How to Improve Your Social Signals for SEO

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Social media has become a critical part of our lives, and businesses are taking notice. Today, the platform isn’t just a place to share memes and cat videos – it’s also a powerful tool for digital marketing. One key social media aspect often overlooked is its impact on SEO. Over the years, social signals have significantly impacted search engine (SE) rankings, and ignoring them could hurt your site’s visibility.

In the sections below, we’ll take a closer look at social signals, including how you can use them to boost your SEO efforts.

What are Social Signals?

These are people’s reactions to online content they interact with on social media channels. They include views, likes, dislikes, comments, shares, tweets, etc. The more responses a post receives, the more mainstream and popular it becomes.

social signals

Remaining visible on the internet is key to gaining more reactions. From an SEO standpoint, social signals can improve SE rankings and help individuals or businesses establish their identity, popularity, and reliability.

It’s worth noting that different platforms use different metrics to measure or categorize social signals. Before seeking user engagement and reactions, you need to understand how a given social media platform works.

Social Signals and SEO

Social signals tell more about a brand’s popularity and relevance on social media platforms. They play an important role in SEO optimization as they indicate the quality of content and generate traffic, which ultimately helps in ranking higher on search engines.

And while social signals are not an official ranking factor for Google, they do indirectly impact SEO performance. Social engagement, such as comments, likes, and shares, can increase the visibility of social posts, resulting in higher traffic and better SE rankings.

To improve social signals for SEO, you need to focus on visibility and brand awareness while posting on social media. You should also engage with your audience, share valuable content, and optimize your posts with relevant hashtags and keywords. We have covered these and more below.

Ways You Can Utilize Social Signals to Boost SEO

While social signals are just one factor in SEO, they are still an important aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Investing time and effort into social media engagement and optimization can improve your online visibility and ultimately drive more traffic to your website. Here are some crucial steps you can take today to improve social signals for SEO.

One obvious and most common way to improve your social signals is to link your site to all the social media pages. Linking your website to your social media pages will improve your online visibility and user experience.

By making it easy for users to find important URLs related to your brand, you’ll increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.

To ensure a smooth connection, place links to your social media pages in the footer of your website. This way, users won’t be distracted from your call-to-action buttons or lead-generation forms.

Publish Consistent Content Across Social Channels

Another less common yet effective way to boost your social signals is to stay consistent across social. Consistency in your brand voice and communication style allows you to build brand recognition and a loyal following.

updating social media

Understanding your audience’s demographics and interests will help you choose the right tone of voice and content that resonates with them. When creating and sharing content, aim to be relevant and authentic and ensure you verify the accuracy and ethics of the information you share.

Consistency in your posting schedule and visual aesthetics can also maximize your organic reach, helping you reinforce your brand identity and leave lasting impressions on customers.

Ensure Your Content is Shareable to Social

Adding social plugins is one way to ensure that your content is easily shareable. These plugins allow site visitors to share your content with friends and family on their social media accounts.

For instance, you can add social icons that stick as the user scrolls through blog posts. That way, you encourage users to share your content, increasing your site’s visibility and reach.

Remember that consumers are more than five times more likely to make a purchase recommended by a trusted friend or family than as a result of seeing an ad or influencer endorsing the product. So optimizing your content for social and making it more shareable can increase reach, brand awareness, and trust.

Stay Active on All Social Media Channels

To make the most out of social media marketing, you should stay active on all social media channels. Responding to comments and shares is a great way to show your followers that a real person runs your profile. This also makes them feel more connected to your brand.

By actively engaging with users, you create more opportunities to share relevant links to your website and increase traffic. If you’re too busy to manage your social media accounts, consider hiring a marketing manager or outsourcing your social media tasks to an agency.

Don’t forget to listen and digest what people say about your brand. You should also respond constructively to any criticism you receive.

Foster partnerships By Sharing Other People’s Content

In today’s digital age, building strong partnerships is one of the organic growth strategies you should adopt. One way to achieve this is by sharing other people’s content. Here, you not only show support for your peers, but you also establish yourself as an active member of your community.

If you do this properly, i.e., retweeting, thanking, and reposting content on social you can form partnerships and increase engagement with peers. In turn, this could lead to more shares and likes from the same accounts in the future, ultimately growing your reach and strengthening your business relationships.

