Blog Archives - Page 7 of 13 - Stevens & Tate Marketing

How AI Marketing Effects SEO

December 16, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, SEO /by Nicole Wagner

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.

Are there ways to increase SEO?

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.

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

December 9, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Direct Marketing, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Lead Nuturing, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

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.

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

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.

Read our article: Content Marketing Misconceptions

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.

5 Questions On Attraction Marketing Strategies To Consider

December 6, 2022/in Articles, Attraction Marketing, Blog, Directors /by Dan Gartlan

As any business owner knows, marketing is essential if you have any ambition for growing your company. Without effective marketing, your ability to attract new leads and increase sales is going to be limited, which means that there’s a good chance that your business won’t last very long.

However, when it comes to marketing, there are two routes to choose between — prospective marketing and attraction marketing. Essentially, prospective marketing involves finding prospects and then marketing your services or products towards them, whereas with attraction marketing, you allow the prospects to find you — hence the term “attraction.” The following are five common questions that you might have about attraction marketing, along with strategies to consider for executing this type of marketing:

1. How Do You “Attract” Leads?

The idea is to put yourself in the position to be found. This is done by optimizing your website for SEO using high-quality keywords your prospects are likely to use when searching for similar products and services. You then provide content on your website that helps inform your leads about your brand and presents your brand as a valid solution to their problems or needs. Other strategies, such as the use of social media, also helps to increase brand awareness, thereby bringing more prospects to your brand.

Read more on How To Develop Content To Build Customer Loyalty

2. Why Is Attraction Marketing More Effective?

Prospective marketing requires that you force your marketing onto a prospect without knowing their interest in your brand. For example, cold calling is a popular prospective marketing technique.

With attraction marketing, you’re not forcing yourself on the prospect. Instead, you’re simply putting yourself in the position to be found by them. The prospects that find you will be more interested in your products or services, which makes them more stronger candidates as potential customers. Additionally, the lack of pressure means that they can do their own research on your brand on their own time, making them more likely to convert.

3. How Does Attraction Marketing Lead to Sales?

One of the strategies involved in attracting leads is to establish yourself as an authority within your industry via your content. When your website visitors educate themselves about your brand by reading through content that’s informative and relevant to their needs, they’re more likely to trust you. This trust makes it easier to capture your leads, giving you the opportunity to nurture them through the sales funnel and eventually, not only closing sales, but creating long-term customers.

4. Will You Begin Attracting Leads Right Away?

Unlike prospective marketing, attraction marketing takes a bit longer to implement. As a short-term strategy, attraction marketing isn’t going to seem very effective. However, long-term results are going to be much more impactful than short-term results, which is why attraction marketing is considered more effective than prospective marketing.

5. Once You’re Done, Will You Keep Attracting Leads?

Since attraction marketing is all about long-term results, it’s important to understand that it requires a long-term strategy. You can’t just set up a website and put up some content and then call it a day. For it to be effective, you have to continually create new content, continually engage with followers on social media, and continually adjust your strategy based on various analytics that you should be monitoring. If you do this, you’ll continue attracting leads.

Prospective marketing is a very short-term strategy based on closing sales immediately — and it’s one that’s generally not very effective unless you have a massive advertising budget. Attraction marketing is a more cost-efficient strategy that focuses more on attracting high-quality leads that you can develop relationships with, thereby creating long-term customers well into the future.

What AI means To B2B Marketing Strategies

November 21, 2022/in Articles, B2B Marketing, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a concept explored through pop culture; it’s a very real thing that has become increasingly prevalent throughout society, even in the creation of B2B marketing strategies. In fact, the use of AI is practically commonplace now. For example, the use of AI is what allows Amazon to recommend personalized products based on your buying and browsing habits. It also allows your GPS to provide you with the best possible route. For business owners and marketers, AI has also become essential to improving B2B marketing strategies.

The Benefits of AI in B2B Marketing Strategies

The following are just a few ways that the use of AI can help to improve B2B marketing strategies:

Improve the customer experience via personalization

Businesses no longer directly interact with brands when they are doing product or service research. This means it can be difficult to mine information from potential clients or business partners. The use of AI technology can help you collect data that provides insight into the behavioral patterns of both existing and potential clients or partners. This means that your marketing efforts no longer have to be limited to certain sectors, you’ll be able to target specific businesses with messages designed to provide solutions to their specific needs, thereby improving the customer experience as well.

