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6 Social Media Trends To Follow In 2020

February 12, 2020/in Articles, Directors, Social Media, Trending /by Nicole Wagner

At this point in time, every business with an inbound marketing strategy should have a social media presence of some sort. Social media is one of the most effective ways to build relationships with your target audience. You can engage directly with them and learn more about what their wants and needs are. However, social media is constantly evolving. Which means that you need to keep up with all the latest social media trends. In doing so, you make sure that your presence is felt and that you don’t fall behind the competition. With that in mind, the following are six social media trends in 2020 worth implementing yourself:

1. Find More Impactful Influencers

Influencer marketing continues to thrive. Building relationships with influencers can help expose your brand to a huge audience. However, more and more so-called “influencers” have popped up over the last few years. And as a result, make it difficult to identify actual influencers. Don’t make the mistake of trying to build a relationship with an influencer based on their number of followers. Many of these “fake” influencers won’t be able to help you at all. Focus more on finding influencers who actually have sway over their followers, no matter how many they have. Many brands are focusing on nano-influencers, which are influencers who may only have a few thousand followers but who actually have significant influence over their audience.

2. Focus On Video Content

Brands are continuing to focus on the creation of video content as it continues to be incredibly effective. Not only are short videos easier to consume on mobile devices than other types of content, but people are more visual creatures that retain information better when it’s presented in a video format. On top of that, YouTube currently boasts the second most active users behind only Facebook. While channels like Instagram are continuously looking to improve their video features. As such, you should focus on creating professional-quality video content for your target audience.

3. Curate Customer Created Content

Encouraging customers to create content that’s relevant to your business not only helps to strengthen your content strategy in general (and provides you with fresh content that helps increase brand awareness on your behalf), but it’s also a great way to boost customer participation and engagement. Many brands encourage their followers to post pictures on Instagram showcasing the use of their product with a specific hashtag. For example, the eyeglasses brand Zenni encouraged its customers to post photos wearing their new glasses under the hashtag #justgotmyzennis.

Enjoy Article: The Power of Social Media Influencers: Why it works

4. Take Advantage Of FOMO

People on social media (and life in general) tend to have a “fear of missing out” or FOMO. This means that posting content that can only be accessed for a specific amount of time can help to attract more views. For example, webinars that people have to register for or ephemeral content in the form of Snapchat Stories or Instagram Stories that will disappear forever. Many followers will check in regularly to make sure that they don’t miss out on content that’s only going to be around for a day, allowing you to drive more engagement and keep your brand at the top of mind as a result.

Most companies stick to major social channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, to name a few. However, there are hundreds of other social channels out there that might be worth incorporating into your social media strategy. Specifically, social channels that cater to a certain niche that’s relevant to your brand. By establishing a presence on such a channel, you’ll be able to target a much more specific audience to greater success than on channels like Facebook that essentially cater to everyone. For example, TikTok tends to be more youth-oriented but has exploded in popularity amongst the younger demographic (it’s a social platform similar to the now-defunct Vine), while Twitch is a streaming platform catering to videogamers.

Social media is thought of as a strategy that helps improve customer engagement and that can drive leads to your website; however, it’s potential to be used as a platform to generate sales is increasing year by year. Channels like Facebook and Pinterest have been used for years now to sell products; however, social commerce has increased to the point where it may soon become just as effective a source of sales as website ecommerce pages and offline stores. As such, you may want to consider incorporating social commerce into your sales strategy going forward.

These are six social media trends that you should keep a close eye on in 2020 and that you may want to consider adopting for your own inbound marketing and sales strategies.

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results

6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs B2B Inbound Marketing

February 6, 2020/in Articles, B2B Marketing, Directors /by Nicole Wagner

There are many B2B companies that continue to advertise using more traditional methods, such as TV commercials, magazine ads, cold calls, and more. While traditional marketing can be effective, it’s a good idea to implement a variety of different marketing strategies. This includes inbound marketing. The main difference between inbound marketing and traditional marketing (often referred to as outbound marketing) is that with inbound marketing you’re putting yourself in the position to be found by prospects, whereas with outbound marketing, the goal is to find prospects and to advertise to them directly. If you haven’t implemented an inbound marketing B2B strategy yet, the following are six reasons to do so:

1. Increase Brand Awareness

As any company knows, increasing brand awareness is critical to growing your business. Inbound marketing provides numerous opportunities to generate awareness for your brand. Having a website that you post content to that’s optimized for SEO (search engine optimization) will help to increase your company’s page rankings on Google, thereby increasing exposure to Google’s users. Establishing a social media presence will help you engage with followers, who will then share, like, or comment on the content you post to social media, which helps drive exposure even further. Inbound marketing also tends to have a snowball effect when it comes to brand awareness. The more you continue to create content and post, the more awareness of your brand will increase.

