The Importance of Package Design – How it Affects Your Brand Story

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Creating a strong brand identity requires good storytelling in order to establish your brand as unique and relevant as well as to make it more engaging for your target audience. We’ve gone over the ins and outs of brand storytelling before, but what we haven’t touched on yet is how your package design affects your brand story and the role it plays in telling that story.

Why packaging design is important?

The Importance of Packaging Design to Your Brand

When it comes to the visual identity of your brand, consistency matters, from your website design and your social media pages to your storefront sign and your business cards. Consistency is what helps to strengthen your brand identity. As such, it’s important that consumers can recognize your brand from the packaging of your products. If the packaging is consistent with your brand, people who are already familiar with your brand will identify it right away. This makes it easier to stand out from the crowd.

Keep in mind that it works the other way as well – those who purchase your product will become familiar with your brand as a result and be able to identify your brand when they see it elsewhere — as long as there is consistency with your branding efforts.

7 Package Design Tips for Creating a Strong Brand

Brand Storytelling Using Your Package Design

Using visual elements of your brand in your package design is important, but there’s more to it than just that. What your product’s packaging ends up looking like on the shelf can tell consumers a lot about your product. For example:

Targeting your audience

When designing the visual elements of brand packaging design, you should take into consideration your target audience. For example, packaging for kid products often uses large, bold typography and a colorful style, while products targeting career-oriented adults may use more elegant typography in a more minimal design.

Conveying an experience

The package design should reflect the experience of your product. For example, an eco-friendly product should probably be packaged using sustainable materials to help build trust in your product. If you’re selling a luxury product, then you should use high-end materials and not cheap packaging. If one of the benefits of your product is convenience, then the package should be easy to use.

Creating an aesthetically pleasing design

Consumers tend to judge books by their covers. When they see that a brand has put effort into creating a visually pleasing package, they will assume that this is reflective of the brand’s effort to create a high-quality product. The real challenge is not only creating a visually pleasing design but one that is unique amongst competing products as well.

Brand packaging design has a huge impact on your brand identity and vice versa. It should help spread awareness of your brand and promise to deliver on your unique value proposition. It should also target your audience and it should speak to the personality of your brand. Your package design shouldn’t just leave a good first impression, it should leave a lasting impression.

Digital Marketing for Manufacturers

7 Reasons Why Digital Marketing for Manufacturers is Critical to Success

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Manufacturers often use traditional marketing to advertise their services and find new customers. Whether it’s TV commercials, direct mail, or even cold calls, traditional marketing can still be effective. However, it’s crucial that you also adopt a digital marketing for Manufacturers Company.

7 Reasons Why Digital Marketing for Manufacturers is Important

The following are seven reasons why digital marketing for manufacturers is so essential:

1. Generate New Leads Over The Long-Term

Digital marketing allows manufacturers to generate new leads over the long term. While traditional marketing efforts help you garner immediate attention, they won’t generate new leads consistently over time. For example, TV commercials won’t have a lasting impact on lead generation. Once they stop running, they’ll stop reaching an audience.

Digital marketing strategies, such as content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), can help put your business in the position to be found online for years to come.

2. Reach Your Target Audience With Greater Success

One of the limitations of traditional marketing is that you don’t have much control over who your audience is. With digital marketing, you can specifically target your audience in various ways. For example, you can segment your target audience to reach specific types of leads. You can also optimize your content for SEO or using targeted advertising (such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads).

3. Digital Marketing Is Cost-Effective digital marketing

The marketing landscape is constantly changing, making it difficult to know how to budget effectively. While traditional marketing efforts like TV ads or billboards can reach many people at one time, they are also expensive. Digital marketing is more cost-effective because you can target a specific audience and spend less on each impression.

Additionally, digital marketing tactics, such as blogging or SEO optimization, will continue to have a long-term impact. As a result, they will provide a greater return on investment (ROI) over the long run. For example, email marketing has an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent.

4. It’s Easier To Track And Adjust Digital Marketing Efforts

One of the biggest marketing challenges is knowing if your strategies are working. You can use various analytics tools to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) with digital marketing. This makes it easier to track the performance of your marketing efforts to determine what channels work and what tactics need to be adjusted.

