direct vs indirect marketing 1

Direct vs Indirect Marketing

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You may not realize it, but all marketing efforts can be categorized in one of two ways — direct marketing or indirect marketing. On the surface, direct vs. indirect marketing is relatively easy to understand.

Difference Between Direct and Indirect Marketing

Direct marketing involves engaging with leads or customers directly. For example, sending a customer an email that contains a promotional offer. Indirect marketing is a strategy in which you put yourself in a position to be found by leads. Consequently, allowing them to engage with you instead of just directly engaging them. For example, writing a post on your website’s blog. Which leads can find through external links or through a search engine, is a form of indirect marketing.

Both direct marketing and indirect marketing can be effective strategies. However, to make sure that you implement them effectively, it’s important that you not only understand what the advantages of using each are, but also what the potential disadvantages are of direct vs indirect marketing.

Direct Marketingdirect vs indirect marketing 2

Direct marketing includes a number of traditional marketing strategies that everyone is familiar with. For example TV commercials are a form of direct marketing. So are billboards, magazine ads, radio ads, and telemarketing. That’s not to say that digital marketing can’t be direct. For example, email marketing and PPC advertising are also forms of direct marketing. You’re essentially trying to find and address a specific audience — and you’re trying to get them to take action right away. The following are some of the advantages to such a strategy:

Advantages

  • You can identify specific audience segments, thereby allowing you to connect with people who are likely interested in your product or service already. For example, if you run a TV commercial, you can choose a time slot on a channel that you know your audience is watching.
  • If you know the audience you’re addressing, then you can personalize your messages, thereby allowing you to nurture leads and build stronger relationships. For example, using the data you have to segment your email list allows you to send more relevant content to your recipients.
  • The data you collect from your direct marketing efforts is more measurable. For example, you can track your email response rate to determine how effective your direct marketing strategy is and to make adjustments accordingly.

While there are plenty of advantages to implementing certain direct marketing techniques, there are some potential drawbacks as well. These can include the following:

Disadvantages

  • If you’re too overzealous, your direct marketing efforts may cross privacy boundaries and may even come off as spam, which will hurt your brand reputation.
  • You have to have an understanding of who your audience is and where you can find them. Otherwise, you may be advertising to people who aren’t interested in your brand, which is a waste of time and money.
  • Your overall reach won’t be as widespread since direct marketing requires you to focus in on a specific audience to be effective.

30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips

Indirect Marketing

Indirect marketing is essentially marketing in which you’re not trying to sell a specific product or service. For example, content creation in the form of a blog of email newsletter are forms of indirect marketing. A lot of social media marketing is indirect as well. For example, if you’re simply engaging in discussions or posting links to informative articles. The idea behind indirect marketing is that you’re nurturing relationships, building brand authority, and generating brand awareness. The following are some of the advantages of indirect marketing:

Advantages

  • You provide value to your customers without coming off as self-serving, which helps to build your brand reputation and increase brand trust.
  • Indirect marketing is typically much less expensive than direct marketing.
  • Indirect marketing is a long-term strategy, which means that your efforts will continue to have an impact throughout the future. For example, you might write a blog post that someone reads years later.

As beneficial as indirect marketing is, there are a couple of disadvantages when compared to direct marketing. These disadvantages include the following:

Disadvantages

  • Tracking performance is more difficult. This is because you’re not honing in on specific customers — you’re casting a wider net.
  • Indirect marketing efforts may not have an instant impact — it may take some time before they begin drawing in new customers. As such, it can be frustrating not to see an immediate impact on sales.
  • Because it’s a long-term strategy, indirect marketing requires constant attention. Whereas direct marketing tactics can work on their own, indirect marketing functions as a whole. This means that you need to be constantly working at it. There’s basically no end in sight.

You are now well aware of the differences between direct and indirect marketing.

As you can see, when it comes to direct vs indirect marketing, both direct marketing and indirect marketing have their share of advantages and disadvantages. Instead of choosing one over the other, the best course of action is to use a combination of both direct and indirect marketing. This will allow you to see both short-term and long-term results, especially if you’re careful when it comes to avoiding the potential drawbacks that both strategies can present when used improperly.

