professional web design1

The Importance Of Having A Professional Web Design Service For Your Business

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It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is, you need a website. If you don’t have a website, you’re without a doubt going to lose out on a lot of potential customers. This is because simply having a website is one of the most effective ways to generate awareness of your business. However, just having a website isn’t enough. You will want to have a professionally designed website to ensure that it’s technically sound, visually appealing, and user-friendly. While you might consider building your website yourself in order to save money, the following are a few reasons why it’s worth investing in a professional web design:

Importance of Professional Website Design Service For Your Business

1. Build A Unique Website

Building a website from the ground up is something few companies have the resources to do, which means that they end up using basic website templates. A professional website design service will be able to customize your website by tailoring it to your specific needs. As a result, you will be able to provide a unique website experience to your visitors that will help your business stand out. Additionally, they will be able to create a consistent aesthetic that accurately reflects your brand, thereby helping to strengthen your branding efforts.

Website Redesign Checklist
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2. Prevent Technical Issues

Professional web design services know what they are doing. They have massive amounts of experience and technical expertise. As such, when they develop websites, they ensure that there are no technical issues that will cause your website to crash or to function poorly. Even minor technical issues, such as slow loading times, can hurt your marketing efforts significantly. A technically sound website reflects positively on your brand as well. Additionally, a professional service can monitor your website for potential issues and address them before they have a big effect on your visitors.

3. Ensure Site Securityprofessional web design 2

Website security is incredibly important. If you’re taking personal information from your visitors, such as their names and email addresses, then you have a responsibility to ensure that this data is secure. If you have an e-commerce page through which customers are providing their credit card information, then this is even more critical. A professional web design service will keep your website secure using all of the latest website security tools and practices, including HTTPS protocol.

4. Optimize Website For SEO

Optimizing your website for SEO (search engine optimization) involves a lot more than just throwing a few keywords in your content. A good website developer understands this and will build a site architecture that supports strong SEO. For example, they will build a site map that makes it easy for Google to crawl through your pages and to index them. Without an effective site map, search engines may miss pages when crawling through your website, which means that they won’t be ranked on their SERP (search engine results page). Additionally, proper keyword use in URLs, effective internal linking, and a lack of technical issues all contribute to good SEO.

Similar Article: 6 Web Design Principals to Increase Conversions

5. Update Your Website

New technology is continually emerging, especially when it comes to websites. A brand new website can become outdated within just a year. A professional web design service can keep your website updated and implement new features that can improve the website experience over time. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that chatbots were first developed and now it’s not uncommon for a website to have one. Trying to add new features to your website on your own can be quite difficult and can cause issues with other parts of your site, which is why it’s best to let a professional do it for you.

6. Save Time

The amount of time that it takes to create a website cannot be overstated. Whether you’re building a website to completion or implementing a growth-driven design, it’s going to require a significant amount of time to do. Not to mention that the website will need to be regularly monitored and updated as well. By letting a professional web design service take care of your website, you will be able to focus your time on growing your core business.

7. Save Money

Many companies attempt to build their websites on their own because they think that they can save money this way; however, they’re more likely to lose money in the long run. Website design requires a lot of different skillsets, which means that you would have to take on more employees. Since running a website is a long-term strategy, these employees would have to be permanent. It’s more affordable to outsource to a professional web design service.

Ultimately, your website is a reflection of your business. If it’s of poor quality or appears unprofessional, potential customers will second guess the quality of your products or services. With that in mind, it’s worth investing in a professional web design.

25 Website Must Haves
brand storytelling examples

How To Create A Brand Story

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Storytelling is an ancient art form, which has scientifically been proven to aid memory, making it the ideal vehicle for promoting products and creating successful branding. Learning how to tell your brand story begins with understanding the role of characters.

At the heart of the story lays the characters. It is through your characters that you connect with your customers. If your story does not have believable characters, then your potential customers will not connect with you, find your branding believable, or create an emotional connection with your story.