2. Build Brand Authority

While generating brand awareness is certainly important, you will also want to build the reputation of your brand as a company that clients can trust and depend on. Inbound marketing can achieve is in many ways. First of all, by creating relevant content that addresses the needs of your target audience, you help to build authority within your industry. The more authority you have, the more trusted you will be. You can also generate authority by engaging with followers on social media, such as by addressing questions and participating in relevant discussions.

3. Generate More Leads

Without leads you cannot generate sales. Inbound marketing encompasses a variety of different tactics that can help you generate more leads. These tactics include SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. Effective inbound marketing strategies are capable of generating high-quality traffic to your website and ensuring that the content that’s available on your website will help to nurture visitors through the buyer’s journey, enabling you to convert your leads and eventually turn them into customers.

4. Educate Your Prospects

The more a prospect knows about their own needs and challenges as well as the solutions that will best address those needs and challenges, the more likely they will consider the product or service that you have to offer. Inbound marketing gives you the opportunity to create content that will educate prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey. The idea is to let your prospects find the information that you offer and educate themselves at their own pace. This way, they do not feel the pressure to purchase until they are ready to choose a solution. The ability to educate your prospects will not only help get you closer to a sale, but it will also build your brand authority.

Similar Article: Top 3 Ways to Maximize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

5. Improve Understanding Of Your Audience

You can learn a lot about your audience via inbound marketing. For example, you can gather information on prospects and customers through your opt-in forms, through questionnaires and surveys, through social media engagement, and by tracking their online behavior. You can use this information to better understand who your customers are and what their needs, goals, and challenges are. As a result, you’ll be able to develop buyer personas that you can then use to more effectively target your inbound marketing efforts.

6. Increase Long-Term ROI

Even if you run very successful outbound marketing strategies, there will always be one major drawback: more traditional marketing efforts tend to be short-term strategies. This means that once a campaign has finished, you’ll have a good idea of what the ROI was for that campaign. The thing about inbound marketing B2B strategies is that they are long-term. Even if the ROI seems low at first, it will grow over time as you adjust and improve your tactics. For example, the content you post to your website will live there forever. Which means it can have an impact years after it’s been published.

Inbound marketing has often been touted as essential for B2C companies, but it can be just as beneficial for B2B companies if properly implemented. These are six reasons why you should implement an inbound marketing B2B strategy. And once you do, you’ll realize that there are many other benefits over the long run as well.

5 Key Healthcare Marketing Strategies to Implement in 2020

February 4, 2020/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

As a healthcare organization, you may know that you have a product or service that fulfills a pressing need; however, that doesn’t mean that patients will simply find you. You will still need to market your healthcare business effectively; in order to spread awareness of your organization and what it is that you have to offer. Because there are so many healthcare options out there for patients to choose from, your marketing strategy is even more important to your success. With that in mind, the following are five key healthcare marketing strategies that you should implement this year:

1. Focus On Local SEO

A lot of people will search for the closest healthcare practice to them if they have a pressing medical need. Even if they have some time to find several different healthcare practices and to compare them, they will often choose the one that is closest to them. You’ll want to make sure that your healthcare business can be found by such patients, which is why you should focus on local SEO. Optimizing for local SEO means that it will be easier for potential customers in your area to find you via search. To strengthen your local SEO, you should do the following:

Submit your NAP – Make sure that you submit your NAP (name, address, and phone number) to numerous local directories. Yelp or Zocdoc, would be good examples of where to start.
Set up Google My Business account – A My Business account on Google will allow you to submit your NAP along with other business information, such as a description of your services, a link to your website, photographs and more.
Encourage reviews – Encourage your patients to leave positive online reviews. When researching nearby healthcare practices or facilities, people will often check online reviews before making a decision.
Optimize for mobile use – Because most local searches are performed on mobile devices while users are out and about, it’s important that your website is properly optimized for mobile use.
Create local-based content – Create content for your blog that’s relevant to your area and use local keywords wherever appropriate (such as the name of the town or neighborhood you’re located in).

