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Effective Advertising Requires Authenticity and Humanizing Ads

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Many businesses assume that effective advertising is achieved when your marketing efforts lead to more leads and more sales. Unfortunately, many companies become overly promotional as a result. Advertising isn’t just about promoting products and services. It’s also about providing value to your customers in other ways. Trying to convince a customer why they should buy your product is rarely an effective advertising technique. Instead, you should be less promotional. For example, creating humanizing ads can make your brand more relatable to your audience. Such ads also show your audience that the bottom line isn’t the only thing you care about. Doing so also helps build a more authentic brand identity.

Providing Value To Your Audience

One of the common mistakes businesses make is to focus too much on showcasing their products and services. Before you can try to demonstrate the value of your products and services, you need to demonstrate the value of your brand. Creating an authentic brand identity is crucial to being able to sell your products and services.

To demonstrate the value of your brand, you will need to add value in a non-promotional way Achieving this requires that you understand who your audience is and what their needs are. For example, many small businesses aren’t going to be investing in new products or services as a result of the COVID-19 situation. This is especially true for small businesses that aren’t considered essential. Trying to convince small business owners to purchase your products or services isn’t going to be effective right now. However, content that can help educate small business owners during COVID-19 is going to be very useful to them. For example, content about the recent small business stimulus program that explains how to go about obtaining funds.

Creating such content provides immediate value to your target audience. Additionally, it shows your audience that you understand what their needs are. The ability to demonstrate this understanding will help increase your brand authority, resulting in more trust. As a direct result, your audience will be more likely to believe that the products and services that you offer will help them address their needs once they are capable of making new purchases.

Enjoy the article: Visual Storytelling Techniques That Will Take You To The Next Level

Creating Soft-Selling Ads

In addition to creating content that offers value to your audience, you should also create soft-selling ads. Soft-selling ads help to advertise your brand without doing so explicitly. Traditional ads are known for being more aggressive. They will often end with a clear call-to-action to buy a product or invest in a service. For example, a traditional cereal commercial might show a person enjoying a bowl of cereal. It might also list all of the healthy benefits. A soft-selling ad does not focus on the product or service that you’re trying to sell.

Some companies are focusing on spreading awareness for important information about COVID-19 using soft-selling ads, such as emphasizing the importance of social distancing. Budweiser has focused many of its new ads on highlighting the heroic work being done on the frontlines by everyone from healthcare workers to grocery store workers. These ads are effective because they aren’t shoving their products in the faces of viewers. However, their efforts to deliver valuable information to everyone showcases their authenticity.

Another great example is Jack Daniels. They produced an ad showing people socializing over video chat from the comforts of their own home. This ad highlights the importance of staying at home during the pandemic. It is also accompanied by a great slogan: Dear humanity, cheers to making social distancing, social. With love, Jack.” This ad is humanizing without every attempting to sell a product. As a result, it helps to lend the brand authenticity. If they had ended the commercial trying to sell their whiskey, it wouldn’t have been nearly as impactful.

Authenticity Matters

One thing to keep in mind when creating content for your audience is that you need to be authentic. You can’t come across as pandering or as taking advantage of a situation. The audience will always know. The only way to avoid such a pitfall is to truly have your target audience in mind when you create your content. Focus on your buyer personas and think about what their needs, problems, wants, and fears are, both in general and in the world today. Doing so is the only way to ensure effective advertising.

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Leveraging Video Marketing During COVID-19

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When it comes to creating content for your marketing strategy, arguably the most effective type of content is video content. In fact, the success of video marketing when compared to other types of content marketing has been proven time and time again. For example, the viewing of video content accounts for roughly one-third of all online activity. Additionally, 64 percent of consumers will purchase a product or service after watching a branded social video.

If that wasn’t enough, video content generates 12 times more shares on social media than text and image-based content combined. With these video content statistics in mind, you should make an effort to focus on video marketing. This still holds true in today’s current stay-at-home environment.

Why Do Audiences Love Video Content?

The main reason why audiences love video marketing is because people are visual creatures. It’s much easier for the typical person to absorb and retain information that they got from a video than from an article. In fact, the human brain processes visual information roughly 60,000 faster than it can process text. Movement tends to attract the human eye as well. Video content provides such movement, whereas text-based content does not. But these are not the only reasons why video content is more effective than text-based content.

