfort of your screen. Using your existing online presence to ensure that people know you will be attending a virtual tradeshow will help drum up support and keep your followers updated as to what happens on the day. You will be able to demonstrate products and services, inform audiences and also provide links to your other sites and platforms, connecting with potential customers and creating lasting business relationships.

An introduction to measuring your digital marketing efforts

You need to measure your digital marketing efforts. And we’re here to explain how.

For any business hoping to pull in customers online, there’s really no item higher up the ‘to do’ list than digital marketing. But when you’re busy pumping out content, connecting with influencers, and driving SEO, keeping track of your success can take a backseat.

But how do you know what eggs to keep in your basket and which ones are just duds? With data! You need to measure your efforts. And we’re here to explain how.

Set SMART goals

You can’t know if you’re succeeding if you never set goals. And not just any goals, but SMART goals. The kind that are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

This might sound like a list of overblown buzzwords, but it’s the different between…

“Get more Instagram Followers” And “Increase number of Instagram Followers by 5,000 within 6 months”.

If you’re pretty wily, you’ll have noticed that the second of the two is much easier to measure and attach defined metrics to. Here’s a worksheet from SmartSheets to get started.

Choose either an on-site or third-party measurement platform

Once you have well-defined goals, you can go down one of two routes:

Use on-site analytics platforms and plugins to keep track of your success
Farm the hard graft out to a third-party measurement platform

Google analytics

Google Analytics is everyone’s favourite on-site metrics tracking tool. It allows you to access standard metrics like site traffic split by source (e.g. social media referrals, organic search), click-throughs (people who click through to another page from the first they landed on your site) and bounce (how many people leave from the first page without interacting with the site)

And you can create custom metrics that better fit your goals. It’s compatible with most website builders, so you shouldn’t have any trouble setting it up, even if you’re just getting started.

So, why would you use a paid tool if Google Analytics is free? Well… because Google Analytics is not particularly specific. Meaning, it can’t offer the range of tailored information that a third-party measurement platform could.

Ads manager

If your digital marketing campaign involves a lot of paid advertising like PPC, you’re best off using an ads manager. These are usually off-site cloud-based software solutions that you pay for on a monthly subscription.

On the whole, these platforms help you both run and analyse add campaigns. So, you can set up your ads natively and then crunch the numbers and generate automatic reports to see how you’re doing.

Generally speaking, you can set up Facebook Pixel, edit ads, increase and decrease budgets, and share your insights with team members all from a typical ads manager.

Social media dashboard

While some social media dashboards include an ads manager, that’s not their main or only function. Social dashboards go beyond advertising to look at impressions, engagements, click-throughs, and other metrics associated with all of your social media posts.

You can usually attach as many accounts as you want, from different social platforms, and get automatic or customisable reports about your activity, audience, reach and other important metrics.

Where social media dashboards are most useful is in identifying what is working, which tells you what you should be investing more time, energy, and money in.

What should you measure?

Whether you’re using Google Analytics, an ads manager or a social media dashboard, you’ll have to decide what to measure. Rather than overwhelm you with an endless list of specific metrics, we’ve broken them down into categories based on what you want to achieve.

Traffic metrics

Traffic metrics essentially break down your audience by source (traffic source) and help you see whether you’re growing or maintaining your reach (new vs returning visitors).

When you know whether your visitors are coming from organic search or social and which social platforms are performing best, you can put more of your time and money into the channels that make the most impact, there are many digital marketing services providers who can help you to identify the same.

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics include impressions (how many people view a post or page), time on page (for websites), bounce rate (how often people leave a page without engaging), exit pages (the pages people are leaving your site from) and pages per session (how many pages a user views in a session).

They tell you how ‘sticky’ your content is. As in, how good the words, graphics, images and other content on a web page or in a post are at keeping visitors looking.