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smart goal examples

5 SMART Goal Example For Business Development

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A smart goal is basically what the acronyms from the name suggest. It is specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant and time bound. The Smart Goal process provides a frame where you can create a long term goal. It also provides a time limit for you to work on the same goal. By doing this business’ are 70% more successful in achieving their goals thanks to regular check-ins, updates and group accountability. Below are a few smart goal examples for business development that will help you understand the system better and enhance your business.

Smart Goal Examples for Business

  • “I Want To Increase My Profits”
  • “I Want To Improve My Response Time to Customer Complaints”
  • “I Want To Improve My Employee Retention”
  • “I Want To Be More Efficient In My Business Operations”
  • “I Want To Grow My Business Operation”

“I Want To Increase My Profits”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will increase revenue while cutting down on expenditure. Moving to a more affordable premise that will cut my rent by 7% will reduce the operational costs.

Measurable: I will increase sales over the next 3 months by signing in 5 more potential clients.

Attainable: I will improve my current customer relationships and promote the business through referrals, networking and through social networks. This will help me find more leads and therefore see to an increase in revenue for the business.

Relevant: moving to a cheaper establishment will reduce the operational cost of my business and therefore give room to the growth of profits.

Time-bound: I will have increased my profit by the end of the coming three months.

“I Want To Improve My Response Time to Customer Complaints”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will improve the response time to customer complaints by increasing my customer service staff from 3 to 8 in the next one year.

Measurable: the increase in customer service staff is scheduled to take place within one year. It should bring the number to a total of 8.

Attainable: as I plan on moving to a new establishment I will ensure the place has enough room to accommodate the additional staff members I intend to have in the next one year.

Relevant: I will find ways to manage the complaints meanwhile in order to maintain the customer base I have and strive to grow the client base even further to match the additional customer service staff.

Time-bound: I will have hired the customer service staff by the end of one year

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“I Want To Improve My Employee Retention”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will improve the employee turnover by 15% in 90 days by putting up training for the new employees to let them know what is expected of them and have a program for them to get used to the operation systems. I will also have one-on-one meetings with employees so that I get to know what challenges they could be facing.

Measurable: the improvement in employee turnover is scheduled to be by about 15% and should take place within 90 days.

Attainable: trainings and one-on-one meetings will ensure the employees are prepared for what is expected of them when they get into production. It also give me a hint of what’s on their mind concerning general operations of the business.

Relevant: outstanding employees will be put up for a reward system. For the ones that might be having a difficult time, there will be motivation trainings for encouragement.

Time-bound: employee turnover will have improved within 90 days

“I Want To Be More Efficient In My Business Operations”

smart goal examples
Specific: I will improve my efficiency in business operations by challenging my sales department to increase their closing ratio from its current 45% to at least 60%. They could also work on improving the delivery time from 72hours to at least 12hours maximum.

Measurable: the sales people are supposed to increase their closing ratio from 45% to 60% and the delivery time improved to 12 hours from the initial 72hours

Attainable: I will conduct a survey to find out what both the clients and the sales team think about the idea. I will implement it as soon as the idea passes as valid.

Relevant: increasing the number of motorbikes and pickups that will do courier services for us will help make the plan a success

Time-bound: this should happen in one year.

“I Want To Grow My Business Operation”


Specific: open three more branches countrywide within five years

Measurable: the objective is to increase operations and revenue for the business. This will, in turn, facilitate the growth to three more branches.

Attainable: increasing my current selling space by 25% will mean more production. This can help me save for the planned growth to 4 branches countrywide.

Relevant: increasing production, operations and revenue will mean a larger client base thus the need for more branches will not be a wasteful idea after all.

Time-bound: establishing the branches should be within the next five years.

How Smart Goals Should Align With Your Business Goals

As much as an organization will work to ensure that its business goals are smart, they will never be flawless. It is, however, essential to ensure they give their teams tasks within their capability and make decisions using accurate data from their past operations while setting new smart business goals. The rest will work out just fine.