Improve your marketing strategy

The use of behavioral analysis and machine learning can help you to better understand what the pain points of your target audience is. Behavioral analyses also allows you to craft a more effective marketing strategy to reach and convert that audience.

Find out how to build your brand story with your B2B marketing strategy.

Save money by saving time

The use of AI technology means that you don’t have to spend hours analyzing data. This type of data can be collected and analyzed by AI programs for you. It will allow you to dedicate more time to other aspects of your business.

Improve results with lead scoring

Trying to chase down every lead is typically a waste of time since not all leads are equal. The use of AI technology can allow you to score your leads using all of the behavioral data that you’ve collected. This, in turn, allows you to pinpoint businesses that are much more likely to convert. It allows for a better use of your resources since you can identify the best prospects and prioritize your most promising accounts.

The use of artificial intelligence will help to improve your B2B marketing strategies in any number of ways, whether it’s by helping you to collect and organize more valuable data that can be used to more effectively target qualified leads using personalization, or simply being able to make better use of your resources. Be sure to visit us at Stevens & Tate to take advantage of our free downloadable marketing tools, which can be leveraged to help improve your B2B marketing efforts.

For more resources on Attraction Marketing, click here.

5 Website Redesign Tips That Will Generate More Phone Calls

November 18, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Nicole Wagner

Your website is not only useful for providing company information and generating leads, it’s also useful for getting potential customers on the phone. If you design your website properly, you can increase the number of phone calls that you may receive, which, in turn, can give you a greater opportunity to close sales. The following are five website redesign tips that will help you to generate more phone calls:

1. Make your phone number visible

The last thing you’ll want is to have a visitor to your website searching for your phone number. If they want to call you, they may get frustrated and give up if they can’t find your number anywhere. This is an easy issue to address: place your phone number on every page of your site in a location where it doesn’t overwhelm the entire page, but where it’s easy to spot. For example, the top right corner of the page. You don’t want it to dominate the page because that will make visitors feel pressured. However, clear positioning will make it easy to find at a glance.

2. Use effective calls-to-action

Encouraging leads to call will help generate phone calls. Visitors often don’t know what they want to do in terms of taking an action and will need a friendly push in the right direction. Use calls-to-action (CTA) on every page and make sure that they are relevant to the content of that page. For example, if you are running a real estate company and you have a blog post providing tips on how to stage a house, you can add a CTA at the end telling the reader to call you for more information or advice on how to sell their house. Add the number in your CTA to make things easy for them.

Why are call-to-action phrases so important?

3. Add click-to-call options

A huge percentage of your website’s visitors are likely browsing your site on their smartphone. By implementing click-to-call options, you’re more likely to generate calls from these mobile visitors. A click-to-call option allows the user to simply tap the phone number listed in your CTA. This will automatically dial the number on their phone. When it’s this easy to call, mobile users are much more likely to do so. Otherwise, they are going to have to pull up their keypad and dial the number in manually. This extra effort may discourage them from calling you right away.

4. Use a Responsive Web Design

If you’re redesigning your website, you need to make sure that you’re using a responsive design to ensure that your site is properly displayed on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. If it’s not mobile-friendly, mobile users may have a tough time locating where your phone number is. For example, if you put it in the top right corner and your site doesn’t display properly, they may have to scroll right to find it, making it easy to miss.

The call-back widget is useful for visitors who aren’t able to contact you right away but want to speak with one of your representatives. For example, they might be on their computer and their phone might be out of reach. The way it works is simple — the visitor will just type in their number, which you’ll be notified of. You can then have one of your representatives call them back.

Capturing leads can very challenging, especially when you’re engaging indirectly with leads via your website. It’s generally easier to close leads when you can get them on the phone, which is why you should implement these five website redesign tips.

Creative Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders

November 14, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Homebuilder Marketing, Real Estate Advertising /by Nicole Wagner

As a homebuilder in an increasingly competitive market, getting ahead with your real estate marketing plan will give you an advantage on your competition and increase your value as a contractor. In much the same way you leverage creativity in your trade, you must be creative when it comes to your marketing.