Get Started Today

Taking your SEO game and the overall digital marketing strategy to the next level takes time and effort. The strategies we have highlighted above aren’t exhaustive but will give you an idea of what to tweak to boost your social media marketing.

Before taking any action, ensure you set realistic goals and have some means to monitor your efforts and track the results. As long as you are doing the right thing, it’s never too late to act.

The Buyer's Journey

What is The Buyer’s Journey?

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The general goal of every business is to attract consumers and turn them into customers. The process that a consumer goes through before they make a purchase is known as the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey has become a lot more complex over the years, especially since the advent of Internet. This is because consumers no longer rely on businesses to hold their hands and to guide them through their buyer’s journey. As a result of digital media, consumers can now navigate much of their buyer’s journey on their own. This also means that everyone’s buyer’s journey is different.

As a business, you will need to meet the needs of the consumer as they move through their buyer’s journey. You’ll need to be able to do this at every stage of their journey in a passive manner until they are ready to be engaged. This may seem like a challenge, but it’s what the entire concept of inbound marketing is built around.

We will be going over the different stages of the buyer’s journey, but before we do, it’s important to understand exactly what the buyer’s journey is and why it’s so important.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

The buyer’s journey is the process a consumer goes through to research a product and to come to a decision to make a purchase. The buyer’s journey typically begins when a consumer realizes that they have a problem but don’t know what the solution to that problem is. For example, maybe they’ve stained their white carpeting with wine. They don’t know what the best solution is for getting wine stains out of their carpeting, so they will begin doing research online.

This research usually begins with a simple search on Google or other search engines. They will read up on possible solutions through articles and blog posts or view videos on the subject. Through this research, they will learn what products can help solve their problem. They will read up on the different products offered by different brands. The buyer will look into those brands to determine how reputable they are based on a variety of factors. They may contact that brand directly, download a free offer, or sign up to an email list through the course of their research.

The Buyers Journey Explained Stage By Stage

At this point, you would begin building a relationship with them by nurturing them through the sales funnel. At the end of the sales funnel, once they’ve reached the end of the buyer’s journey, they will make their decision and choose a product to buy. This process is split into three main stages:

  • Awareness stage – During this stage, the buyer realizes that they have a problem. They will begin doing research to figure out exactly what their problem is and what the cause of their problem is.
  • Consideration stage – At this point, the buyer has defined their problem and its cause and are doing research into the possible solutions to their problem.
  • Decision stage – The buyer now knows what the solution to their problem is and are comparing products or services as well as different companies to identify the best solution.

The Importance of the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey may seem long, but the fact is, you’re meeting them halfway through it. The idea of inbound marketing is that you make available a wealth of valuable information (through different forms of content) allowing the consumer to do the majority of their initial research on their own.

However, this means that it’s extremely important that you understand every stage of the buyer’s journey. This is because you’ll want to make sure that you have content available that will be helpful and informative to the consumer no matter what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in or what channel they’re on. You will also need to be able to identify the stage of the buyer’s journey a consumer happens to be in so that you know when to engage with them.

The buyer’s journey consists of numerous stages that make up the research and decision-making process of a consumer. It is the process that the entire strategy of inbound marketing revolves around, which is why it’s so important that you understand what it is and why it’s important.

17 SEO MYTHS YOU SHOULD LEAVE BEHIND

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.

Utilizing PR Tools When Growing Your Company’s Brand Recognition

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Public relation is vital for a successful business marketing campaign. While marketing involves multiple bits and pieces, public relations ensure your target audience is receptive to your marketing messages by establishing higher brand recognition.

Successful public relations strategies can boost customer trust and convert potential customers into loyal followers. However, it’s critical to understand how PR works and how you can execute a successful campaign.

Define Your Value Proposition

Building an irresistible brand requires a unique value proposition that resonates with existing and potential customers. A value proposition defines your business and differentiates it from competitors.

The USP should focus on the target market, solutions to customer problems and overall benefits of your offer compared to the competition. Typically, brainstorming the answers reveals a pattern that helps you fine-tune the value proposition. The process requires diverse input to ensure the USP is unique and appealing.