How To Create A Brand Story

Starting with Archetypes

Your brand persona reflects your customers understanding of your brand’s behaviors and values. The persona must appear human and exhibit traits that the customer recognizes, such as courage, persistence, and imagination. They need to be able to create an emotional connection with your persona. Your story’s characters play a vital role in shaping this relationship.

super heroFor compelling brand story, it needs strong, well-drawn, and quickly recognized characters, which your customers can relate to and see themselves in. To achieve this, you need to begin with archetypes. Hero, villain, mentor, caregiver; these are archetypes that are easily recognizable and relatable to. They are found in all stories throughout history, from Ancient Greek classics to modern fantasy tales. However, an archetype on its own is two-dimensional, so it needs to be personalized to make it believable.

Developing a Believable Persona through Relatable Characters

Your characters must grow from these archetypes. Otherwise, they will remain flat and hold no emotional connection with the customer. Achieving this involves creating a brand story for your characters without losing consistency. This enables the customer to see them as multi-dimensional.

Through those character stories, you develop your brand persona’s attributes. The attributes your persona portrays will be the ones your customer associates with your company, so these need to be chosen carefully. You might want to consider qualities such as courage, decisiveness, determination, work ethic, honesty, flexibility, responsibility, and curiosity.

An example of good brand storytelling and excellent character creation is Guinness. Consider the company’s latest campaign with the guys that have turned their backs on the gang culture of Compton, and are instead saving horses. The archetypes are good versus evil, but the characters stories make them relatable and give an overall caring, yet brand persona for Guinness.

Defining Your True Brand Story and Bringing it to Life Online

Creating a Relatable Persona

As well as being believable, your brand persona must be relatable. If your target customer group is young women, then having a brand persona that your audience consider to be a middle-aged businessman is not going to make your brand relatable. If your customers cannot relate, then they will not feel connected to your brand and are unlikely to believe your promises, mission statement, or aims. You need to know who it is you want to connect with before you even begin to develop your persona.

The customer may never see any of this directly, but they will instinctively know if you have not considered these elements as it will show in the consistency–or lack thereof–of your brand storytelling. If you are unsure of the importance of characters in how to tell your brand story and create your brand persona, go back to your favorite work of fiction and imagine that work without the attention to detail that has been poured into each character.

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

drip email marketing

Email Opening Lines That Actually Work

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In the digital age, emails have become a primary mode of communication, especially in professional settings. The opening line for email is crucial; it’s the first thing the recipient reads and sets the tone for the rest of your message. A well-crafted opening line can make the difference between your email being read or ignored. 

In this blog, we will explore the best opening lines for an email suitable for different contexts, including formal, polite, professional, business, and friendly scenarios.

Formal Email Opening Lines

Formal emails are often used in professional settings where a respectful and serious tone is required. They are ideal when communicating with someone you don’t know well or in situations demanding a high level of professionalism.

Formal Opening Line for Email Examples:

  1. “Dear [Recipient’s Name], I am writing to you regarding…”
  2. “To Whom It May Concern, I wish to express my interest in…”
  3. “Dear [Recipient’s Title and Name], I write to seek your guidance on…”
  4. “Esteemed [Recipient’s Title], I am contacting you in relation to…”
  5. “Respected [Recipient’s Name], I am reaching out regarding our upcoming collaboration…”
  6. “Dear Sir/Madam, I am formally requesting assistance with…”
  7. “To the [Department/Team Name], I wish to submit my proposal for…”

These lines establish a formal tone, showing respect and professionalism, which is crucial in official matters.

Polite Email Opening Lines

Politeness is important in any form of communication, especially in emails. Having polite opening lines help in fostering a positive relationship with the recipient.

Polite Opening Line for Email Examples:

  1. “I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to…”
  2. “Thank you for your attention. I would appreciate your input on…”
  3. “Good day, I hope this email finds you in good health. I wanted to discuss…”
  4. “Hello, I trust you are doing well. May I inquire about…”
  5. “Greetings, I hope you’re having a productive week. I’m writing to ask about…”
  6. “Hi there, I hope you had a great weekend. I’m reaching out because…”
  7. “Dear [Recipient’s Name], I hope this message finds you well. I am eager to hear your thoughts on…”

These lines demonstrate courtesy, enhancing the recipient’s receptiveness to your message.