Building your reputation is key to attracting more long-term customers. Establishing and maintaining a presence on social media is a great way to do that. Social media allows you to engage directly with your target audience, whether it’s by posting links to helpful healthcare-related content (including your own), answering questions that followers have about your services or products, asking followers for feedback, and more. As you continue to engage with people through social media, you will build trust and awareness. If done effectively, people will begin automatically looking for your healthcare practice or business when they’re in need of healthcare products or services instead of doing basic Google searches.

3. Keep Patients Engaged With Email Updates

Staying on the top of mind, is important. If your existing patients forget about you, you could lose them to a competing practice. Not to mention that some patients may not stay up to date when it comes to scheduling routine appointments. Email is one of the best ways to keep your current patients up-to-date and to remind them about scheduling appointments if it’s time to do so. You can also use email marketing to inform customers about new healthcare services or products that you’re offering.

4. Attract More Patients Using PPC Advertising

PPC ads are a great way to attract new customers. The way they work is simple. You bid on a keyword. When somebody performs a search using that keyword, there’s a good chance your ad will show up on their SERP (search engine results page). You will then only pay for the ad if that person clicks on the ad. Using relevant keywords (such as keywords that are location-based and describe specific services or products), you can make sure that your ads are attracting potential customers in your area. You can use your PPC ads to promote new products and services. Making PPC advertising one of the most flexible healthcare marketing strategies available.

5. Create And Publish Relevant Content

Create content centered around healthcare-related topics that are relevant to your business. Afterward, publish that content on a website blog regularly. Not only is this a great way to attract organic traffic via Google, but it will engage readers and help to build your brand authority. The greater your authority becomes, the more your reputation within your industry will grow, thereby helping to increase brand trust.

Knowing how to market your healthcare organization is critical to attracting more patients and growing your business. These are some of the healthcare marketing strategies that will help you to attract more patients and that will help put you in the best position to compete with other healthcare businesses in your area.

Tips On Using Facebook For Senior Living Social Media Marketing

January 29, 2020/in Articles, Directors, Senior Living Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

Senior living social media marketing, is one of the most effective ways to spread awareness about your senior living community. In doing so, you provide your audience with insight into your facility. This is because decision-makers will often look through social media pages; to not only find the information they’re looking for, but also to get a sense of what other people think about your facility as well as how you engage with decision-makers. As for what social channels you should focus on, Facebook is arguably the best way to reach your audience. This is because Facebook not only has over two billion users, but because 75 percent of American adults between the ages of 18 and 49 use Facebook, which means you’re more likely to reach the family members who are in charge of finding a senior living facility for their loved ones.

Keeping this in mind, the following are a few senior living social media marketing tips to help strengthen your efforts to reach your audience and to engage with them via Facebook:

1. Showcase Your Personality

Besides delivering information about your community, you’ll also want to showcase the personality of your community. This is done through the tone you use and the type of content you post. Showcasing your personality is important because it makes your community more engaging for potential prospects.

2. Use Real Pictures Of Your Property And Your Residents

People tend to be attracted to visual content. Pictures of your community can convey much more about what it’s like to live there than words can. Facebook is a great place to share pictures of your property and residents that will have a real impact on your audience. Additionally, people will be more likely to share visual content, thereby helping to drive awareness of your community. Just make sure to use actual pictures of your property and residents and not stock pictures. As this will feel inauthentic and will hurt your trust.

3. Give Your Residents A Voice

Instead of constantly trying to convey the message that residents are happy and active in your community, let your residents deliver the message themselves. Post testimonials from actual residents in your community. Even something as simple as a quote from a resident and their picture can impact a person’s impression of your organization. Your audience is much more likely to believe what actual residents have to say about your community over what you have to say about it, after all.

4. Promote Events And Activities

Keep your followers up to date with all community-related events and activities. Posting updates that include the dates and times help keep your audience informed about what’s going on in your community. It also gives decision-makers the opportunity to see what kinds of events and activities you typically hold.

5. Be Helpful To Your Audience

Facebook is a social channel, which means it’s not just about delivering information to your audience. It’s also about engaging with them in a two-way conversation. As such, make sure to address any questions, concerns, or feedback that’s left on your page; in a polite, friendly, and helpful manner. The more helpful you are, the better it will reflect on your senior living community.