Also, every business must formalize the offer in a mission and vision statement. While the documents may seem simple, organizations should strive to create a clear picture of their ideal brand. It can be hard to develop and cultivate a positive brand image without formal documents communicating your unique value proposition.

A refined value proposition helps you develop appropriate messages to promote to potential customers. Once you have a unique message, you can earn important media initiatives and boost brand recognition.

Establish Industry Thought Leadership to Gain Trust

Getting involved in your industry is critical for any business. You can start by identifying the media outlets and social media platforms your target audience uses and establish yourself as an industry expert. This way, media outlets, and journalists will want to tell your story.

Regardless of the size of your business, you can build brand recognition by dominating the news in your industry. In addition, it’s important to identify media outlets covering your industry and reach out when you have newsworthy announcements.

Getting your business featured in a popular industry trend can boost brand recognition even when multinational corporates dominate the landscape. For instance, a small financial organization can level the playing ground by securing consistent appearances in the media.

In addition, using public relations strategies to publish featured content can elevate your brand. However, scanty appearances may not be effective, so you may need to partner with a PR company to ensure consistent results.

collaborationCollaborate With Media Outlets

Building brand awareness requires positioning your company in front of your target audience. The digital landscape has made it easier to identify markets and effective media outlets for your campaigns. You can build a list of niche publications and media outlets focusing on your target audience.

And since PR is about relations, ensure your company introduction is attractive. Whether you want to appear in digital media or traditional advertising, ensure your offer is captivating to dominate the media.

Reporters get numerous pitches and story suggestions. Whenever your correspondent is interested in your story, act quickly by scheduling an interview or providing supporting information.

The goal is to establish your reputation as a media-friendly company that embraces reporters. Most media professionals are under enormous pressure to deliver results amidst resource cuts. Therefore, demonstrating your friendliness and collaboration traits can go a long way.

When a story has a high potential of creating brand awareness and benefiting your audience, make it easy and interesting to cover. Besides targeting the pitch to appropriate contacts, establishing great media relationships can help improve your PR strategy outcomes.

Studies show that 76% of journalists prefer brand press releases, and 57% want to get expert sources and data. Also, most journalists will quickly cover a brand story with multimedia.

Ensuring outstanding media collaboration means embracing targeted outreach with concise pitches. In addition, provide data and sources to back up new information.

Use Unique Stories to Highlight Your Brand’s Strengths

Your audience loves current and unique stories. Similarly, media outlets embrace timely stories with a unique twist told to the right audience.

Every business has a positive story about how its offers connect to the consumer and the pain points they serve. Therefore, focus on your brand’s users and find opportunities to craft stories highlighting your business and its solutions.

Regardless of the content, strive to educate your audience by contributing informative content on local press and websites. In addition, you can host a special event and shed light on trends and issues affecting your industry.

Alternatively, community activity sponsorships can be cost-effective opportunities for attracting attention from local media outlets. When you choose your media outlets well, experiential marketing and other events can boost your brand reputation over time.

Bottom Line

Successful PR programs may not be an overnight sensation, but long-term commitment can complement other marketing initiatives and ensure higher brand recognition. Since branding is critical in marketing, incorporating PR in your strategy can help your business establish industry authority and deeper customer connections.

Decision Stage

A Guide to the Decision Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

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After helping consumers learn about their problem and how they can solve it, you will want to present your product or service as the best option for that specific solution. It’s at this point that consumers are in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.

What Is The Decision Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey?

The decision stage of the buyer’s journey is the last stage, the stage in which you close the sale. However, there’s still work to be done. Although the consumer has decided on a solution by this stage, they have yet to decide on a product or service or the vendor that they will purchase from.

During the decision stage, they will be doing research into the products and services that they are considering as a solution to their pain point.  They will also research vendors that provide those products and services to determine if they are trustworthy. For example, if the consumer has decided to purchase a new computer, they may be looking to answer the following:

  • The pros and cons of different brand computers
  • The type of warranties offered by different computer vendors
  • The expected lifespan of different computer models
  • The different features of different computer models
  • Customer reviews of different computer vendors

Creating Content For The Decision Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey

You’ve done a massive amount of work to help nurture your leads through the first two stages of the buyer’s journey. You’ve done so by publishing a variety of different types of content addressing the awareness and consideration stages. At this point, you’re trying to get your leads over the finish line. This is why you need to have content that presents your brand as a trustworthy and reliable vendor and your product or service as the best option for their specific needs.