Video content allows you to display a personality. By having someone onscreen, you give your audience someone to relate to and to connect to on an emotional level. It doesn’t matter how much personality you write with, text-based content simply cannot stack up to video’s ability to do this.

Enjoy this article: Video Marketing Ideas: Using Storytelling In Social Media

How Can You Leverage Video Content During COVID-19?video marketing 2

Considering that the majority of the country is staying at home, there are more opportunities to reach your target audience via video marketing. Many people are out of work. Those who aren’t may not have as much work to do and are likely working remotely from home, which means that they have much more time on their hands.

While they might have more time to read text-based content while stuck at home, they will likely be even more drawn to video content. Video content gives people the chance to watch somebody speak on screen. In some cases, such as through the use of video messaging software, they can even engage with the speaker directly. As a result, viewers will be able to connect with a real human, which is something that’s a bit of a rarity during these times of social isolation. With that in mind, the following are a few examples of how you can leverage video marketing during this pandemic:

  • Pre-produced video content

Because of COVID-19, you can’t exactly go out and produce new video content. However, you can promote the existing video content on your website. It’s a great way to get more views and to generate more brand exposure. Post links to older videos that are still relevant to your social pages. You can also get your company’s leaders to produce simple video messages for your audience as well.

  • Webinars

Arguably the best way to provide your target audience with new video content is to hold webinars. They can be hosted by a variety of people, from company leaders to industry influencers. Webinars are convenient since they can be hosted from home. All you have to do is to schedule a live stream through one of your social channels. Viewers can then tune in from the comfort of their own homes at a specific time. You can encourage participation by making your webinars question and answer based. This will help to improve engagement with your audience. Following the webinar, you can post the video of it to your website so people can view it at their own convenience.

  • Virtual tours

Companies that provide essential services can create behind-the-scenes video content of their place of work. They can also film virtual tours of your place of business. For example, if you have a factory that manufactures an essential product, you can showcase how you’re keeping your employees safe. For example by demonstrating social distancing in the workplace, allowing employees to speak about your safety standards, and more.

Continue Focusing on Video Marketing During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Video marketing has always been one of the most effective content marketing strategies that you can implement. This is because video content tends to engage audiences more than any other type of content. During this COVID-19 pandemic, much of your audience will be staying at home and will have more time on their hands than usual. With that in mind, video marketing can be a great way to engage them. Use older video content, virtual tours, and webinars to effectively leverage video marketing during this particularly strange moment in time.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES
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Communication Tips for Senior Living Homes

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Millions of people have been stressed out and worried about their families every day during this COVID-19 pandemic. This is especially true for people with family members who are living in senior living homes. If you are running senior living homes, then odds are you’re doing everything you can to keep residents safe and comfortable. However, you should also be doing everything you can to alleviate the worries and fears of their families. To do this, you will need to be able to communicate clearly and regularly. The following are a few tips that will help you communicate more effectively during this time of crisis:

Know Your Audience

Not only do you need to know who you should get your message across to, but you need to know how you’ll get that message across. This requires that you know who your audience is. Your audience should include not just the family members of residents, but also employees, board members, and more. It’s because your audience is so varied that you should develop buyer personas. It will become much easier to meet the needs of your audience if you are able to target each one of your buyer personas. It also ensures that you don’t forget to address certain parts of your audience. For example, you might be so focused on alleviating the worries of the family members of your residents that you forget to address your employees. You need to keep communicating with your staff as well. Additionally, your staff will have family members who may be worried too.

Finally, the creation of buyer personas will help you determine which marketing channels to use for each part of your audience. For example, if your staff is on the younger side, it may be easier to communicate with them via Twitter. However, older residents are less likely to use Twitter. To deliver information to them and their families, Facebook might be a better option.

Use Your Marketing ChannelsSenior Living Homes 2

Businesses of all types tend to slash their marketing budgets first when times are tough. You should avoid doing this. Instead, refocus your marketing efforts to communicate with your audience. For example, you can create content for your blog to deliver information about what precautions you’re taking at your senior living home. Such content can help assure people that you’re taking good care of their family members. You can also provide information on how they can keep in touch with residents since in-person visits may no longer be possible. Consider creating content focusing on the caregivers of your senior living home. Such content allows you to spotlight your frontline workers while also inspiring confidence in your audience about your staff.

Besides continuing to create and publish content, you should also continue using social media. Social media is an excellent way to keep in touch with families. Use your social media channels to answer questions and concerns your audience has on a daily basis. Post updates to your social channels on a regular basis as well. The last thing you want to do is make your audience feel like they are being kept in the dark. The more often you provide updates, the less worried they will feel.