Conversions

It’s all very well tracking traffic and engagement, but your ultimate goal is to get those lookers to take a specific action. This action might be making a purchase, subscribing to your podcast, signing up to a webinar, or even entering a t-shirt design idea.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of your total engagements that go on to take that specific action. And, it includes the ream of metrics that help you determine how profitable that conversion rate is (e.g. cost-per-conversion and value per visit). As well as those that break down your overall conversion rate into more specific metrics (e.g. new visitor conversion rate and return visitor conversion rate).

All of these metrics give you an idea of the profitability of your digital marketing efforts and provide some insight into which aspects of your strategy are behind it.

To sum things up

It takes a lot of effort and insight to stay on top of your digital marketing efforts. But if you know your metrics and choose the right tool to crunch the numbers, you’ll make your life a lot easier. So make sure you’ve set your goals, picked your software, and know what to track before you splash the cash online.

Word of Mouth Marketing: 5 Tips for Improving Your Online Reputation

Word of mouth marketing is still crucial today.

Word of mouth marketing is still crucial today. The internet connects people from all over the world, allowing them to talk, and may mean it’s possible for a business’s customers to have an impact on sales based on what they say to others about the business. When an online reputation is poor or it’s not enough to help the business, there are a few things the business can do to boost their reputation.

Use a Review Management Platform

Reviews are the main way for customers to let others know what they think about the business. While it’s not possible to get perfect reviews all of the time, the more reviews a business has, the more positive reviews potential customers can see. It’s also a good idea to respond to reviews, which means there needs to be a way to track the reviews as they’re posted. A good review management platform can help businesses get more reviews to help their reputation improve, visit this site.

Improve Customer Service

Customer service is crucial. When customers have a poor experience, they’re going to leave reviews talking about it. Instead, make sure everyone has a great experience with the business and go above and beyond the minimum needed to make the business look good. Listen to any complaints that customers may have and work on improving the business so those issues don’t occur again.

Target Influencers

Influencers can encourage others to try out a business and can help boost the business’s reputation quickly by talking to their followers about how great the business is. To take advantage of this, identify and target influencers who may be interested in talking about the business online. This can also help boost branding awareness and help bring in new customers. However, make sure you keep away from influencer databases and instead learn to get straight to the good stuff.

Give Lessons Online

Consumers love to learn new things and maybe willing to check out online lessons offered by a business if it’s something they’re interested in. This helps encourage new customers, but it can also impact the business’s reputation online. Stick with something that’s short and that customers will be interested in and they’ll help generate good publicity when they’re done with the lessons. This is an excellent way to give back and to encourage customers to talk about the business.

Contribute to the Community

Businesses can help get the word out about their business and improve their reputation online by giving back to their local community. When a business helps the community, it can generate a lot of good publicity and will help make it look like the business is charitable. Customers notice when businesses help their community and will generally talk favorably about the business to others or when they write reviews for the business.

The internet has made it possible for many more businesses to be created, which can mean a lot more competition for a small business. However, word of mouth marketing online can help boost the business above their competition and help them gain a better reputation with their customers. To do this, the business must use some strategies to boost their reputation and get more customers talking about them. If you’re looking for ways to boost your business’s reputation online, try out these ideas today. They could have a huge impact and lead to a better reputation and more business.

Online marketing tactics to revitalise the dead traffic

While we’re spending all that time growing lists and trying to pull in new subscribers, what about all the dead customer base.

We, as a marketer, spend a lot of time growing our customer base. We create irresistible content upgrades, compelling lead magnets, encourage list signups, and try to drive all our growth activities back to an opt-in. It’s the glue that holds together the inbound methodology.

But while we’re spending all that time growing lists and trying to pull in new subscribers, what about all the dead customer base on your list? They signed up for a reason, but they’ve stopped engaging or maybe never did.

Can you still be helpful for them? How can you win them back?

Colour Graphics has come up with some amazing marketing tactics with the help of which we can revitalise the dead traffic.