How do you drive website conversions throughout the buyer’s journey?

While this means that some of the content you’ll want to have available on various channels (from your website to social media to your emails) will need to be promotional, you can still provide more informative content as well. Types of content you’ll want to offer during this stage include downloadable white papers, case studies, use cases, which show off the benefits of your products or services. You’ll also want detailed product or service videos that include video demonstrations if possible.

Also, you will want to showcase exactly why they should choose to purchase from your business. This should be done by publishing customer reviews on your website and by encouraging reviews on social. You should consider creating customer testimonials as well–video testimonials tend to be extremely effective during this stage.

Creating Reasons to Choose Your Company

Last, but not least, give consumers a reason to choose your product or service over another brand. You can do so by offering a free trial of your product or service or a free consultation. This way they will get in touch with you. Services like Netflix and Amazon offer free 30-day trials. People jump on the chance to take advantage of such services for free and often end up purchasing the service in full at the end of their trial as a result.

The decision stage of the buyer’s journey is the third and last stage. You’ll want to encourage consumers to choose your company’s product or service by not only promoting your products and services, but also by informing the consumer about your products and services as well as about your company. The goal is to convince them that they can trust your brand. It’s also to show them that your product or service will meet their specific needs more so than any other option out there.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

How Creativity and Data Driven Marketing Help Develop Marketing Campaigns

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Not long ago, businesses simply didn’t have that much information to leverage when it came to crafting marketing campaigns. They could only draw conclusions about their audience from in-store information — as in, information on who bought what. Mostly, they just advertised to the audience that their products or services were initially intended for. A lot of their marketing effort came from the instincts of their advertising agency’s creative team. These days, advertising agencies have access to a wealth of data, which has led to data driven marketing. However, knowing how to use that data properly is important as well. It’s the agencies that merge data and creative to form the foundation of their marketing campaigns that tend to be the most successful.

How Using Data Can Inspire Great Marketing Campaigns

How Data Driven Marketing Can Support Creativity

Although it’s difficult to argue that data hasn’t been hugely beneficial in terms of identifying who your audience is and how to reach them, a lot of people within the industry are scared that the use of data is restricting creativity. They believe that the increased use of data and automation is going to reduce innovation in marketing campaigns. There’s certainly some truth to this – but only if your marketing agency isn’t using your data properly. You don’t want your creative decisions to be solely based on numbers, after all.

However, you also don’t want to use your data as an afterthought either. For example, maybe you’ve produced both long-form and short-form blog content. Using analytics, you’ve found that your long-form content is performing better. You won’t want to try to take your short-form content and extend it so that it’s longer as this kind of strategy is akin to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Instead, you should keep this data in mind for future campaigns.

Data driven marketing is about creating a balance between the data you have and your creative. Take video content creation as an example. Video has become one of the most effective forms of content in the past few years as it’s become easier and cheaper to produce as well as easier for consumers to watch. According to recent stats, Facebook users are more likely to engage with your video if it draws them in within 1.7 seconds. When creating video content for Facebook, you’ll want to keep this in mind. It might seem restricting at first — but limitations are often what helps to drive creative solutions. Instead of looking at data as something that restricts the creativity of your marketing campaigns, look at it as a way to drive innovation.

While some critics fear that an over-reliance on data could ultimately hinder creative efforts, in reality, the use of data can help inform creative efforts to bolster the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. In this day and age, advertising agencies who do not leverage data to their advantage in order to influence the direction of their creative marketing decisions will quickly fall behind the competition.

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

b2b email marketing

Exploring The Differences Between B2C and B2B Email Marketing

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How you market your brand depends greatly on who your audience is, which is why b2c (business to consumer) and b2b (business to business) marketing are very different strategies. As such, your email marketing strategy is going to depend heavily on whether or not you’re marketing b2b or b2c. The following are some of the differences between b2c and b2b email marketing to keep in mind:

Optimal Send Time

Knowing when to send your emails has a big impact on whether or not they’re opened. B2c customers are more likely to check their emails in the evenings or on the weekends since they are busy working during the day. B2b recipients are more likely to open them during work hours since they often check their work email regularly throughout the day.