Use A Dedicated Spokesperson

Publishing new content on your blog and posting updates on your social channels is a good start. However, you should also have a dedicated spokesperson to deliver important messages to your audience. Posting videos or hosting webinars using this spokesperson can be very effective. With a spokesperson, your audience will have an easier time connecting with your message. It’s also easier to build trust when there’s an actual person delivering a message. The more trust you build, the less worried your audience will be.

You don’t necessarily have to create video content spotlighting your spokesperson either. For example, your spokesperson can deliver a message that’s posted on social media or in blog form as well. Simply having a name that people recognize attached to your message will help build trust. Your spokesperson will essentially represent your company’s leadership. This means that they should probably be an executive-level representative. Because we are living in uncertain times, it’s a good idea to name a dedicated spokesperson as well as a backup spokesperson.

These tips can help senior living homes communicate much more effectively. As a result, you can help to alleviate the worries and stress of your residents’ families. These communication tactics can be leveraged during any type of crisis, including this current COVID-19 pandemic. However, they are also essential to senior living marketing strategies even when there is no crisis to speak of.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES

What’s Trending in Marketing For April 2020

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It is important to be informed about what is going on in the marketing industry. Doing so is a great way to stay up to date and tweak your marketing strategies so you can stay ahead of the competition. The following articles are from popular marketing blogs and highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

How the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing brands to connect digitally

Because of COVID-19 and the nationwide stay-at-home orders, retailers are quickly switching up their marketing strategies by putting an emphasis on mobile technology and virtual appointments to keep their businesses operating. Doctors are conducting virtual consultations for their clients. Retailers are connecting with their customers online by hosting virtual lunches, happy hours, and outfit try-on sessions. Alex Fitzgerald, Manager of Consumer Practice, believes this will be an acceleration towards digital.

How working from home has thrown a wrench in campaign targeting

Working remotely has been helping businesses stay in operation as the world is going through this time of uncertainty. But for some businesses, it can be hard to make sense of data that may not be as reliable due to the shift in work environments. Working from home has made analytics and cookie data less reliable.

When your Google My Business listing becomes your lifeline

During COVID-19, Google My Business can turn into a business’s lifeline during this time of uncertainty and disruption. People normally use GMB to get info about store hours and customer reviews to learn about a business. During this pandemic, consumers are searching different topics such as “Are you open while we shelter in place?” and “Do you offer curbside delivery?” It is important during these times to keep your GMB up to date and provide useful, relevant information for consumers.

Enjoy this article: What’s Trending In Marketing For March 2020

Improving Your Marketing Program

7 Tips For Success When Working Remotely

If you are working remotely for the first time, making the adjustment can be challenging. It can be helpful to get tips and tricks on how to stay motivated and focused.  Other factors such as establishing a routine and maintaining a regular schedule are discussed. Check out the article for more advice on how to be as productive as possible.

8 Ways That You Can Improve Your SEO

It is important that you stay up to date with your SEO strategy. It is helpful to continually do keyword research to identify what keywords your target audience is using. This will also help give you a good rank. Other strategies such as updating your old content, monitoring backlinks, and tracking performance are all important factors that can help improve your SEO.

How Healthcare Content Marketing Companies Can Step Up In 2020

With the COVID-19 pandemic spreading across the nation, healthcare content marketing is more valued than ever before. It is important for healthcare companies to take advantage of their increased website traffic. The content they post should be reliable. It is helpful to create specific landing pages to route people to the right resources.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and TrendsMobile Marketing Strategy 1

30 Marketing Statistics to Consider for 2020

Keep up with what new research is telling us about the marketing industry. Learn the most recent statistics and what your company needs to know to stay updated with their social media, advertising, search marketing, and more.

Local ad revenue forecast contracts 10.6% due to coronavirus, study says

Local advertising revenue in the U.S. is expected to total $144.3 billion in 2020, which is a 10.6% decrease from the $161.3 billion previously forecasted. The new estimate shows a 3.6% decline from 2019 activity even with political advertising revenue of $7.1 billion expected this election year.