Learn How to Use Targeted CTAs to Increase Lead Conversion

Professional Email Openings

Professionalism in emails is about being concise and to the point while maintaining a respectful tone. These openings are perfect for day-to-day business communications.

Professional Opening Line for Email Examples:

  1. “Greetings, I would like to discuss…”
  2. “Hello, thank you for your email regarding…”
  3. “Greetings [Recipient’s Name], I am writing to follow up on our last conversation regarding…”
  4. “Hello [Recipient’s Name], I wanted to touch base about quickly…”
  5. “Hi [Recipient’s Name], I’m reaching out to provide an update on…”
  6. “Dear [Recipient’s Name], I have some news regarding our ongoing project…”
  7. “Good morning/afternoon, I want to clarify a few points about our recent meeting…”

These lines are straightforward yet courteous, suitable for regular business interactions.

Opening Sentences for Business Emails

Business emails demand clarity and a direct approach. The opening sentence should immediately convey the email’s purpose.

Opening Sentence Business Email Examples:

  1. “Regarding our upcoming project, I wish to update you on…”
  2. “Following our recent conversation, here is the information you requested…”
  3. “As agreed in our previous discussion, I am sending over the details of…”
  4. “Following up on our recent meeting, I have compiled the report on…”
  5. “In response to your request, here are my recommendations for…”
  6. “I would like to draw your attention to the recent developments in…”
  7. “Pertaining to our last conversation, I have a few updates regarding…”

These lines are clear and direct, indicating the email’s purpose right from the start, which is appreciated in business communications.

Friendly Email Opening Lines

When writing to someone you have a good rapport with, a friendly opening can be engaging—these lines are ideal for less formal, more personal communications.

Friendly Opening Line for Email Examples:

  1. “Hi [Name], I was just thinking about our last meeting and wanted to ask…”
  2. “Hey [Name], hope you’re doing well. I have some ideas to share regarding…”
  3. “Hey [Name], just a quick check-in. How’s everything going with…”
  4. “Hi [Name], I was just reminiscing about our last meeting and thought to follow up on…”
  5. “Hello [Name], I came across something that reminded me of our project. Have you got a minute to discuss?”
  6. “Hi there [Name], hope you’re doing well. Just wanted to share a quick update on…”
  7. “Hey [Name], I was thinking about what you said last time and wanted to explore the idea of…”

Crafting Opening Lines for Different Scenarios

It’s essential to tailor your opening line to the context of your email. The tone and formality should match the purpose of your email and the relationship you have with the recipient.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Email Opening Lines

  1. Avoid overly casual or overly formal language in inappropriate contexts. 
  2. Starting an email with an apology can also weaken your position unless it’s necessary.

The Impact of a Well-Chosen Opening Line

The opening line of your email holds significant importance in determining its efficacy. A well-thought-out introduction sets the tone for your message, captures the recipient’s attention, and improves the likelihood of a positive response. The first line is an opportunity to establish a connection with the reader, convey the purpose of your email, and create a favorable impression. Hence, it is crucial to invest time and effort in crafting an opening line that is engaging, relevant, and tailored to your audience. By doing so, you can increase the chances of your email being read and responded to positively.

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Lead Nurturing During the Buyer’s Journey

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Using Lead Nurturing During the Consideration Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey

The consideration stage of your buyer’s journey begins a pivotal series of events for your buyer and your brand. Once your buyer has been made aware of their problem, searched through your content, and become a lead, their true “shopping” experience begins. This is where delivering solutions in an authoritative way will start to differentiate your brand from competitors offering similar products and services.

That differentiation starts with a shift in your marketing towards your potential buyers in the form of lead nurturing: granular, tailored messages focused on the information you’ve gathered through them during the awareness stage. Email marketing and marketing automation are the primary avenues for marketing to your buyers at this point.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead Nurturing is a process in marketing and sales to cultivate relationships with potential customers over time. It is providing relevant information to leads at various stages of the buying journey to guide them towards making a purchase decision.