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Choosing HubSpot CRM As Your CRM Solution

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If any business wishes to collect customer data, monitor customer interactions, and ensure that their marketing and sales teams are properly aligned, it is necessary to have a CRM (customer relation management) platform. However, there are a lot of different CRM software solutions to choose from. For good reason, HubSpot CRM tends to be one of the more popular options. The following six reasons are why you should consider implementing HubSpot CRM into your marketing strategy:

Why To Choose HubSpot CRM As Your CRM Solution?

1. HubSpot is Available For Free

When comparing CRM solutions, you’ll find that most of them cost money. Although many of these solutions have free trials or even free versions, they are often limited in their number of usable or accessible features. HubSpot provides its CRM solution for free. While they do have paid versions available with added features, the free version is absolutely packed with features and almost no limitations. For example, your HubSpot CRM platform will be accessible to unlimited users, and stores upwards of one million contacts.

Similar Article: Using HubSpot Lead Flows to Improve Conversion Rates

2. HubSpot is Packed With Features

For a free CRM, you’ll be surprised at the number of beneficial features you can use. These include a standard dashboard, ticketing, tasks, deals, email scheduling, upwards of five email templates, team email, live chat, conversational bots, external form tracking, pop-up forms, company records, contact management, contact and company insights, and more. 

3. HubSpot is Scalable

As expected,  your business will grow over time. Therefore, whatever CRM solution you implement, you should make sure that it can handle significant increases in customer data. Even HubSpot’s free version is capable of doing this. It is, after all, able to handle upwards of one million contacts. This is enough for even the world’s biggest corporations. Should your business expand to the point where you need added functionality, you’ll probably be at the point where your budget has no problem accommodating one of HubSpot’s paid versions.

4. HubSpot Can Be Easily Integrated

Due to HubSpot CRM being designed to integrate with a wide range of applications,  you should have no issue integrating it with your existing marketing technology stack. Some of the other applications that HubSpot CRM can be integrated with include Dropbox, Gmail, Outlook, MailChimp, WordPress, Salesforce, Facebook, and more.

Similar Article: What Are The Benefits of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

5. HubSpot is Extremely Intuitive

Next, HubSpot CRM was designed to be user-friendly. Your team members can easily obtain the data and functionality they need, as a result of the intuitive menus containing only the most useful elements. Additionally, the dashboards make it easy to align your marketing and sales goals, along with establishing who is responsible for what, and identifying the current state of your marketing and sales efforts in real time.

attraction marketing

6. HubSpot Will Improve Conversions

Finally, HubSpot provides tools that allow for tracking leads as they navigate your website. You can monitor what actions they take to determine how ready they are to be engaged. In fact, this makes HubSpot particularly effective for both marketing and sales teams. Your sales personnel will be able to identify the highest quality leads, and use information gathered by your marketing team. Subsequently, this will help them nurture the lead and close the sale (such as what products the lead has viewed the most, for example).

Even if you’re running a smaller to mid-sized company, you will not want to go without a CRM platform for long. Implementing a CRM solution is going to make your marketing and sales efforts much more efficient and, therefore, effective. As far as CRM solutions go, you can’t go wrong with HubSpot CRM. This highly advantageous CRM tool understandably continues to be one of the most popular options on the market.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Using HubSpot Lead Flows To Improve Conversion Rates

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There’s a common misconception that some businesses that pop-ups are always a bad idea. While it’s true that pop-up ads can be annoying, especially if they are disrupting the visitor’s website experience, they can also be very effective if you know how to implement them properly. For example, you’ll want to refrain from having pop-ups on every page of your site as this will probably annoy your visitors.

However, a strategically placed pop-up can actually make it easier to convert your leads. In fact, a recent study showed that pop-ups convert 1375 percent better than traditional opt-in forms. If you do decide to use pop-ups in an attempt to convert leads, then you should be sure to use HubSpots’s Lead Flow feature.

What Is Lead Flow?