6. Post Content That Is Informative And Relevant

Facebook is a great way to nurture leads through the buyer’s journey by posting links to content. This content can be from your blog or even from other relevant blogs on other high-quality, non-competing websites. Since the buyer’s journey isn’t linear, make sure that you post content that addresses all three stages of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness – At the awareness stage, people are still identifying what their pain points are. Content that addresses common challenges to finding the right senior living community (such as budget, help with activities of daily living, location, staying active, and more) help address the awareness stage.
Consideration – Once they are familiar with their pain points, they will begin looking for specific solutions. Post content that highlights potential solutions to those challenges and how your community is able to provide such solutions.
Decision – At this point, people will know exactly what they’re looking for and will be deciding on the community that best suits their loved one’s needs. Content that helps convince your prospects that your community is the best option can include testimonials, virtual tours, ebooks, and more.

Similar Article: 4 Tips for Marketing Senior Living Communities

7. Use Relevant Hashtags

When posting content or comments to Facebook, adding relevant hashtags helps to categorize what you’ve posted. Doing so can make it easier for interested people to find your content more easily. In doing so, helping to drive awareness of your community on various social media platforms. This includes not just Facebook but also Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, and Pinterest.

There are plenty of social media tools available that allow you to track mentions of your community. This allows you to get an overall idea of what people think about you since you can monitor reviews on Facebook as well as general comments about your community. Not only can you get a sense of your reputation this way and find areas that need to be addressed (in the event that there are similar complaints about specific things), but it gives you a chance to find opportunities to engage with the people who are talking about your brand.

9. Drive Conversions Using CTAs

Although your audience can do its own research using the content you post on Facebook, they still need to be encouraged to take action. Use CTAs (calls-to-action) to encourage potential prospects to take specific actions, such as opting in to your email newsletter or calling your community to set up an appointment.

Facebook can be an incredibly effective way to inform your audience about your senior living community and to drive conversions if you know how to leverage it properly. These are nine senior living social media marketing tips that will help you do just that.

Figuring Out Your Bounce Rate Benchmark

January 27, 2020/in Articles, Content Marketing, Directors /by Nicole Wagner

When it comes to your website, it’s important to monitor how it’s performing. Tracking performance allows you to adjust different tactics. Thereby ensuring that you have the best chance of attracting high-quality leads and converting them while they’re exploring your site. One metric that you should be sure to monitor is the bounce rate. However, the bounce rate benchmark isn’t as easy to read as you might think.

What Is The Bounce Rate?

A “bounce” occurs whenever someone who has visited your webpage leaves the page without engaging further. This is generally seen as a bad thing since visitors who leave without engaging may not be interested in your content, may have a poor first impression of your website, or did no0t find what they were looking for. A bounce can be triggered when a visitor returns to their original search results, closes their browser, stays inactive on your page and the session times out, clicks on an outbound link, or enters a new URL into the address bar.

While a high bounce rate might indicate that there’s something wrong with your page (for example, it’s not loading fast enough, resulting in visitors returning to their search results in frustration), it’s not always a bad thing. In some cases, certain pages simply have naturally high bounce rates. For example, contact pages often have high bounce rates. This is not because the visitor is leaving as a result of a negative experience — instead, they may simply be using the contact information they’ve found to reach you. With that in mind, you’ll want to set a different bounce rate benchmark for different types of pages.

Setting Your Bounce Rate Benchmark

Setting a bounce rate benchmark is important. When you monitor your bounce rate of certain pages, you’ll want to be able to identify if the bounce rate is too high or not. A bounce rate under 40 percent is considered normal, while a bounce rate between 20 and 30 percent is excellent. However, there are other factors to consider as well. Sometimes a 50 percent bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With that in mind, the following are some of the factors you’ll need to consider when setting your bounce rate benchmark for different pages on your site.

Similar Article: Improving User Experience With Good Website Navigation Design

The type of page

As previously mentioned, some pages are going to have higher bounce rates than other pages because of the type of page that they are. Content-based pages, such as blog pages, tend to have higher bounce rates. A visitor might spend some time reading a long-form blog post and then leave after finishing. Unfortunately, this can trigger a bounce if all they did was read the post. But this isn’t necessarily a negative thing — if they stayed on the page and finished reading the entire post, then there’s always a chance they’ll come back to your site in the future.