Drip Emails

Drip emails deliver content to your prospective buyers over time. With time being virtually the only factor affecting how and when messages are sent. While customizing in the sense of what content is delivered, it offers very little in the control you have of the content against the information you’ve gathered about you lead over their buying journey.

Drip emails certainly have a place early in the consideration stage for offering further education, keeping your brand present and in front of your potential buyers. They can also be very broad campaigns announcing new products, brand updates, and showcasing the highlights of your company. Drip email marketing and lead generation, however, have a mutual independency on one another for a successful marketing campaign.

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

The goal of lead nurturing as part of your buyer’s consideration process is to deliver the right information at critical points in their journey through your content. The beauty of marketing automation is that you can build the campaigns tailored to your buyer personas and design those automation steps to deliver perfectly timed content.

Through marketing automation, lead generation collects data about your buyer’s behavior and helps guide them through the buying process. The actions your buyers take on your website will trigger certain actions on behalf of your lead nurturing campaign. Attending a webinar, downloading a certain piece of content, or visiting a page a certain number of times can trigger an email.

While drip emails can be effective at points during the consideration stage and certainly keep your brand at the front of your audiences, lead nurturing campaigns are a “smarter” way to go. Lead nurturing is smart in the sense that it leverages the information your inbound marketing software collects about your leads and uses it to tailor the right content to your leads.

Drive Website Conversions Throughout the Buyer’s Journey

Re-marketing

As you probably know, marketing doesn’t necessarily always go according to plan. Sometimes a marketing qualified lead (MQL) who has already dug deep into your content, fallen into a workflow, and even triggered actions based on your lead nurturing campaigns goes cold. This is where some clever re-marketing coupled with lead nurturing can rejuvenate those once-promising leads.

Re-marketing is a multifaceted and very versatile way to bring leads back into your lead nurturing campaigns. We say multifaceted, because various avenues can be used to reinvigorate your buyer’s interest including paid social media promotions, smart CTAs, and smart lists as part of your lead nurturing. While re-marketing may seem like a last resort in your buyer’s journey it’s actually an integral part of how you keep your brand relevant to prospective buyers especially those who may have slipped through the cracks.

Core Difference Between Buyer Journey vs. Customer Journey

The Marriage of Sales and Marketing

No matter what degree of marketing your brand engages in, marketing without sales will not meet the results your company is seeking: ROI. In the inbound world, we call this “smarketing”, and it’s that partnership between your sales force and marketing department that ultimately tips a buyer in your direction. As we have moved down the funnel, hopefully you’ve seen how vital integrating sales with your marketing practices truly is.

Both the consideration stage and decision making stage of your buyer’s journey rely on that smarketing relationship and the symbiosis therein helps make that transition from a simple lead to a sales qualified lead more fluid. In our next article, we’ll discuss how the personal touch from your sales team can help your sales qualified leads turn into actual sales.

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

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The Benefits of Inbound & Outbound Marketing

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There are two main types of marketing: inbound and outbound. Inbound marketing involves positioning yourself to be found by your target audience, providing them with the content they need for self-informed decision-making. Examples include SEO and content marketing. On the other hand, outbound marketing is more traditional, advertising directly to a broad audience through channels like TV commercials, radio ads, and magazine ads instead of waiting to be found.

Many businesses tend to prefer one over the other. However, the most effective way to market to your target audience is to use a combination of both inbound and outbound. To understand why using both is a valuable investment to your business, you’ll need to understand the Benefits of Inbound and Outbound Marketing.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a non-invasive advertising approach. In contrast, outbound marketing interrupts the audience’s activities (reading, listening to the radio, watching TV, etc.). One benefit of inbound marketing is avoiding annoyance by not disrupting experiences. It allows potential customers to move through the sales funnel at their own pace without pressure. Providing content for them to read at their convenience helps build brand loyalty, trust, and comfort. Notably, outbound marketing is short-term, while inbound is long-term. The website and content you create continue attracting new leads over time.