Lead Flows are HubSpot’s version of pop-up ads. Lead Flows can be accessed in both free and premium versions of HubSpot and allow you to create custom pop-ups that will help you to engage visitors, increased web leads, and reconvert returning visitors. Not to mention that through the use of Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to collect contact insights and analytics, making it easier to nurture the leads that you’ve captured.

What Types Of Lead Flows Are There?

There is more than one type of pop-up, and Lead Flows offers a variety of different types that you can customize to fit your needs. This includes the following:

  • Traditional Pop-Up Boxes – Traditional pop-ups are the best way to immediately get the attention of your visitors and are a good way to promote new content offers, grow your email list, highlight specific pieces of content on your site, and to promote your social presence.
  • Drop-Down Banners – Drop-down banners appear as thin, full-width bars near the top of your page. Although direct, they aren’t as disruptive as pop-up ads. They’re great for sales and special offers, growing your blog subscribers list, and promoting upcoming events or webinars.
  • Side-In-Boxes – Side-in boxes are ads that slide in at the bottom left or right side of your page. They’re more subtle than other types of Lead Flows and are effective for promoting content offers or growing your blog subscribers list.

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

What Are The Lead Flow Triggers?

Instead of just having ads pop-up on every page, you can trigger your Lead Flows to appear based on certain actions that the visitor takes. This allows you to pinpoint what actions are more likely to result in a conversion, thereby allowing you to strategically present the visitor with a Lead Flow at an appropriate time. The following are the three types of triggers that you can set for your Lead Flows:website redesign process

  • Browser Exit Trigger – You can trigger the execution of a pop-up Lead Flow when a visitor exits their browser window. This gives you a last chance to capture leads who haven’t converted as they leave your site.
  • Elapsed Time Trigger – You can also set certain Lead Flows to trigger based on how much time the visitor has been on a certain page. The minimum amount of time you can set a Lead Flow trigger to is seven seconds.
  • 50 Percent Page Scroll – Last of all, you can trigger your Lead Flows when a visitor has scrolled past the halfway mark of a page (which shows that they are interested in the content of that page and are more likely to convert as a result).

There are plenty of other customization options available. For example, while pop-ups may be effective for website visitors, they may hurt the experience of mobile users. As a result, you can disable your Lead Flows for mobile visitors. By using HubSpot’s Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to track the leads who have filled out your Lead Flows. This makes it easy to follow up and to develop your strategy to ensure that your leads are being nurtured.

Contrary to popular belief, pop-ups can be effective if they are used appropriately and strategically. The best way to leverage pop-ups is through the use of HubSpot’s Lead Flows feature, which provides a variety of customization options to ensure that you can reach your leads without disrupting their website experience.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Media Mix Marketing: What Is It and What Are the Benefits?

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The marketing world is dynamic. New marketing tactics and trends constantly change how businesses market themselves. Consequently, marketers have embraced media mix marketing. Statistics show a 14% growth rate in digital marketing budget spending between 2020 and 2021 across industries. Besides, forecasts show a digital marketing annual growth rate of 9% from 2020 to 2026.

These figures encompass a mix of media marketing strategies available today. Businesses no longer rely on a single media marketing tactic to achieve their objectives. They can leverage a media mix marketing strategy for more versatility and visibility than traditional marketing methods.

Understanding Media Mix Marketing

Media mix marketing is a crucial part of business marketing and advertising. It combines all the channels a company can use to achieve its marketing goals and boost the branding message. It entails both online and offline media, such as the following:

  • The business’ website and social media channels
  • Email marketing
  • TV ads
  • Radio ads
  • Newspapers
  • Billboards
  • Direct mail

Leveraging a marketing media mix is a practical and effective way of reaching a wider audience. Besides, a media mix enables a brand to try new things confidently. For example, you may have tried to promote your brand through digital displays and seen results.

However, you may be interested in trying TV ads to test the response while keeping a safety net. Digital advertising isn’t static, so you must evolve your strategy to keep up with the competition.