5. Establish Your Business As A Brand Authority

Digital marketing for manufacturers is beneficial for increasing brand authority. One of the best ways to establish yourself as an authority is by regularly publishing content on subjects related to manufacturing services. Such content can include everything from blog posts to white papers.

As you build up your library of content, Google may recognize you as an authority on the subject.  As a result, people searching for manufacturers online will be more likely to find your company. The reputation you build due to that brand authority will increase brand trust, making it easier to close sales. It will also help you stand out from your competition.

6. Nurture Your Leads In A Pressure-Free Environment

When you create compelling content and invest in SEO, you’ll generate leads without putting pressure on potential customers. Outbound marketing (which includes a lot of traditional marketing strategies) is considered “interruption” marketing. This is because you’re forcing your message on an audience without their permission.

Inbound marketing (including many digital marketing efforts) allows you to attract leads and nurture them without engaging with them right away. Inbound is known as “permission” marketing because your leads are viewing your marketing materials on their own accord. They will engage with you when they are ready.

By not having to pressure your leads into sales, you can spend time building trust, which is more likely to result in a long-term relationship.

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

7. Build Relationships With Existing Customers build relationships

Digital marketing is more effective in building relationships with existing customers. For example, you can use email marketing to keep in touch, whether by sending your customers personalized email content or sending them cross-selling or up-selling opportunities. The ability to stay in touch and continue nurturing existing customers helps build long-term relationships, resulting in steady sales.

If you’re running a manufacturing business, you should strongly consider implementing digital marketing into your overall marketing strategy. Although traditional marketing may still suit you well, there are advantages to digital marketing that traditional marketing can’t offer. In this day and age, to be successful as a manufacturer, your marketing strategy should consist of a mix of traditional and digital marketing efforts.

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.

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.

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.

lead nurturing

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.

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.

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

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

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.

smart goal examples

How To Incorporate Smart Goals Into Marketing Plan Development

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Now, most of us have heard about how to develop SMART goals. But, how do you incorporate them into your marketing plan development?

A quick recap: SMART goals are those that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. This format makes it easier to see where you need to go and how to measure your progress. That’s why it’s perfect for your marketing plan development.

Making Your Marketing Plan SMART

Every plan must have at least one objective. In the world of marketing plans, the objectives usually include building demand for a product or service, maintaining current demand or shortening the sales cycle. The actual plan you put together works towards obtaining those objectives.

Setting high objectives sounds great on paper. But, when they are not specific, measurable, attainable, relevant or time bound, they become nothing more than marks on a page.

To avoid making paper goals, your marketing objectives themselves must be SMART. For example, let’s say your objective is to gain a 50% increase in market share in the next 12 months. That is definitely specific and measurable, but may not be attainable due to lack of resources or stiff competition. Relevancy depends on the size of the available market and how fast it is growing or not. Being able to grow that much in 12 months may or may not be possible depending on the market.

5 Smart Goal Examples For Business Development

Incorporate Smart Goals Into Marketing Plan

All of your objectives should be stated in SMART terms. Let’s say you want to increase the number of visitors to the Thingamajig product page on your website.

  • Specific: To increase the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page by 25% over last quarter’s total.
  • Measurable: The total visitors last quarter was 2000, so the goal this quarter is to achieve a total of 2500 or more visitors.
  • Attainable: Increasing the number of visitors is definitely doable with increased spending in PPC ads and referral incentives for existing customers.
  • Relevant: The Thingamajig is our most profitable product. Ten percent of visitors to the website ultimately end up placing an order. Increasing the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page has the potential of increasing the number of orders by 25% or more.
  • Time-Bound: The goal is to have this achieved by September 30th, so that we are ready to enter the Christmas season with a larger share of the Thingamajig market.

Also Read: SMART Goal Examples That Will Make You a Better Marketer

Going from a general objective to a detailed one is a major change. Here is what just happened:

  • General objective: “Increasing the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page”
  • Detailed objective: “Increasing the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page by 25%, or 500 more visitors, in the 3rd quarter, in order to generate 25% more orders and to obtain a larger share of the market during the upcoming Christmas season”

Applying SMART goal thinking to our marketing plan development will make all the difference in moving things forward. How can you incorporate it into your next campaign?