8 Important Questions To Ask When Hiring Inbound Marketing Agencies

The Benefits of Outbound Marketing

The biggest benefit to using outbound marketing is that you have the potential to reach a larger audience. This could be an audience who may not be familiar with your brand or the services you have to offer. They may not know that they have a need for your products or services until they see your ad and wouldn’t have known to search for your brand beforehand. It’s also a great way to reach audiences who do know about your brand but who may not have known about new products and services that you’re offering.

Using Inbound and Outbound Marketing Together

Using both forms of marketing provides short-term and long-term results and can complement each other. Here are examples of effective combined use of inbound and outbound marketing:

  1. Generate traffic via outbound: Consumers have smartphones or tablets even while watching TV. Running a TV commercial (outbound) can encourage viewers to visit your social media page or website (inbound). This applies to various outbound efforts, like putting your site on billboards or magazine ads, prompting in-store customers to follow you on social media, etc.
  2. Nurture leads before promoting live events: Inbound marketing can inform audiences about your brand and familiarize them with you. Before promoting live events in-store or at a tradeshow (outbound efforts), where they can pick up pamphlets or speak with sales reps in person, nurture leads through inbound efforts. Interested in learning more about lead nurturing? Using Lead Nurturing During the Consideration Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey

Inbound VS Outbound Marketing: What’s Better for You?

Which One Should I Choose?

There’s no reason to limit yourself to either inbound or outbound marketing. Learning how to use both effectively can be a valuable skill for your business. The answer lies in recognizing the strengths of each and being able to leverage both effectively. Mastering this blend is not just a skill; it’s an important way to maintain a successful and impactful marketing approach.

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

Six Types Of Real Estate Video Marketing Ideas For Homebuilders

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There is a good reason why YouTube has become the second biggest search engine – digital video is the new home of action for marketers. Through real estate video marketing tips, homebuilders and other real estate professionals have discovered an easy way to engage with the audience and increase conversion rates online. You can use videos for every marketing effort for your property, from neighborhood guides to virtual tours.

As a homebuilder, there are several types of videos you can use in your real estate video marketing strategy. Here are some few essential ones you should consider.

6 Real Estate Video Marketing Ideas For Homebuilders

Listing videos

Listing videos have become the go-to videos in real estate marketing. Showing off all the properties that you are selling in an engaging video is a great way to impress new leads that are just learning about your offers. Additionally, you will grab the attention of prospects in the middle of your sales funnel who are considering picking a unit from you. Fortunately, recent technology has enabled the creation of videos that showcase the units without embedding slideshows in the sidebar.

Interview videos

Buyers who have purchased from you in the past, sales teams that have sold your units, and other professionals in the real estate arena can make suitable candidates for your interview videos. The key to making highly effective interview videos is to ensure that all your interviewees provide information that is relevant to your target audience.

Live question and answer sessions

You can hold periodic Q&A sessions with your followers on social media, as well as prospects from your email marketing lists. They can send their questions through online chats, and you can answer them through live sessions. You can also use past webinars as bait to attract more people to register for your live sessions.

Home buyer advice videos

You can also have short videos where you explain different ways that homebuyers can save when purchasing their next home. Some ideas for video topics include ways to determine a good mortgage provider, how to researching a neighborhood, and how to get the best deals. You can intertwine your message, or ways you offer solutions to buyers as a homebuilder, with your sales promotion

Special offer videos

Special offers are used as a means of getting people to take action, such as register for your email marketing or free consultation on a number of home buying issues. Incentives that special offer videos may include are a chance to buy a home at a discounted offer or an additional fixture for the winning home buyer. Also, be sure to include a call-to-action in your videos to generate leads.

Neighborhood videos

Every buyer is concerned with the neighborhood’s access to amenities, infrastructure, and security among, other things. As a result, neighborhood videos provide a preview of these factors by visually taking the audience around the neighborhood.

New construction model video tours

It is helpful to show your potential clients model video tours of the units being built. The model tours show the floor plans, expected roofing, and other fixtures that will be in the home. The potential client will not have to leave his or her desk to obtain detailed information about the house being constructed.