Benefits of a Media Mix Marketing

One benefit of media mix marketing is enabling you to deliver the right marketing message to your audience. For example, if you want to target a broad market across the country, a media mix of national newspapers, television, and radio may be the right fit.

To reach a specific group of decision-makers, a mix of media marketing might include specialists’ magazines or exhibitions specifically for that target audience. Direct mail or a briefing session could be more effective for a smaller target audience of decision-makers.

Better Returns on Investment (ROI)

A compelling media mix can improve your business ROI while enabling you to test new campaigns. It prevents you from putting all your marketing or advertising budget in one place or relying on one method to reach a broad audience.

You can determine the best-performing method and invest more to balance out the underperforming ones for a better ROI. You can decide whether to optimize or eliminate ineffective marketing methods depending on the outcome.

Creates a Strong Brand Message

When you consistently use a combination of media channels to promote your company, you enhance your chances of creating a consistent brand. Sharing your brand logo, colors, message, and tone across different media platforms makes it easier for people to recognize it.

Better Understanding of Market Trends

As you try to mix different marketing techniques, you gain a better understanding of what other brands are doing in the market. You also learn how different channels affect your business and how trends keep changing with time. Creating new marketing strategies that work best for your brand is easy with this knowledge.

Improved Planning Through Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics provides more insights into what the future of an organization’s marketing efforts looks like. Combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can account for many variables, such as seasonality, industry trends, and the impact of advertising.

The data enables you to predict the effectiveness of campaigns for a clearer view of what to expect from your mixed media marketing strategy. It becomes easier to anticipate customers’ needs and desires for more personalized campaigns.

How to Choose the Best Media Mix?

When choosing a media mix, remember that the goal is to establish suitable communication channels to improve your customer base and sales. That is only achievable by paying attention to the following components of a marketing media mix:

  • People: Carefully consider the audience you want to reach with your messaging through your media mix. Do you want to reinforce a specific message to your existing customers or test a new market segment? Your marketing objectives can largely influence your decision.
  • Product: What do you intend to sell or market through your chosen channels? How effectively can you demonstrate what it offers through your preferred medium to fill a market gap?
  • Place: Place is the location where customers can purchase your product or service. While this may be a physical store, your mix of media marketing may comprise your social media platforms and website as the place where customers can buy.
  • Price: As you mix your media marketing channels, you can quickly determine the price in several ways, including factoring in the cost of the media mix. Remember to include other expenses like labor and distribution.

Ultimately, getting your media mix right requires carefully thinking through the strategies based on your budget, brand, product, audience, unique selling proposition, and in-house skills. Some tips to help you along the way are the following:

  • Consider your primary marketing goals
  • Think through the marketing funnel as different channels are effective at various points of the buyer persona journey.
  • Invest heavily in tracking and analytics to gauge the impact of each marketing channel.
  • Ensure you monitor the same metrics across the various marketing channels.
  • Validate the lessons you pick along the way by optimizing your media mix.
  • Analyze your target audience based on their pain points, location, demographics, and preferences.
  • Harmonize your mixed media marketing channels to boost your ROI.

Getting Started with Your Media Mix Marketing Strategy

With 84% of media planners already leveraging a media mix marketing and getting positive results, there’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same to boost your brand. Determining the best mix may be an uphill task, but not impossible. Analytics tools are available to help you improve and fine-tune the mix. Once you establish how changes in the blend affect the results, you can reallocate your budget to enhance the mix for better marketing performance.

6 Best Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

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As you may already know, Facebook Ads can be a very effective advertising platform, especially when you consider its overall cost-effectiveness (it’s a pay-per-click advertising platform, after all) and the ability to target audiences based on a variety of criteria (from demographics to location to interests and more). Facebook Ads has a lot of features that you’ll want to take advantage of, including their Facebook Video Ads feature.

6 Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

The following are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to implement:

1. Get Your Message Across Immediately

Don’t just assume that your viewers will stick around until the end of your video ads. According to Microsoft, around 19 percent of online viewers lose interest in video content after 10 seconds. Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to get to the point as quickly as possible so that your viewers know why they are watching. Try to get your message across in the first ten seconds.