Additionally, content pages are often visited via links posted on social media. This means that someone who came to your site, via a link to your blog that you posted on Facebook may go back to your Facebook page after they’re done. Just because they didn’t engage further on your website, doesn’t mean that they’re not engaging on your social pages afterwards. In addition to content-based pages, reference pages tend to have high bounce rates as well. For example, FAQ pages, form submission pages, and sales confirmation pages.

The device used

The device the user is on affects the bounce rate as well. People using a desktop are more likely to engage with a webpage that they are visiting because they have more time. Mobile users tend to be in more of a hurry and are more likely to bounce as a result.

The origin of the traffic

Knowing what channels your traffic is coming from is helpful since the origin of the traffic can affect the bounce rate. Visitors coming to your site from social media pages tend to go back to the social channel they came from. It’s why social media bounce rates are usually two to three times higher than bounce rates from other channels. The highest bounce rates come from display ad traffic. As far as the lowest bounce rates go, they tend to come from referral and email traffic. This is because visitors coming to your site from a referral or email link, are more likely to have an existing interest in your brand and are more likely to continue engaging on your site.

Although bounce rates are an excellent metric to track in order to monitor your website’s performance, it’s important to understand the factors that contribute to your bounce rate. Understanding why the bounce rate is what it is will make it easier to judge the performance of your pages.

Evaluating Your Internet Marketing Strategy

January 23, 2020/in Articles, Directors, Website Design /by Nicole Wagner

It’s not only the beginning of a new year, it’s the beginning of a new decade. So what better time to update your internet marketing strategy than now? If it’s been a while since you’ve evaluated your marketing strategy, then it’s time to do so. Even if your marketing efforts have been effective, there’s no reason why they can’t be improved on. The following are five ways that you can update your internet marketing strategy in 2020:

1. Update Your Web Design

Your website design will always be one of the most important aspects of your internet marketing strategy. It’s the foundation from which all of your marketing efforts depend on, after all. If visitors come to your website and it’s difficult to navigate or not aesthetically pleasing, it will leave a poor first impression of your company. Consider the last time that you updated your web design. If it’s been longer than a year, then you may want to consider re-evaluating your website in the event that it could use an update.

Pay attention to how easy it is to navigate. You should make sure that there are clearly marked links to the most important pages of your site on your homepage. Add a search feature to make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. Check to see if all of your links are working. Make sure every page loads quickly. These are all important to a successful web design. You should look at competing websites as well to get an idea of what’s working and what isn’t. When it comes to the aesthetic of your site, remember that what may have been popular a few years ago may be significantly outdated tomorrow. These days, clean, elegant, and minimal web designs are preferred.

2. Expand Your Content Strategy

A successful content strategy is one that produces a variety of different types of content. You may be running a successful blog on which you post new articles several times a week, but there are other content creation tactics that you should consider employing in order to improve results. For example, writing guest blogs for companies within your industry that you’re not competing with directly can help to build your audience as well as increase brand authority. If you’re not creating video content yet, then you should begin doing so. Video content is more easily consumed by people, especially those on mobile devices, making it an important component of any modern content marketing strategy.

Learn More: 5 Ways to Update Your Internet Market Strategy in 2020

3. Improve The Effectiveness Of Your Email Marketing Strategy

Because of how old email marketing is, some people may think that it’s an outdated strategy in itself. This is a mistake — email marketing can still be very effective if you do it right. You just need to make sure that your email content can’t be mistaken for spam. The best way to ensure that your email marketing efforts are effective is to use the data you have on your subscribers to segment your email list. This will allow you to send out more relevant content, thereby allowing you to nurture both leads and customers more effectively. You should also begin performing A/B tests on your emails. This will help you pinpoint certain elements (for example, the types of CTAs or titles that you’re using) that result in the best open and conversion rates.

4. Find More Ways To Improve Your Conversion Rate

Be sure to monitor your conversion rates over time. You can identify ways to improve your conversion rate as well by testing different elements. For example, use conversion rate optimization to test images, webpage layouts, CTA buttons, and more to identify what visitors prefer. For example, you might find that a blue CTA button converts more visitors than a red CTA button despite the page layout and content being the same.