NFL Draft scores 55M viewers, breaking ratings records despite shift to virtual format

This year’s NFL Draft saw ratings up 16% year-on-year despite the shift to a virtual format due to the coronavirus pandemic. The draft broke ratings records as the number of viewers increased each day.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES
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7 Tips For Success When Working Remotely

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More and more employees are working remotely these days, in part due to the major strides made in technology. Not only do most workers have access to a home computer, but they also have access to countless software solutions that allow them to communicate and collaborate with coworkers and managers from home. It’s estimated that between 2005 and 2017, the number of people in the U.S. that worked remotely increased 159 percent. In early 2020, roughly 4.7 million people worked remotely. As of April of this year, those numbers have likely increased substantially.

If you are working remotely for the first time, making the adjustment can be challenging. This is especially true if you’ve gone into work your entire life. You’ll quickly find that working remotely provides you with much more freedom and flexibility, but that it will require much more discipline in order to stay motivated and be productive as well. With that in mind, the following are a few tips on working remotely:

1. Establish A Routine

When you went to work, odds are you had a morning routine before you left as well as an evening routine right when you got back. Such routines are helpful because they allow you to mentally prepare yourself for when to start and stop working. Without clear routines, it can be difficult to get started, which can hurt your productivity. The last thing you want is to keep putting off work to the point where you don’t get started until 3:00 PM and then end up working all night long.

Establish a routine, such as getting up at a certain time, taking a shower, eating breakfast while you watch the news, and then get started by checking your email. Don’t forget to have a routine for when you stop working as well, such as taking your dog for a walk at 6:00 PM.

2. Set Up An Office SpaceWorking Remotely2

If you don’t have a dedicated office space, it will be a challenge to stay organized and to get yourself into the right mindset to be productive. Working from your couch in the living room is also not a great idea since you’ll have to fight off various distractions. If you have a spare bedroom, such as a guest room, consider turning it into your office space. If you don’t have an extra room, try to find a quiet space in your home where you can permanently set up — even if it’s just a table in your kitchen or a desk in your bedroom.

3. Maintain A Regular Schedule

A regular schedule is important for your productivity. Otherwise, you may end up working a few hours one day and 12 hours the next, which isn’t going to be great for your work-life balance. Without a regular schedule, it might be difficult to stay productive as well. Not to mention that coworkers, managers, business partners, and clients may find it difficult to reach you if they don’t know when you’re working.

4. Create Home Rules

If you’re not the only person at home, then you need to set some clear rules, whether you have roommates or a family. Let them know when your work schedule is and where you’ll be working so that they do not disturb you.

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5. Give Yourself Breaks

Just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you don’t get to take breaks. Take the same amount of breaks you would take if you were working at the office. Breaks are important as they will help keep you from wearing yourself out working. If you don’t take breaks, your work will begin to suffer.

6. Get Out Of The House

Now that you’re working from home, you’re going to find that you’re always at home. To keep yourself from getting cabin fever, be sure to get out of the house. For example, start your day with a run through the neighborhood, use one of your breaks to go for a brief walk, or end your day with a long walk.

7. Communicate Clearly

Because you’re not in the same space as your coworkers and managers, communication is key. Clearly communicate when you’re working, what you’re working on, what your needs are, and more. Regular communication throughout the day will help keep everybody on the same page. It will also help prevent miscommunication, which is something that does tend to occur when everyone is working remotely.

These are just a few tips that will help people adjust to working at home and allow them to work remotely with greater success. Here at Stevens & Tate, we understand the challenges of working from home and are currently one of the many companies that have transitioned to working remotely. We are still capable of providing all of our services, from digital marketing to media coordination, and we will continue to work closely with our clients via a variety of communication methods, including the use of web conferencing tools and more traditional methods, such as phone and email.

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Effective Lead Generation Strategies For Professional Services

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As a lead generation professional services firm, your marketing efforts shouldn’t be focused on selling a specific product or solution. Instead, you should be focused on selling your expertise. This means that you should focus your marketing strategy on generating brand awareness as well as increasing your brand authority. Doing so will lead to greater success in generating new leads. With that in mind, you will need to implement various lead generation professional services strategies. The following are a few of the lead generation strategies that can be very effective for professional services firms:

1. Publish Informative And Relevant Blog Content

Setting up a blog on your website will allow you to regularly publish content in one place. If this content is relevant to your target audience and is of high quality, then it can be incredibly effective at generating leads. This is because high-quality content helps to build brand authority. The more brand authority you build, the more trust you build, making it easier to capture potential leads. Additionally, not only will good content help capture leads, if properly optimized for SEO (search engine optimization), you will be able to attract more potential leads to your website as well through organic search.