Creative real estate marketing starts with a rock solid online presence and strategy and, once established, can be built up on the foundational level. Here are 8 creative real estate marketing tools you should be utilizing now.

1. Video

Video is a vital piece to your marketing puzzle, especially when it comes to helping prospective home buyers visualize their future home. Whether you’re in the custom home market or not, video content is a great way to help your clients better understand what it is you do and what makes you unique.

Leveraging video by making them personable, relatable, authentic, and unique to your brand helps build brand awareness and rapport in your industry. These articles below can guide you in the right direction to make fantastic video content:

2. Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are where your online prospects “land” after reading through your content. This is your customer’s gateway into your sales funnel and where they are willing to enter your sales process with hopes of a return of more education about your brand or products.

Optimized landing pages improve the chances that a potential customer enters your sales funnel and draws their focus toward the important points about the offer presented them. Here are some resources on the value of optimized landing pages:

3. Use Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is far less scary than it may seem on the surface and can actually be an extremely valuable tool for identifying buying trends, behaviors, and interests of individuals and families seeking a quality homebuilder.

Marketing automation can (and should be) personalized and will help your leads matriculate through your sales funnel faster. This gives you the ability to nurture leads into sales and gives you crucial insights into individual buying behaviors. Marketing automation is more than drip emails and encapsulates a vast area of lead nurturing. Check out these useful references:

An often overlooked aspect but highly important piece of your marketing puzzle is social media. There’s a high likelihood that your customers will start their search for a homebuilder by some form of social media, and your presence there could very well make the difference between getting a lead and losing a sale.

Knowing what to do with social media requires a bit of a learning curve to someone who may be new to it as more than a social platform. Business social media in conjunction with a quality attraction marketing campaign is a slightly different animal, but we’ve got a few key posts aimed at making your social media presence a fruitful one:

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising may seem unfamiliar and (if put in the wrong hands) very costly; however, PPC advertising done right is a primary structural piece of your attraction marketing efforts and can greatly improve your marketing ROI.

Two of the leading platforms for PPC ads are Facebook and Google with both performing admirably for myriad industries and are critical for the awareness stage of your buyer’s journey. Take a look at these resources for leveraging PPC to your advantage as a homebuilder:

6. Retargeting

Sometimes referred to as remarketing, retargeting deals largely with resurrecting forgotten leads who have either fallen out of your workflows or to heat up a lead gone cold. Retargeting focuses largely on marketing qualified leads or MQLs. MQLs have already been qualified for sales and have entered the consideration stage of their buying journey.

This is a great time to churn up that cold lead and get it back into your lead nurturing program. Here are some ways retargeting can help your leads heat back up:

7. Content and Inbound Marketing

Often used interchangeably, content or inbound marketing leverages your expertise and online presence as a hub of information and attracts potential customers to your brand. Unlike more traditional outbound marketing where leads were often untraceable, inbound gives you the power to track your leads from beginning to end. Check out these resources for yourself:

5 Inbound Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Know About

8. Email Marketing

As we mentioned previously, email marketing is an essential part of your lead nurturing process and can keep prospective customers in the loop with what’s going on in the housing industry and your company’s building endeavors. Like any tool in your marketing toolkit, email marketing has a place and a time in your buyer’s journey. Specifically, email marketing is geared towards the information hungry buyer during the attraction phase.

Nevertheless, email marketing is relevant throughout their journey. It can be even more critical in the middle of the funnel where leads tend to fall away. These resources below can give you a better understanding of how email marketing fits into a creative real estate marketing plan:

5 Digital Marketing Tactics For Senior Living Communities

November 7, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Senior Living Marketing, SEO, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Nicole Wagner

More and more seniors are becoming tech savvy, using smart phones and tablets to communicate with family and friends. They also use their smart devices to do their own research on where they want to live and how they want to do it. This is one reason why digital marketing tactics are critical for senior living marketing.

Digital Marketing Tactics for Senior Living Communities

Your website is one of your most important assets. It’s where consumers are going to find out more about your company. The place where you build trust. Where you show your leadership in the senior living industry. It’s where they can get more information about your community.

With your website in place, what digital marketing tactics should you employ?