2. Optimize Videos For Lack Of Sound

A lot of people watch videos with their sound off. You want your videos to not only get the message across even if they’re silent, but to engage the viewer to the point that they will turn the sound on. To optimize for the lack of sound, show captions, add text overlay, and be sure to use powerful, moving images.

Video Ad FB

3. Keep Mobile Videos Short

Although some viewers may be more willing to watch a longer video ad on their desktops, this is not so for mobile users. Mobile users are often on the go, which means that they’re not going to have the patience to watch a video that’s minutes long. Try to keep videos under 15 seconds long to help ensure that mobile users actually watch your whole video.

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

4. Customize Thumbnail Images

Many Facebook users will turn off autoplay on videos. However, just because some people won’t see your video ads play automatically doesn’t mean that they won’t watch them. You need to spark their interest by choosing a thumbnail image, which is a static image representing your video. Facebook will provide a number of options of still images that it pulls from your video ad. However, you’re not limited to these options–you can also upload a custom thumbnail instead. Make sure the image you use is of high quality and that it’s relevant to your ad.

5. Test Your Video Ads

To make sure your Facebook Video Ads perform to the best of their ability, perform A/B testing. You can create several versions of your video ads through Facebook by changing the creative, the placement, the product set, optimization events, and the audience. Test your ads for three to 14 days to get the most accurate results. Use the results to optimize your video ads so, thereby increasing their chances of performing successfully.

How Facebook Advertising Helps You

6. Analyze Performance

Make sure to analyze your video ads as you run them. The data you collect should help you when it comes to creating future video ads. For example, track which video ads had the highest levels of engagement, what times of the day your audience engaged with your videos, how many viewers visited your landing page after viewing a video ad, which videos were watched from beginning to end, and more.

Considering how effective video marketing is in general, you should be sure to take advantage of Facebook’s Video Ad feature. These are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to take note of before launching a video ad campaign on Facebook.

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Improving User Experience With Good Website Navigation Design

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It’s not a stretch to say that your website is one of — if not the — most important element of your inbound marketing strategy. Without it, there’s very little that you can do. Because of this, it’s essential to make sure that poor web design doesn’t frustrate your visitors. Content quality will not mean as much if visitors have trouble viewing your pages or finding what they’re looking for. This is why you need to make sure you focus on creating a user-friendly website navigation design.

Making Your Website Easy To Navigate

When someone visits your website, no matter how they got there, you’ll want them to spend as much time on it as possible. The more they engage with your site, the easier it becomes to nurture and eventually convert them. As such, you’ll want to make navigation through your website easy. Good website navigation design makes it easy to find links to your site’s main pages, as well as  being able to navigate to those individual pages, conveniently. Awareness Stage

Even if you do have a navigation bar with drop-down menus, it is important to note that most users, today, tend to prefer scrolling.  They’ve become accustomed to scrolling because of the way most social media channels work. Therefore, instead of  visitors clicking through your drop-down menu, a scrollable menu allows them to simply move their mouse over the menu to make it automatically drop-down. This way, they don’t have to click three or four times to get to the page they want to go to. Alternatively, they can just scroll through their options until they find the actual page they want to click on.

It’s a better idea to keep content on one page instead of breaking it up on multiple pages. Even if it’s a long-form piece, forcing the user to click on buttons at the end of each page that says continue to page 2, page 3, etc., is a hassle. Since they have to click to get to the next page, in addition to waiting for that page to load as well. Simply allowing them to scroll through the entire article will make your page more user-friendly.

Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company? 

Tips for Good Website Navigation Design

The following are a few more examples of how you can create a good website navigation design that will improve your user experience:

Use a responsive design – Your website navigation design may be well thought out for your desktop users, but it may not translate well to mobile devices. This happens due to the fact that most websites use a horizontal design, whereas screens on mobile devices are vertical. By using a responsive design, your navigation menu can be designed to turn into a mobile friendly hamburger-style menu.