2. Create Case Studieslead generation professional services2

Case studies are an exceptionally effective form of content marketing for professional services. This is because case studies showcase exactly how your professional services are leveraged to the benefit of your customers. Leads will be able to discover exactly how your professional services have helped similar customers with their needs. Not only do case studies help increase awareness of your professional services, they boost your brand trust since they highlight the experience of past customers — and leads tend to trust what other customers have to say.

3. Use Relevant And Enticing Offers

Generating leads isn’t possible unless you’re capable of capturing leads. To capture leads, you will need to provide an offer that’s relevant to them. You need to encourage them to provide you with their name and email address, after all. Make offers based on the content of the page that the lead is on to ensure that they are relevant. One way to do this is to offer “content upgrades,” which are more in-depth pieces of content relevant to the page they’re on, such as eBooks or whitepapers. Free trials can be very effective offers for leads who are towards the end of the buyer’s journey.

Similar Article: A Brief Guide To Sales Lead Generation

4. Implement A Referral Program

One of the best ways to get highly qualified leads is through a referral program. A referral program encourages existing customers to refer your business to other customers. Typically, a referral program will provide existing customers with a reward for every referral they provide. However, they won’t just recommend you to any lead since they are staking their reputation on the referral. Because of this, the leads they refer will assume that your business is trustworthy, which means that they will be easier to convert. This also means that leads obtained through a referral program often have a shorter sales cycle.

5. Use Email Marketing

Email marketing can include not just nurturing the leads you’ve captured, but also to engage in email prospecting, which is essentially the email marketing form of cold calling. However, when engaging in email marketing, make sure that you segment your audience list. This will ensure that when you send emails that the content included (or linked to in the email) is relevant to the recipient. If it’s not relevant, you’re likely to lose that lead.

6. Leverage Social Media

Social media is an excellent way to engage with potential leads and spread brand awareness. Simply interacting with followers when they engage with you as well as using your social channels to post content can help to foster reputations and build brand trust. Additionally, you can find new prospects by engaging with industry influencers and by participating in community groups and discussions that are relevant to your business.

7. Promote Your Content

In order for your content to have an impact on lead generation, you will need to promote it. You can do this in numerous ways. For example, you can promote your content by posting links to it on your social channels. You can post links to your content upgrades on social channels as well. You can also use PPC ads and social media ads to promote new blog content or content upgrades. Finally, you can promote new content to leads you’ve captured via email marketing.

When it comes to professional services firms, lead generation depends heavily on your ability to generate awareness and build brand authority. Using these lead generation professional services strategies, you should be able to put your company into a position to attract and convert more leads.

30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips
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Improve PPC Success With These 7 PPC Optimization Strategies

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PPC (pay-per-click) optimization is an often underlooked marketing strategy that can be incredibly beneficial to your overall marketing efforts. One reason many businesses overlook it is because they think that it will cost too much to implement. However, PPC advertising is actually quite cost-effective. This is because PPC optimization works by allowing you to bid on specific keywords. You can bid however much you want. While the amount of your bid will affect how often the ad is displayed for that keyword, you will only pay for the ad if it’s clicked on.

Of course, the success of your PPC campaign will rely heavily on whether or not you get clicks and whether those clicks result in conversions. With that in mind, the following are seven PPC optimization tips to improve the success of your PPC ads:

1. Perform Keyword Research

Don’t assume that you know what keywords your target audience will use. Using keywords without performing the necessary research can result in inefficient use of your marketing budget. The last thing you want to do is bid for keywords that you can’t compete with or that expose your ads to the wrong audience (resulting in low click-through rates and low conversion rates).

When performing keyword research, identify keywords that are relevant to your business, to your ads, and to your audience. Find out what the search volume of each keyword to figure out whether they will be effective at exposing your ad as well as whether you’ll even be able to compete with them. Via keyword research, you’ll also be able to identify new keywords you may not have thought of before as well.

2. Identify Negative Keywords

When running ads, you can find out what keywords and search terms were used to trigger your ads to display. Some of these terms may not be relevant and can be considered “negative” keywords. You can add these to a negative keyword list to ensure your ad doesn’t show up for those terms. For example, if your clothing company only sells adult clothing, then the word “children” would be a negative keyword.

3. Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is essential for identifying keywords that are relevant to their search queries. After all, if you target the wrong audience, your PPC ads won’t perform well. To figure out who your audience is, develop buyer personas based on your ideal customers. These will make it much easier to successfully target your ads, both in regards to the keywords you use and the copy you write.

Enjoy the Article: A Guide to Successful Marketing Optimization

4. Create Effective, Relevant Copyppc optimization2

If your keywords and your copy don’t match up, it’s going to affect your ability to generate clicks. After all, if someone performs a search and an ad is displayed that isn’t relevant to what they’re looking for, that person is not going to click on your ad. Your copy not only has to match the keyword, it also needs to be well-written and to the point. Make the copy easy to scan so that people know exactly what it is you’re promoting and what the benefits are of clicking on the ad. Additionally, keep in mind that a good title is essential to drawing attention. Without a good title, people will scroll right past your ads.

5. Create Effective Landing Pages

Getting clicks is going to be an enormous waste of money if nobody is converting. One of the most common obstacles to a highly converting PPC ad is the landing page. If your PPC landing page is poor, it won’t convert. In fact, some businesses don’t even have landing pages — they just direct the people who have clicked on their PPC ads to their homepage. If you do this, they’ll have no idea what they’re supposed to do.

Your landing pages should reiterate the offer of your ad. Make sure the page is clean and easy to scan. A cluttered landing page can be distracting and confusing. In addition to emphasizing the offer of your ad, make sure you use the same language — including the same keywords.

6. Optimize Your Ad Groups

Google recommends that you create three to four ads per ad group and to create different messages for each one in order to see which performs best. Your ads will rotate automatically to display the ads that perform best most often.

7. Test Your Ads

Make sure to test your ads so that you can identify what works and what doesn’t. For example, you can create an ad group with one control ad and one test ad. You can test ads using different keyword variations, titles, copy, and more. Monitor conversion rates, cost-per-conversion, and click-through-rate to identify what ads perform better and to optimize your ads more effectively.

The key to a successful PPC ad lies in how well you’ve managed to optimize that ad. These are seven PPC optimization strategies that you should implement to help boost the effectiveness of your PPC advertising strategy.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business
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8 Ways That You Can Improve Your SEO

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Although you might think that you have a pretty good grasp of SEO (search engine optimization), it’s important to understand that your SEO strategy, while effective today, can become outdated tomorrow. It’s why it’s important to continuously look for ways that you can improve SEO. The following are just a few ways in which you might be able to improve your existing SEO efforts:

1. Perform Routine Keyword Research

Keyword research isn’t something that you can do once and be done with. You need to continually do keyword research so that you can identify what keywords your target audience is using, what keywords your successfully ranking for, and what keywords your competition is using and successfully ranking for.

Keyword research doesn’t just help you identify keywords that you can use, it can also help you determine whether you’ll be able to compete using those keywords. The more thorough and up-to-date your keyword research is, the stronger and more effective your keyword use will be.

2. Optimize For Google Snippets

Google’s Featured Snippets is a feature that answers user questions without forcing the user having to leave the SERP (search engine results page). By optimizing content for these Featured Snippets, your content will have a better chance of appearing at the top of SERPs.

Start by identifying whether snippets exist for the keywords you’re using. If they don’t, you’ll be in a better position to have a snippet of your content showcased. To have your content showcased as a snippet, ask the question that your snippet answers in one of the subheadings of your content and answer that question immediately following the subheading.

3. Update Your Old Content

Google takes into account how fresh the content is. It’s one of the main reasons why you should publish new content on a regular basis; however, that doesn’t mean your old content is useless. Going back periodically to update old content can help to improve your rankings. For example, you could take a list article published a year or two ago and turn it into a Slideshare. You can also update facts and data used in older blog posts once new studies are released to keep them relevant.

Enjoy The Article: 5 SEO Concepts For An Improved ROI

4. Use The Skyscraper Strategy

The skyscraper strategy is a strategy in which you identify high ranking content that’s relevant to your business and your target audience. Create similar content that’s better written or more comprehensive. Once you’ve published this content, reach out to the websites that linked to the original content and request that they change their links to your content. The skyscraper strategy can be very effective in terms of outranking competition and building backlinks.

5. Monitor Your Backlinks

Improve SEO2

Earning backlinks is essential to SEO. Google monitors the backlinks that your pages earn, using them as an indication of your content’s quality. After all, the more backlinks you earn, the more authoritative your content is considered by other websites. However, Google does monitor where your links are coming from. If they are from poor sources, they may not count towards your rankings. In cases where Google thinks you might be trying to spam backlinks from a single source, they may even penalize you. As such, monitor where you are earning backlinks from.