Spam Filters

Spam filters work a bit differently with b2b and b2c customers. B2b customers often use filters that check for certain keywords before deciding whether to inbox the email or automatically sort it into the junk folder. With b2c customers, it’s more about building a good sending reputation with minimal complaints.

Personalization And Segmentation

While personalization and segmentation are important for both, they’re a bit different. With b2c customers, you’ll want to personalize products and content based on individual taste. With b2b customers, personalization should be a bit more subtle, such as by highlighting new stories within their industry or providing case studies that match their needs.

How Customers Respond

B2b customers buy from people, whereas b2c customers buy from brands. This means that when you send emails to b2b customers, you should expect a potential reply. Make sure that you include contact information, such as a phone number and who the email is from so that it’s easy for b2b recipients to reply. This isn’t as important for b2c customers.

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing Automation

Triggers

Using triggers to automate emails to your b2c customers helps to drive them back to your website. However, email triggers don’t work as well for b2b customers. Instead, use triggers for phone calls from your sales team instead.

Buying Cycles

B2b buying cycles are typically longer than b2c buying cycles. This is because you’re not just nurturing a single type of customer like you would in a b2c situation. Instead, you’re having to nurture a group of decision makers. Not to mention that in b2c situations, customers are more likely to make faster decisions based on emotion.

The Role of Content

Because buying cycles are longer in b2b situations, your customers will benefit more from educational and non-promotional forms of content, such as white papers, whereas b2c customers might be more moved to action by testimonials and case studies right off the bat.

These are some of the differences between b2c and b2b email marketing that you should know before crafting your email marketing campaign. The last thing you’ll want to do is to use b2c tactics for your b2b email marketing strategy (or vice versa) since this will hurt your ability to nurture your leads.

email marketing program

How AI Marketing Effects SEO

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For years, artificial intelligence (AI) was mere science fiction — an idea with unlimited possibilities. As technology has advanced, AI has developed to the point where it’s not only implemented throughout our everyday lives, but it’s become so commonplace that it’s beginning to be taken for granted. For example, virtual personal assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, movie recommendation services, and smart cars are all known quantities.

One area in which AI is currently upheaving the status quo is in the online marketing world. The emergence of AI marketing over the past few years is already changing the way businesses market their brands — and for the better.

How AI Has Affected SEO

Traditionally, search engine optimization (SEO) was based on a handful of factors, from keyword use to link building. Google and other search engines would use algorithms to rank content based on these factors. However, the introduction of marketing AI has changed the way Google is able to rank content. AI marketing software allows for the collection of valuable user and website data and analysis in real time. Take for example Google’s RankBrain.

Google introduced its RankBrain AI marketing software a few years back with the aim of more accurately identifying high-quality, relevant content for its search engine users. It has become their third most important ranking factor in their overall algorithm. It works by being able to accurately analyze queries in real time and returning relevant search results even if the exact keyword phrase used in the search doesn’t appear in the content. It does this by scanning website content and identifying related terms and concepts that make it relevant to the query. This means that there no longer needs to be an emphasis on forcing keywords into your content to make sure that Google identifies what your content is.

The use of marketing AI has also ushered in the ability to perform voice searches. Consumers are increasingly using voice search features via their virtual personal assistants, such as Alexa, to find what they are looking for. One of the reasons voice search is possible is because of how advanced AI marketing software is able to determine context without specific keywords. As a result, you will need to focus more on user intent in order to position yourself to be found by voice search. Fortunately, you can use AI software to collect and analyze user data and website data in order to identify what that user intent is.

The Future of AI Marketing

Considering how marketing AI has already changed the SEO landscape over the past few years, it’s not difficult to predict that there’s going to be even more change on the way. The following are a few ways in which marketing AI is likely going to change the way you market your brand in the near future:

No more keywords

RankBrain has already shown that AI is advanced enough to be able to infer meaning from certain words to help supply its queries with relevant content. AI is only going to get smarter in the future, which means soon enough, it will be able to scan content and determine relevance to user queries without having to identify specific keyword phrases or phrases that are similar to those used in queries. This will become even more necessary as voice search becomes more prominent since while users have been trained to perform searches using keywords, they rarely speak naturally using keyword phrases. This means that instead of competing with keywords, you’ll have to focus on just creating good content that is relevant to your audience, thereby placing even greater importance on your audience’s user intent.