Incorporate breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs allow users to see what links they have followed to get to the page they are on. This makes it easy for them to backtrack to a previous page they were on if they got lost going through your site.

Link logo to your homepage – Make sure that the logo at the top of your page links to your homepage. This makes it easy for visitors to go back to the beginning, without searching for a link to your homepage.

Always display a link to your contact page – Displaying your contact information at the top of your page along with a link to your contact page makes you easier to reach.

Make links easy to click for mobile – Use buttons for CTAs that are easy for people to click on when using mobile devices.

Do You Need to Redesign Your Website

When designing your website, make sure that you carefully consider your website navigation design. Easy to use and clear navigation will help to improve your user experience, thereby making it easier to keep visitors engaged and on your website.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales
website redesign process

Components Of Web Design That Will Modernize Your Website

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In today’s age, keeping your website up to date is incredibly important if you want to remain competitive and maintain visibility. Having a modern, compelling website can open doors for your company and transform your user’s experience in a positive way. Here are the following components of web design that will modernize your website:

Top 5 Components Of Web Design To Modernize Your Website

1. Minimal Design

In some cases, especially when it comes to your website, less is considered more. Exactly what it sounds like, minimal design provides users with a greater sense of clarity and focus when visiting your site. This type of modern design makes your website more user friendly and will make navigating your website much easier for visitors; it will also encourage users to focus more strongly on important details on your website like your content. The less distractions on your site, the better you’ll be at converting leads. Minimal design also helps your company appear more professional.

2. Mobile Friendly


Accessing the Internet from a mobile device has become second nature to a majority of folks. Making your website mobile friendly is absolutely critical if you want to be able to communicate your brand’s value to a wider audience. By having a mobile friendly website, you’ll be able to access a greater number of potential customers, resulting in an increase in profits.

3. Clean Design Typography

Choosing the right typography for your website is not something you should take lightly, as it helps communicate to consumers what kind of brand you are. If you want to appear as a modern, forward-thinking brand, you should stick to using web-standard fonts that can easily be interpreted by everyone. But according to HubSpot, if you’re struggling to set your brand apart from competitors, you might want to consider using a unique font to help visitors identify you from the crowd. Modernizing your website also means avoiding using an excessive amount of colored fonts, making sure your line-spacing is suitable to improve readability, and using an appropriate text size (usually 16px).

4. Full-Screen Background Videos


Visitors won’t always want to read large chunks of text and since our brains process videos much faster than text anyways, incorporating a background video on your website is a smart way to share your brand’s story without having to overwhelm your visitors with loads of text. Having a video on your website will not only intrigue visitors but will also encourage them to click through to the main video. Adding a background video is not difficult and can be achieved by hard coding on HTML and CSS, or by using plugins.

Types Of Marketing Video You Should Use

5. Hero Images

Google Trends foresees hero images to increase in popularity as a modern website design idea. Hero images are large banners that appear above or below the fold, or in the background with content overlaid on top of it. Hero images are great to help build a connection with visitors, and instead of drawing your visitor’s attention to social buttons or a CTA, using an image with text will encourage your visitors to want to scroll down to see more of your website. They also work to communicate your company’s story without adding a lot of text.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales

Why TV Advertising Remains Effective

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Over the past decade, there has been the perception that inbound marketing tactics, such as publishing blog content and expanding brand recognition by maintaining a strong social media presence, has eclipsed many outbound marketing tactics; however, this isn’t altogether true. Businesses are still having a lot of success with outbound marketing, especially TV advertising. The following are a few reasons why television ads can still play an effective part of your marketing campaign.

People Still Watch TV

While it’s true that many people (especially younger people) are spending more of their time watching streaming services, that doesn’t mean that there’s no audience to reach via TV advertising. Plenty of people still watch TV even though viewership has declined over the past decade. In fact, according to a UK study done last year, people still watch an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes of TV a day.