6. Promote Your Content

The more traffic, backlinks, and social signals that your content gets, the higher your content will rank. With that in mind, promoting your content is essential to improve SEO. For example, simply adding social buttons to your content as well as sharing your content on social media can help generate more traffic to your content. More people will be likely to share, like, and comment on your content as well, which will also increase exposure, leading to more traffic and potentially more backlinks.

7. Improve Technical SEO

Technical SEO is important because it relates directly to the user experience. If your website isn’t technically sound, it will hurt user experience. You will want to make sure that you monitor and improve your technical SEO by making sure your links are working properly, that your content is optimized for mobile use, and that pages load quickly.

8. Track Performance

Tracking how your content is performing can provide you with a lot of information. There are numerous metrics that you should monitor that will help improve the SEO. This includes traffic per page, conversion rate, new traffic vs. returning traffic, and traffic by source. These metrics can help you discover potential issues that could be negatively affecting your SEO and that will need to be addressed.

Continuously adapting new SEO practices may seem like a real chore, but it’s essential that you keep your SEO strategy up-to-date. Effective SEO is crucial to your overall inbound marketing success, after all. This means that it’s worth investing both time and effort to improve SEO.

17 SEO Myths
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How Professional Service Marketers use Marketing Automation Strategies to Succeed

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A comprehensive professional service marketing strategy can be time-consuming to not just develop and implement, but to monitor and maintain as well. A successful strategy requires that many tasks be performed repeatedly over time. These tasks are often mundane. It’s why many professional services use automation tools. Automation tools help automate certain tasks, which can reduce the time that needs to be spent manually performing tasks, can help reduce human error, and can make your marketing efforts much more efficient (and therefore, effective) in general. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few examples of how you can use professional service marketing automation.

1. Qualifying New Leads

A lot of time is wasted trying to engage leads who aren’t qualified, whether it’s by your marketing team or by your sales team. Using lead scoring automation tools, you can assign points to every lead you capture based on the actions they take or the information that they provide. You can then determine thresholds for qualifying them as MQL (marketing qualified lead) or SQL (sales qualified lead). Using lead scoring automation helps ensure that you can identify leads that are ready to be engaged, thereby preventing qualified leads from falling through the cracks and avoiding wasting time on leads that aren’t qualified.

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2. Nurturing Leads 

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Captured leads can’t be engaged right away if they’re not MQL or SQL qualified. You’ll need to nurture your leads through the sales funnel. You can do this using automated email drip campaigns towards the middle of the funnel. Drip campaigns involve a series of emails sent at specific times after a conversion. Or when certain actions have taken place. They allow you to automate a significant part of your nurturing process.

3. Publishing New Content 

Content marketing requires that you create and publish new content on a regular basis. For example, many professional service firms publish three to four blog posts a week. However, it’s a little bit inefficient to create new content every day and then publishing it at a specific time each week. Using automation, you can create numerous pieces of content at once. As soon as you do, you can then schedule them to be automatically sent out at specific times and dates in the future.

4. Improving Targeting And Personalization 

Automation is a conceivable way to automatically segment your prospects and customers into separate lists based on customized criteria. This will make it easier to target your marketing efforts to more relevant prospects or customers. As a result, your engagement with them will seem much more personalized. Without segmentation, many of your prospects may end up being emailed content that has nothing to do with them, which will hurt your chances of being able to close a sale.

Similar Article: How Marketing Automation Can Improve Your Lead Nurturing Process

5. Reducing Customer Churn

One of the big challenges businesses face is that of customer churn, which refers to the number of customers that you lose over time. Existing customers are important to keep as they are who you will get the majority of your revenue from. Using automation, you can notify marketing or sales personnel if an existing customer in your system hasn’t been engaged with for a specific period of time. This will allow you to reach out to them in an effort to reduce customer churn. Using automation in such a way can help keep you from losing customers.

6. Monitoring  Analytics

Tracking the performance of your marketing efforts as well as of your marketing and sales teams is essential to being able to improve your marketing and sales strategies. Using automation, you can ensure that your teams have access to dashboards that display up-to-date metrics and KPIs. You can even automate the creation of and distribution of reports on specific dates for your stakeholders.