Social media is an incredibly cost-effective way to engage directly with your audience. As such, it’s the perfect tool for building relationships, promoting content, and even managing PR. If you’re only using social media to promote content, consider leveraging social media to engage your audience in other ways. For example, begin contributing to discussions that your followers are having. Hold contests on social media to encourage followers to engage with each other. Use social media to collect valuable feedback from your customers. You may also want to re-evaluate your social media strategy to determine if your audience is using any other channels other than the ones you’re on. You want to have a presence wherever your audience is, after all.

As effective as your internet marketing strategy may currently be, you should always be on the lookout for ways that you can improve it. These are five areas that you should focus on when evaluating and improving your internet marketing strategy for the new year.

10 Best Digital Marketing Podcasts in 2020

January 16, 2020/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Marketing strategies constantly change and evolve every year. Therefore, it’s important that you stay up to date on all of the best digital marketing podcasts, and latest marketing trends. Doing so can give you good ideas on how to improve your marketing strategy. So that it doesn’t grow stale. While keeping up with the latest marketing trends may seem like a challenge, it can be easier if you know where to look — or listen. Podcasts are becoming an incredible resource for all kinds of information, especially when it comes to online marketing. The following are ten of the best digital marketing podcasts that you should be sure to check out:

1. Duct Tape Marketing

Duct Tape Marketing is a podcast that has been around for the better part of a decade. The podcast covers a number of digital marketing topics. From organic SEO to word-of-mouth marketing and more. Likewise, host John Jantsch, brings well-known guests onto his podcast. Including the likes of John Lee Dumas and Neil Patel. As a result, these conversations contain helpful advice for interested listeners. Moreover, Duct Tape Marketing is particularly useful for beginner and medium level marketers.

2. Marketing School

The Marketing School podcast is unique in that it’s a daily podcast that’s only ten minutes long. Easy to consume and a great way of obtaining helpful advice. Considering that the hosts are well known for their marketing acumen (it’s hosted by Neil Patel and Eric Siu), Marketing School is well worth tuning into eve Best Digital Marketing Podcast 1 ry day.

3. The #AskGaryVee Show

Gary Vee is a New York Times bestselling author, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur who gained popularity with his YouTube series. Consequently, his podcast, the #AskGaryVee Show, is a spin-off of that series. Going over lots of marketing tips as well as diving into emerging marketing trends. Gary Vee also answers questions that his listeners submit. As a result of using the #AskGaryVee hashtag on every podcast.

4. Marketing Scoop by SEMrush

SEMrush is known for their knowledge of digital marketing. As a result, they launched their podcast to help share this knowledge in an easy-to-digest way. The first season focuses mostly on SEO and PPC. Their second season covers news, trends, and discussions with industry leaders. All of which focusing on content marketing, SEO, and more. Some of the guests in the past have included Jim Banks, Barry Schwartz, and Larry Kim.

5. Everyone Hates Marketers

Everyone Hates Marketers was launched by Louis Grenier, the Content Lead at Hotjar, back in 2017. His goal was creating a podcast, that would help inform listeners on how to market the right way. Similarly, encouraging them to avoid manipulative tactics. Which included, interviewing successful marketers who avoid using “buzzwords” and focus on telling the truth.

Similar Article: Types of Digital Marketing Strategies Your Business Should Use

6. The Mad Marketing Podcast

The Mad Marketing podcast is hosted by Marcus Sheridan, one of the partners of HubSpot, and the founder of River Pools and Spas. The podcast focuses mostly on SEO and content marketing and is a great resource on those topics. It’s an easy listen as Sheridan is a entertaining host. Incorporating personal stories from his career into his podcasts.

7. Marketing Over Coffee

Marketing Over Coffee, hosted by Christopher S. Penn and John Wall, focuses on the latest digital marketing tactics and techniques. As a result, this weekly podcast is an excellent way to stay up to date. Conversations ranging from social media marketing and email marketing to copywriting and SEO marketing.

8. Seeking Wisdom

Seeking Wisdom is a podcast created by Drift. Featuring conversations, between David Cancel, the CEO of Drift, and Dave Gerhardt, the host. Each podcast spending about 20 minutes on a conversation between the two men over coffee. Leadership principles and the process of building Drift, are among some of the discussed topics of the podcast.