People Watch Live TV

While streaming services are attempting to build up their content libraries, there is one area in which they still lag behind TV, and that’s in the realm of live TV–specifically, sports. Live sports games broadcast on TV are still an enormous draw and an excellent way to reach certain audiences. Just take for example the Super Bowl, which allows a 30-second ad to reach roughly 100 million viewers. There’s something immediate and social about live TV that few streaming services have managed to replicate.

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TV Can Benefit Inbound Marketing Strategies

The use of TV advertising can actually compliment your inbound activities. For example, you can use hashtags in your ads or display website addresses to encourage viewers to seek out more information online — something that’s easy for viewers to do since they often watch TV with their smartphones or tablets on hand.

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TV Will Never Die, It Will Evolve

Abandoning television advertising simply because you think it’s on the way out is not a good idea. Viewership may be trending down slightly and streaming channels may still be figuring out ways to eclipse their TV counterparts (for example, Amazon recently begun streaming NFL games), but that doesn’t mean TV is dying. An industry as big as TV doesn’t just go away–it evolves.

One of the reasons why streaming services are so popular is because they provide more customizability to their viewers. Viewers get to choose what they want to watch from the content that lives on each streaming platform instead of being forced to watch whatever’s programmed at certain times. TV has been resisting change for some time, but it won’t be long that the way TV works evolves; for example, once channels become available piecemeal (which seems inevitable) instead of grouped in packages, people will have much more control over what they’re paying for. This will also benefit advertisers since you’ll be able to more effectively target your demographics.

These are just a few reasons that you should still be investing in TV advertising as it remains and will most likely always remain an effective marketing technique.

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5 Holiday Email Templates for Salespeople

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When it comes to email marketing, you should always welcome the opportunity to do something a little bit different. Changing it up is a great way to keep it fresh and to keep your leads interested. One of the best times to do this is during the holiday season. The following are five email templates that you can use to send out emails appropriate for the holiday season that will help boost your open rate and that will engage your audience through email:

1. Gift Guide Email

Sending out a gift guide email is an excellent way to reach prospects who are still in the early stages of their customer journey. A gift guide email gives you the chance to stay in touch (and thereby, to stay on top of their minds) and to remind them who you are and what you have to offer. Using a gift guide format, you can list several of your products and services as well as how they might benefit the prospect. Considering the fact that the holiday season is very much gift-oriented, this is an appropriate way to connect with your prospects.

2. Discount Offer Email

Promotional content is not something that you want to send out too often, but it’s typically considered appropriate during the holidays due to the fact that it’s a very commercial season in which everyone is buying gifts. As such, it’s completely appropriate to send prospects discount opportunities to encourage them to purchase certain products or services. Avoid having your email come off as an advertisement by addressing the prospect in a more lighthearted manner (this tends to be okay to do during the holidays when people are less formal).

Email Opening Lines That Actually Work

3. Holiday Checklist Email

If you’re working on a deal with a prospect, then sending out a holiday checklist email is a great way to help them stay on track so that they won’t fall behind on deadlines. Reminding prospects about upcoming deadlines can be a challenging task, especially since you don’t want to sound pushy. Providing a “holiday checklist” that lists the dates and the milestones that they should reach on those dates is a great way to not only remind your prospect about upcoming deadlines, but to give them an overview of all of their milestones and deadlines that they can refer back to at any point.

4. Upselling Email

Trying to close new sales shouldn’t be your only priority. The holiday season is also a great time to revisit old customers. Using their purchasing history, suggest products or services that may appeal to them. Besides simply trying to upsell them, thank them for their previous purchase and offer a discount that shows them how thankful you are to have them as a customer.

5. Personal Thank You Email

Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to send out thank you emails to your prospects and clients. Not only will they appreciate a brief email that thanks them for working with you or taking an interest in your brand, but it’s also an excellent way to stay on top of their minds and to touch base with those who you haven’t heard from in a while.

These are five examples of email templates that can be quite successful during the holiday season. The holidays are an opportunity to not only be a little more playful with your email templates and to have the excuse to send out promotional material, but they are also a great opportunity for keeping your brand on the top of your audience’s minds and to stay in touch with both existing clients and prospects.

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