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Deep user intent

When you look at some of the more popular websites that rank high on Google’s SERP, it’s not uncommon to see sites like IMDB or Wikipedia. One of the reasons for this is not only because they provide high-quality content relevant to a lot of user queries, but they have a lot of supporting content as well that users continue to read, resulting in visitors staying on their sites for a longer time. This means that when identifying user intent, you’re going to have to take a more holistic approach to the buyer’s journey by considering every stage. By creating content based on user intent at every stage of the buyer’s journey, visitors will be more likely to stay on your site and look through more pages. There’s no doubt that in the near future, AI will begin taking into account how websites address the intent of visitors at every stage with its supporting content.

Automated content creation

Keeping in mind how advanced AI is likely going to be able to identify high-quality, relevant content based on the entirety of the content and not just a handful of keywords, it’s not that far of a stretch to predict that AI software will soon be able to create content for businesses as well. Right now, AI-created content reads like it was produced by a robot — but many believe that it will be able to create natural sounding content in the near future.

The use of AI marketing has already begun to improve the quality of search for users around the world. It’s never been easier for people to find what they’re looking for. Although you will need to adapt to the growing impact that AI is having on the inbound marketing world, doing so shouldn’t be difficult. As long as you focus on creating high-quality content for your target audience, you will find it much easier to adapt than those who were solely focused on earning high search rankings.

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What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

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Creating a successful long-term inbound marketing strategy requires that you tackle several different tactics on different fronts, such as optimizing your site for SEO, creating high-quality content for your website, producing email newsletters, and engaging with followers on social media. Because these tactics all require constant attention to be effective, you should strongly consider the use of HubSpot marketing automation tools as a way to simplify your workload. The following are four reasons why you should be using HubSpot marketing automation tools:

1. Collect and Analyze Data to Improve Your Marketing Efforts

HubSpot’s analytics tools can help to collect data across all of your marketing platforms and provide you with metrics that you can use to the benefit of your marketing campaign. For example, you’ll be able to see what blog posts are outperforming other posts based on metrics such as visits, social engagement, click-throughs and captures. You can use this information to determine what kind of content is more effective or what elements of your blog posts need to be changed. For instance, if you have content that is receiving tons of views but no click-throughs, it may be because your calls-to-action are poor.

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2. Personalize Communication With Your Customers

Marketing automation allows you to segment your email list, which makes it easier to personalize your emails and send more relevant content to your recipients. This is done by gathering data from your opt-in forms and using that data to segment your email list into different groups. For example, if you run an online clothing store, then segmenting your list into male and female will prevent you from sending content about women’s clothing to your male audience, which would hurt your ability to properly nurture leads through the sales funnel. The use of email segmentation will make your email marketing strategy more efficient and effective.

3. Schedule Out Your Work Ahead of Time

One of the important aspects of a good content marketing strategy is making sure that you continually publish new content on a regular basis. Your readers are going to expect new content at certain times and if you don’t publish it on the same days at the same times, you’ll lose readers. Of course, remembering to manually publish new content, whether it’s a posting an article to your blog or sending out a tweet, is time-consuming. Marketing automation allows you to create your content and posts well ahead of time and set them to be automatically published at specific times on specific dates.

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4. Send More Qualified Leads to Your Sales Team

One of the challenges that a lot of businesses face is having their marketing team on the same page as their sales team. Sales personnel often don’t know what state of the buyer’s journey prospects are on, which makes their job more difficult — especially if they are sent leads that aren’t qualified. HubSpot marketing automation tools allow you to collect extremely useful visitor information, including their history of actions on your website, which in turn can allow you to send more highly qualified leads through to your sales team when they are ready.

The use of HubSpot marketing automation tools allows you make more efficient use of your resources and gives you the opportunity to see exactly what is and isn’t working in your marketing strategies. You’ll end up saving a lot of time on smaller, more time-consuming tasks, which you can then dedicate to more important aspects of your marketing campaign, such as engaging with and nurturing your leads.

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