Blogging

Blogging offers you the opportunity to provide your audience with useful information while positioning you as a trusted expert. You can use your blog to provide useful information like how to downsize, how to stay healthy as you age, how to find the right senior community and how to find work as a senior. High-quality content keeps people coming back.

Check out these tips on How to Have a Successful Blog

SEO (search engine optimization) works to get your community’s website found by the search engines. It is done with keyword placement, quality content, and a dynamic website. The more you have of all three, the better your SEO results will be.

Social Media

Social media allows you to engage your audience. You can share tips, post links to new content, or share testimonials. Facebook offers a place to share as well as a place where potential residents can make queries or learn more about your community.

Email lead nurturing allows you to make your community more attractive to people who have expressed interest. You can share community events, resident highlights and interesting tidbits to show how involved and engaged the residents of your community are. That makes it more attractive to those considering moving in.

Online Advertising

Online advertising positions your brand in front of anyone seeking information on senior living communities. In fact, as they search for that kind of information, your name pops up. It can give you highly qualified leads almost instantaneously.

How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

These tactics will help you position your senior living community. You can grab the attention of seniors as well as their loved ones and care providers.

How Data Driven Creative Is Shifting The Advertising Industry

October 3, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors /by Mark Beebe

It wasn’t that long ago that businesses had limited data to use for their creative. Marketing campaigns were often built using subjective creative instinct and little else. However, now that advertisers have access to significant amounts of data, including personal customer information as well as audience behaviors, creative decisions are being informed by their data. The use of data allows businesses to make much better use of their resources, thereby making your data driven creative efforts more successful as well as more cost-efficient. The following are just a few ways that advertising agencies use data driven creative tactics to influence your marketing campaign for the better.

1. Develop More Accurate Buyer Personas

Arguably the most important facet of any marketing strategy that you implement is the audience you’re targeting. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, your efforts will fail. This is why developing buyer personas is so important — and the most effective way to do this is through the use of customer data. You can use the data you have from previous customers as well as data from the leads you’ve captured in order to identify exactly who your audience is, which will help inform the creation of your buyer personas.

For example, you can track the behavior of your customers by viewing what pages they visited and what actions they took before making a purchase. Information like what they’ve purchased and when they purchased it will be very helpful in being able to reach your audience as well. Many businesses will also create post-sale surveys for customers to fill out that provides valuable information as well. Additionally, you can gather information from your email opt-in forms as well as from your social media followers.

2. Locate Where Your Audience Is

Knowing who your audience is won’t help much if you don’t know where they are. There are countless social media platforms on which you can target your marketing campaigns. If you choose a social channel on which your target audience isn’t present, your campaign will fall on deaf ears. Figuring out what platforms your audience uses is the first step towards reaching them, and your data can help you pinpoint where they are. For example, you can look at the social media data of similar companies to determine where they have the biggest reach, or you can add social share buttons to your content and then identify which platforms your content is being shared on most.

You can also set up business pages on several social platforms and link to them in your email campaigns and on your website. You can then track which pages receive the most follows, which will tell you which social channels you should focus your marketing efforts on.

3. Personalize Your Ads

The amount of data that you have at your fingertips should allow you to personalize the experiences of your customers, especially once you’ve created your buyer personas. For example, retargeting customers using PPC (pay per click) ads highlighting items that they added to their cart but didn’t end up purchasing can be a very effective way to close a missed sale opportunity. Personalized experiences in general, whether it’s personalized CTAs (calls-to-action) or personalized emails, have a big impact. A recent study even revealed that consumers are twice as likely to click through ads for brands they were unfamiliar with if it was tailored to their preference.

4. Create More Relevant Content

By using your buyer personas and by collecting and analyzing how your visitors engage with the content you produce, you can fine tune your content strategy to better target your audience. By tracking several metrics, including time spent on a page, engagement with the content (comments, social shares, likes, etc.), click-throughs, bounce rate, lead captures, and more, you can identify what content performs at the highest rate. You can then craft new content that’s aligned with what type of content performs well. For example, if you noticed that short-form content in list form performs well but long-form content without bullets or numbers does not, then you should have a pretty good idea of what future content should look like.

These are just a few ways that data driven creative can work and why it’s changing the way the advertising agency operates. Using the significant amount of data that you have access to in order to drive your creative marketing decisions will make it easier to successfully identify who your target audience is and how to reach them in a cost-efficient manner.