Virtual house tours

Virtual house tours are simulations of a house that showcase the features, spaces, and fittings of the house. It is much like having an open house on the Internet. Potential clients are able to go through every detail of the house like they are moving from room to room. Virtual tours makes it easy for you to reach as many people as possible and create a high engagement with prospects without requiring them to come view the house.

Real estate video marketing is the new medium through which to capture leads and engage customers. You should strongly consider having video marketing as part your marketing plan.

Ready to learn more about real estate marketing? Check out this article here.

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

Organic Growth Business1

7 Organic Growth Business Strategies You Should Adopt

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Every company’s goal is to succeed and in order to succeed, it has to grow. A business that doesn’t grow won’t succeed in the long run. There are two ways that your business can grow: organically and inorganically. Inorganic growth is driven by capital; for example, via a merger or acquisition. Organic growth is driven by the resources your company already has, such as your experience, relationships, knowledge, visibility, reputation, and more. For example, expanding the amount of business you do with existing customers or obtaining new customers are forms of organic growth.

As you can imagine, organic growth is essential to your company, especially if you’re in the starting stages of your business. However, there is no right path to achieve organic growth. In fact, you can follow more than one path to achieve organic growth. With that in mind, the following are a few organic business growth strategies that you should consider adopting:

7 Organic Growth Business Strategies

1. Define Your Company’s Niche

When you define a niche, it will make it easier to meet the needs of a specific audience. Not to mention, your competition will be a lot smaller. Cornering that niche can help you increase your market share and drive growth to the point where you can expand your products and services beyond that niche when the time comes.

2. Establish Your Unique Value Proposition

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

Whether or not you’ve defined a niche, you need to have a unique value proposition. This is what will help you stand out from your competitors. Without a unique value proposition, your products or services will seem generic and customers will be more likely to choose similar products and services from competitors who do have a unique value proposition. When you have a unique value proposition, your market share will most likely begin growing at a steady pace as a result of being able to offer something your competition can’t offer.

3. Don’t Ignore Existing Customers

Your existing customers are an invaluable source of organic growth. Many businesses make the mistake of focusing too much on obtaining new customers to the detriment of keeping their old customers. Don’t just assume that because they are customers that they will continue to purchase your products and services. You need to continue to foster the customer relationships you’ve built. Doing so will help reduce customer churn and build trust and loyalty. This will help to ensure that they not only continue doing business with you, but that they expand the amount of business that they do with you over time.

Enjoy Article: Micro Moments: A New Consumer Behavior in Marketing

4. Focus More On Relationships Than Sales

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to focus on the sale. Focusing on a sale is a short-term view. Instead, focus on building a relationship with your prospects so that once they do make the purchase, you have a relationship in place that you can continue to foster throughout the future. If you focus too much on the sale, you may also lose prospects due to the fact that you were focused too much on your business instead of their needs.

5. Optimize Your Website For SEO Organic Growth Business2

SEO (search engine optimization) is an inbound marketing strategy that will help drive long-term organic growth. When your website is properly optimized for SEO, your pages will be more likely to be indexed by Google and ranked highly (as long as the quality of the content is good). As a result, your pages will appear higher up on Google’s SERP (search engine results page). People who search for the terms you’ve used as keywords when optimizing your website will see your website displayed.

Keeping your site properly optimized will, as a direct result, help to drive organic growth over time. Proper SEO requires a technically sound website, positive social signals, high-quality backlinks, and the use of relevant and competitive keywords, to name a few ranking factors.

6. Develop A Content Marketing Strategy

Your SEO strategy won’t do you much good with content to optimize. Additionally, Google’s ranking factors are all meant to help identify the quality of a webpage’s content. As such, your content marketing strategy needs to revolve around regularly producing high-quality content that’s relevant to your audience and that’s properly optimized for SEO. Part of your content marketing strategy should also focus on the promotion of new content.

7. Establish SMART Goals

You will want to monitor organic growth so that you can make adjustments that help to enable and enhance it. To do this, you will need to establish SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) goals to help you monitor and analyze your marketing and sales efforts.