7. Improving Customer Service And Engagement

Both prospects and customers are constantly providing new data to your business, requiring you to update your customer profiles regularly. Unfortunately, doing so can be a challenge, which can lead to subpar customer service and engagement. For example, if a customer has an issue with a service and contacts customer support several times, a lack of an updated profile will require that customer to go over their issue over and over again, which will frustrate them greatly. Through CRM automation, you are able to unite the customer data from all your channels to one location. You can even automate the creation of new customer profiles the moment a new lead is available.

Professional service marketing automation isn’t just about improving productivity and efficiency, although automation tools do help in this manner. Automation can also help to improve your ability to engage and nurture your leads. As a result, it can help make your marketing strategy more cost-effective as well. These are seven examples of how you can use professional service marketing automation to enhance your marketing efforts.

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6 Essential Steps to Healthcare Content Marketing

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When it comes to healthcare and wellness, roughly 80 percent of people tend to use search engines like Google to find information and advice. As a healthcare provider, you should take advantage of this by investing in a robust healthcare content marketing strategy. By implementing a good healthcare content marketing strategy, you’ll not only be able to establish yourself as a healthcare authority, which will help to earn more trust amongst potential patients, but you’ll be able to generate more leads as well. Keeping that in mind, the following are six healthcare content marketing tactics that you should leverage in order to improve engagement with potential patients.

1. Write A Blog Focusing On Your Niche

A website blog is one of the easiest ways to produce and publish informative content on a regular basis that can help to attract new leads as well as keep existing leads coming back. Create content that focuses on medical information relevant to your niche. In fact, by focusing on your niche. you’re more likely to attract your target audience. For example, if you’re a general health practitioner, then writing a blog post on steps to take to avoid the coronavirus is relevant to your practice. However, if you’re a dental practice, such a post is not relevant to your medical niche. Make sure that the content you create is helpful and informative to your specific audience.

2. Post Patient Testimonials On Your Website

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Building trust is absolutely essential to the success of a healthcare marketing strategy in general. Since new patients are putting their health in your hands, you will need to find ways to build that trust. While creating high-quality content can go a long way in building trust, you should also create patient testimonials. Patient testimonials are essentially positive reviews from previous patients. Potential patients are going to be much more at ease if they see that you have a lot of patients who had a good experience with your healthcare services.

Set up a dedicated patient testimonial page on your site so that it’s easy to find. Although you can simply post written comments from past patients, you should consider creating patient testimonial videos, which are even more effective.

3. Introduce Your Team Of Healthcare Professionals

Being able to put a face (or faces) to your healthcare business is going to help make potential customers feel much more comfortable about scheduling an appointment or contacting you. After all, it’s not knowing about what they’re getting into that tends to put people ill at ease. With that in mind, flesh out your about page with content about your healthcare professionals. For example, a photograph of each doctor along with a short background paragraph can make a big difference. If you want to go the extra mile, post a video interview with each one of your doctors (or main healthcare providers).

Similar Article: 5 Key Healthcare Marketing Strategies to Implement in 2020

4. Create Interactive Content

The majority of people who are searching for healthcare-related content are looking for information that pertains to their own health. As such, creating interactive content can help you to address their needs more effectively. For example, health assessments and quizzes allow them to go over their symptoms in order to get a general idea about their current health. This type of content tends to be highly engaging, not to mention that it can lead to more appointments being scheduled as well.

5. Establish A Relatable Brand Personality

In order for potential patients to be able to trust you, they have to feel like they know you. While fleshing out your about page can help, it’s also important that you establish a brand personality that they can connect with on a more personal level. If your content is too dry and has no personality, it will feel like they’re just getting information from a textbook. You want it to feel like they are getting information from one of your healthcare professionals. Keep this in mind when creating your content. Additionally, get your personality across by interacting with leads directly. Whether through a live chat feature, on the comment section of your blog, or on social media.

6. Analyze The Performance Of Your Content

Monitor the performance of your content over time using analytics. Track metrics such as page rankings, traffic generated, traffic generated by source, click-through-rates, social signals, backlinks earned, and conversion rates. This will allow you to identify content that’s performing well so that you can make adjustments to improve your healthcare content marketing strategy over time.

These are just six tactics that you should focus on when implementing a healthcare content marketing strategy. With an effective healthcare content marketing strategy, you’ll find that your ability to attract new patients and to engage with them will improve significantly over time. As a result, there will be more leads, brand awareness, and an increase in brand trust.

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