Using a Website Redesign Checklist

August 29, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Nicole Wagner

When it comes to redesigning your website, there are a lot of different elements you’ll need to address, which is why you should use a website redesign checklist. The following website redesign checklist will help you gather all of the data you need as well as address the most important aspects of your website’s design:

Analyze your current website

If you’ve committed to investing in a complete website redesign, then you probably know what you want to improve. However, you should use analytics to diagnose your site’s issues so that you know exactly what’s wrong. For example, if you’re visitor conversion rate is lower than you would like, look at data such as bounce rates, page load times, CTA click-throughs and shopping car abandonment rates to pinpoint where your issues lie. Other metrics you’ll want to pay attention to include:

SEO rankings for important keywords
Total number of sales generated
Number of visitors
Number of unique visitors
Domain authority
Number of new lead form submissions.

Establish your goals

If you don’t know what you want your website to accomplish, then you won’t know what direction to take your website redesign in. Without goals, you won’t know what to focus on, nor will you know whether your website redesign is successful once it’s up and running. Make sure that when you set your goals, you can tie them to measurable results. For example, if increasing your brand authority is your main goal, then track metrics such as:

The number of unique visitors,
Time spent on page
Social signals (shares, likes and comments)

Determine what works

Just because your current website might have a few issues doesn’t mean that there aren’t elements that work really well. For example, maybe you’re redesigning your site because you want to update its look; however, your content is actually very effective at drawing in visitors and capturing leads. More specifically, you’ll want to make sure that high ranking pages are kept in place. When auditing your site, take note of what you think is successful as well as what needs work.

Analyze your competitors

In addition to auditing your own website, you should audit the sites of your main competitors. Take note of everything you like and don’t like about their site. Your aim shouldn’t be to just copy what they do but to get an idea of what they are doing so that you can create a superior website experience.

Identify your UVP

Your unique value proposition (UVP) indicates exactly what your business does and what makes your services or products unique. A UVP helps you stand out from the competition. You need to know what your UVP is because it will inform all of the content that you create for your website.

Keep buyer personas in mind

Your website should appeal to your target audience. Your visitors need to be able to connect to your brand’s messaging, after all. To make sure that this happens, all of your content should cater to your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer created using the available data you have from current and past customers, such as:

Demographics
Past purchases
Online behavior
Motivations
Needs
Wants
Concerns
Personal histories
Income

Here are the reasons why buyer personas are so important to a business

Map your buyer’s journey

Every visitor that comes to your website is going to be at one of three stages of the buyer’s journey. The first stage is the awareness stage, in which the buyer is seeking information that helps to define their problems or needs. The second stage is the consideration stage in which the buyer defines their problem and is searching for solutions. The final stage is the decision stage, in which the buyer chooses a solution. Your website needs to cater to visitors at every stage of the buyer’s journey in order to attract their attention, keep their attention and, finally, to convert them.

Set benchmark metrics

The goals you set should be general yet measurable. For example, the goal to increase brand authority is a long-term goal that doesn’t end. Because of this, you should set benchmarks so that you can judge your site’s performance. For example, social signals are a good metric for measuring brand authority. You could set benchmarks for how many shares you want to average per blog post by a certain date. If your metrics meet this benchmark by this date, then you know that your redesign is working and you can set the goal posts even further. If you don’t meet this benchmark, then you may need to make more adjustments.

Optimize your site for SEO

Implementing a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is vital to consistently attract new visitors. Google takes into account a variety of factors, including keywords, link juice and social signals. You’ll need to do keyword research to identify unique keywords relevant to each page. These keywords should be used naturally in your titles, headers, body content, anchor text, alt image tags, HTML tags, meta tags and title tags. External links are earned by promoting and linking to your website’s content via social media, submitting your website information to local directories and by writing guest blogs. Social signals are earned by getting visitors to engage with your content, such as by liking, sharing or commenting on it.

Optimize your site for mobile use

Many people use their smartphones and tablets to browse the Internet. This means that your website will need to load and display properly no matter how small the screen size is. The easiest way to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly is by using a responsive design. You can check to see if your current site is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Just type in the address for each webpage and it will determine how mobile-friendly it is.