These are 7 organic business growth strategies that you should consider adopting. By implementing these organic growth strategies, you will help to drive the organic growth of your business over time.

visual storytelling

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Avoid

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Storytelling is an integral part of marketing your brand effectively. It allows you to convey your message and your values to your audience, all while making it easy for them to relate and connect to you on a more personal level by capturing their interest and inciting specific emotions. However, storytelling isn’t as easy as you might think it is.

Top 5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Avoid

There are several mistakes that brands commonly make in their attempt to tell a story that can cause your audience to lose interest. The following are five storytelling techniques you should avoid:

1. Making Your Brand The Central Character

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make is to think that the story they’re telling is about them. How is your audience going to relate to such a story? You need to make the story about them instead. Position the customer as the main character. They are the hero on the hero’s journey. As the brand, you should be the mentor that helps the hero overcome their problem.

2. Not Knowing How To Tell a Good Story

There are two essential components of a good story. The first is to have a point. If the story you’re telling doesn’t go anywhere, it’s not going to have much of an impact on the audience. You need to have a primary message that you’re trying to get across or else the audience won’t know what the point of your story is.

The second is pacing. Good pacing is extremely important. If your story is too long, your audience grows disinterested. Keep your storytelling succinct and avoid going on tangents — stay on point.

3. Providing Too Much Information

Many companies have a habit of trying to provide their audience with as much information as possible. Although you want your audience to be as informed as possible, trying to over explain is going to cause your story to become overwhelming. Keep it simple.

4. Only Showcasing Your Successes

Only showcasing how effective your brand is and how well your products or services work isn’t going to come off as very authentic. Don’t be afraid to highlight some of your failures. Tell your audience how you overcame your failures in order to obtain success. Showing this kind of vulnerability is much more authentic and relatable.

5. Not Knowing Who You’re Telling The Story To

To tell your story effectively, you need to know who your audience is. Otherwise, how can you ever present a character and a problem that your audience can relate to? Identify who your audience is before you begin crafting your story.

Storytelling not only allows you to inform your audience about how your business can help solve their problems, it can also help them to relate to your brand on a more emotional level, making engagement easier sometimes called emotional advertising. However, there is an art to storytelling, which means some storytelling techniques work better than others. Make sure to avoid these five storytelling techniques and you’ll be on the right path.

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Use For Your Marketing Efforts

Learn The StoryBranding Process

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The Importance of Earning High Quality Backlinks

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One of the major goals of an inbound marketing campaign is to be found online. There are many tactics that you can implement in order to achieve this. One such tactic is through link building. Link building refers to getting other websites to link to your content. The more high quality backlinks that you earn to your website, the more traffic you’ll receive. Because of the nature of high-quality backlinks, there’s a good chance that this traffic will consist of high-quality leads. Because of this, you should try to earn as many high-quality backlinks as possible.

High-Quality Backlinks Benefits

There are two major benefits of high-quality backlinks. The first is that a website that links to your content is doing so in order to provide their audience with a quality source that they think will benefit them. This means that your content will be exposed to an audience that is likely going to be relevant to your brand. Backlinks from websites with particularly big audiences are going to result in a lot of web traffic to your site as well, which can result in more potential leads.

The second benefit of earning high-quality backlinks is that they indicate to Google that your content is of high quality. After all, a reputable website wouldn’t send their audience to your page if the content wasn’t helpful or relevant. As such, Google factors the number of high-quality backlinks that your content earns into its page rankings. This means that the more high-quality backlinks you earn, the higher your page is probably going to appear on their SERP. As a result you’ll gain more exposure and more organic web traffic.

How to Earn High-Quality BacklinksHigh Quality Backlink2

Earning high-quality backlinks might seem like a matter of luck. After all, you have no control over whether another website decides to link to your content. However, this isn’t necessarily true. There are a number of ways that you can increase the chances of being linked to. The following are a few tips on how you can earn more high-quality backlinks:

  • Create high-quality content – The first thing that’s required in order to earn backlinks is to have content worth linking to. This means that you should focus on creating high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience and that is helpful or informative in some way. Be sure to get your content out there too by promoting it. For example, link your content to your social channels and add social share buttons so that your readers can help expose it to more people. The more exposure the content is, the more likely it is that another website will stumble onto it and link to it.
  • Optimize your content for SEO – The higher your content ranks on Google’s SERP, the more likely it is that another website will find your content when doing research for their own blog content. If they end up referencing your content, they will link back to it.
  • Build your brand authority – The more brand authority you have, the more you’ll be trusted as an expert in your field. As a result, websites will be more willing to link to your content as a valid source that they can use to strengthen whatever argument they’re making or information they’re providing in their own content.
  • Build relationships with influencers – Find the influencers within your industry on social media and begin building relationships with them. Once they know you exist, they may link to your content. Not only can you earn backlinks this way, but the additional exposure can result in more backlinks in the near future.
  • Write guest blog posts – When you write a guest blog post on another website, that website will link your guest post back to your own blog. This means that you’re automatically earning backlinks for every guest post your write.
  • Link to other websites – Link your content to other high-quality websites. Doing this can result in them returning the favor.

How Businesses Can Use a Blog To Strengthen Their Online Marketing Efforts

The thing about backlinks is that they only help in seo if they come from a reputable website. A low-quality website isn’t going to send you a whole lot of traffic, after all. Additionally, Google will evaluate where your backlinks are coming from to ensure that they are from a reputable source. The reason they do this is because, websites would try to trick Google into providing high page rankings. They did this by buying backlinks from websites that sold them, known as link farms. This was a common blackhat tactic that is now very difficult to get away with. If you buy backlinks, Google will penalize you by either lowering your page ranking. Or they’ll kick your page off of their SERP.

Importance of earning backlinks should be a tactic in seo that everyone invests in. Doing so can help to increase the exposure of your brand and your content. Help bring in traffic from other websites, and help boost your SEO rankings, thereby attracting more organic traffic from Google.

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SEO Benefits From A Long Term Strategy

How Your SEO Benefits From A Long Term Strategy

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When it comes to getting your website found online, SEO is essential. But, it is not something that you can do and expect immediate results. It requires a long-term vision and consistent application to achieve optimal results. It is an investment that will give you compounding returns in SEO benefits.

Why SEO is Long-Term?

If you flash back a decade, the Internet was a very different place. SEO was a lot easier back there. A website could use a few keywords and quickly move up the rankings.

Then, Google started making some critical changes in the way it ranked pages. With the Penguin and Panda updates, the rankings changed radically. Pages at the top of the rankings before the updates were sent to the bottom. Why? They were stuffing their pages with keywords. Google had made the shift towards organic searches and that triggered the transformation of how SEO worked.

Today, Google gives the highest rankings to websites that have rich, dynamic content that use keywords in organic, context correct ways. And gaining those top spots takes time because Google doesn’t change a website’s ranking overnight. It can take months to see SEO benefits.

Is SEO Worth the Investment?

You might think that it’s not worth the investment in SEO unless you get quicker results. And that would be a strategic mistake.

SEO works much like compounding interest. At first, the amount of interest earned is small. But, as the interest adds up, the amount of interest earned also grows. In time, you are gaining substantial amounts of interest that only adds to the power of the interest already compounded.

Just like compounding interest, SEO starts giving minimal results, but then it starts to build. Eventually, you will see the results snowballing. Your website will enjoy high rankings in the keywords that matter to your business.

Essential Website Optimization Techniques to Increase Visitors

SEO Benefits of Long-Term Strategy

The SEO benefits you will see include, but are not limited to, the following:

It builds your audience. Every time a person reads your content, you have a new member for your audience. The more high quality content you have out there, the more potential traffic you have, the more new audience members you gain.
It attracts people to your website. As you start gaining footing in the search engine rankings, the more people will come and see what your company is offering. And that will continue to snowball with each SEO effort you make over time.
It builds referral traffic. If you offer high-quality content, you may find other sites linking to it. And those links are gold when it comes to search engine rankings. It shows Google that others view your content positively.

One of the best things about SEO is that it works with new websites and existing ones. You can build a brand new website from the ground up, optimizing its structure and content for high search engine rankings. Or, you can revamp an existing website to optimize it for the search engines.

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