Find opportunities for conversion

Calls-to-action should be used on every page to encourage visitors to convert. Without calls-to-action, visitors won’t know what you want them to do. Not only should you use relevant CTAs on every page, you need to offer something of value to visitors in return for opting-in. Depending on your what your business offers, this could include downloadable eBooks and white papers, email newsletter subscriptions, product discounts, free trials, free consultations and more. Unique landing pages should be crafted for every call-to-action that focus on the visitor’s needs, your UVP and how what you’re offering can benefit them.

Implement a content strategy

Whatever your goals are for your website, their success will depend on your content strategy. You need to provide high-quality content that is relevant to your buyer persona’s needs and concerns and that is informative, helpful and unique. The best way to do this is through a website blog. Additionally, you’ll need to regularly publish new content to keep your audience engaged and to make sure that they return to your site. While writing good content is important, you’ll need to market it as well. An important part of your content strategy is establishing exactly when you publish your content (it should always be on the same day at the same time) and where and how you promote your new content.

Continually improve

Don’t assume that once you’re done with your website redesign that you’re finished. A good website design is one that is always being improved. You should track your metrics and make adjustments to your design whenever needed. If you meet your goals, you should establish new ones. Move your goal posts further so that your website can continue to grow and improve. Additionally, you should always be uploading new content to keep your website fresh, thereby maintaining or improving your search engine rankings.

Want more resources on how to redesign your website? Click here!

How Using Data Can Inspire Great Marketing Campaigns

August 26, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

One of the biggest benefits of online marketing is that it allows you to collect valuable data about your customers as well as your target audience in general. It also gives you a chance to pinpoint what is and isn’t working as far as your marketing efforts are concerned. However, collecting all this data is useless if you don’t leverage it to your benefit. In fact, the information you have can help to inspire creative ideas to help craft great marketing campaigns.

How Data Can Spark Creativity

Data doesn’t just help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t, it can help drive creative decisions that allow you to create great marketing campaigns. A good example of this is Netflix. Everyone knows that Netflix has an absolute treasure trove of behavioural data from their subscribers. They leverage this data to inform the content that they produce.

For example, many critics were bewildered when they gave Adam Sandler a huge four-movie deal. Saying that his movies are panned across the board is putting it mildly, after all. However, according to their data, his older films were streamed an absurd amount. They knew that even if critics didn’t like his films, their subscribers certainly did — and that’s why they signed him to produce Netflix-exclusive films.

Netflix will often look at subscriber viewing habits and look at where they overlap to find a niche that they can fill with their original content. For example, the popularity of older series on Netflix has often resulted in revivals, such as Fuller House and Arrested Development.

Another good example is Equifax. Using their data, they realized that the average person’s credit score depended heavily on how old they were. They used this data to create a great marketing campaign that provided tailored benefits information to people at different stages of their lives.

How to Incorporate Email Marketing into B2B Campaigns

How To Use Your Data To Inform Your Creative Marketing Campaigns

How you use your data to influence your creativity and create great marketing campaigns depends heavily on the specifics of your business. However, the following are a few basic ways data can help you connect to your audience on a more emotional level when creating new marketing campaigns:

Learn what your audience connects with

Look at how your audience engaged with previous campaigns. By looking at what worked and what didn’t work, you can figure out exactly how your audience was able to engage with you on an emotional level. For example, maybe certain types of content posted on social media were commented on and shared much more than other types of content. This will give you a better idea of what your audience is looking for, which can give you better direction on how to reach your audience on a more personal level during future campaigns.
Learn what your audience’s needs are

You can figure out what your audience wants by analyzing certain sets of data. For example, you can compare two PPC ads promoting the same product in two different ways. You can then use the conversion rates of both ads. The ad that converts more leads is probably presenting a solution that fulfils a need that your audience has more effectively than the other. This information can be used to reach your audience more successfully with future ads.
Continually improve your campaign

Once you launch a new campaign, don’t just stay the course if it’s obvious something isn’t working. You should continually track the results of your campaign based on your specific goals. The data you gather can help you figure out whether your creative decisions are having an impact on your audience or not. If they aren’t, you can make adjustments even as your campaign is ongoing.

When building new marketing campaigns, make sure that you make use of the data that you have. Your data can be the difference between creating great marketing campaigns and failed marketing campaigns.