9. Growth Marketing Toolbox

The Growth Marketing Toolbox is a podcast hosted by Nicholas Scalice from Earnworthy. Focusing on exploring the newest marketing tools and technology being used within the marketing industry. Similarly, Scalice himself is an expert in landing page design, conversion optimization, and A/B testing. In short, this a podcast is worth listening to.

10. The Marketing Companion

The Marketing Companion is hosted by Mark Schaefer and Tom Webster, combining over 50 years of shared marketing experience and expertise. It’s an on-demand podcast that is incredibly entertaining. Having seven years worth of podcasts currently available, there’ll be plenty to listen to.

In conclusion, these are some of the best digital marketing podcasts available. Retaining insightful and invaluable information when it comes to finding ways to improve your own marketing strategy.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales

Cornerstone Content & Why You Need It

January 13, 2020/in Articles, Content Marketing, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

As you likely know at this point, the success of your inbound marketing strategy depends significantly on your content strategy. Your content strategy, however, probably consists of several different facets. As you plan your content, it’s important to understand that not all content provides the same value to your strategy. Some content is much more valuable to your marketing strategy than other types of content. The most important of this content is known as cornerstone content. It’s useful to understand what cornerstone content is and that you implement it on your website.

What is Cornerstone Content?

Cornerstone content is the best and most important content found on your website. Out of all the content you create, this is the content that you want to rank highest in search engines. It provides new visitors with an overview on important topics that are relevant to your business. For example, cornerstone content for a roofing contractor might include an article, about the different types of materials that can be used in a roof installation. Or how to tell when your roof needs to be replaced. It can also include an in-depth breakdown of services offered by your company and when they might be needed.

As such, cornerstone content can take the form of a blog post or a webpage. Cornerstone content is generally found at the top of your funnel. Since it provides visitors with a thorough introduction to a topic, it doesn’t need to be gated.

The Benefits

The following are some of the benefits of creating and implementing cornerstone content onto your website:

Increase your brand awareness – Your content is more likely to be found by new visitors, who are looking to educate themselves about certain topics. Because your content provides visitors with an introduction to certain information, it should help to drive awareness of your brand as a result.
Create a positive first impression on visitors – People who first arrive at your site are more likely to do so via your cornerstone content. If the information is helpful and insightful, then you will leave a good first impression. This will encourage them to continue exploring your site and to read other content.
Earn natural links – Cornerstone content is more likely to earn links from other respectable sources. As a result of being a good source of information for people who are new to the topic. As such, cornerstone content is more likely to earn traffic as a result of external links.
Drive relevant web traffic – Create what is relevant to your brand, then the people who search for the topics you’ve focused on are more likely to be part of your target audience.
Build brand authority and trust – If what you create is of high quality, it will help to build brand authority, making it easier to earn trust from new visitors.
Repurpose into other types of content – Because cornerstone content is a long-form introduction or overview of a topic, you can repurpose it into other types of content, such as smaller blog posts.

How to Create What You Need

As important as cornerstone content is, creating it is a simple process. The following are some of the basic steps you can take in order to create what’s needed for your website:

Identify main keywords – Do keyword research to determine what the main keywords you want your website to rank for. Use these keywords to form the topic ideas for your content.
Write long-form content – Cornerstone content should be more in-depth pieces of content that provides readers with highly-informative material. Content that is impressive in both quality and scope is more likely to be linked to. Make sure that when you begin crafting that it’s well-developed and comprehensive.
Connect related content – Link your cornerstone content to other pages and other content on your website that’s relevant. Keeping it interconnected will help boost your SEO as well as make it easier to keep visitors on your website.
Optimize – Make sure you also use proper keywords in your headers, meta tags, titles, and URLs.
Make your content accessible – It should be easy to find your cornerstone content. Even if new visitors don’t find it via a search, they should be able to find it when on your website. It’s why you should link to it from your homepage.

When it comes to your content strategy, the importance of having this information on your website is essential. It is the foundation that will help to drive the success of your content marketing strategy in general.

7 Market Research Strategies You Should Implement

January 9, 2020/in Articles, Consumer Marketing, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

When it comes to market research strategies, the more you know about your target audience, the more effective they will be. The biggest mistake you can make is assuming you know who your audience is and that you understand what their needs are without doing the proper market research. Not only could you be mistaken, but audiences evolve over time. This means that even if you do have a firm grasp of who your audience is at the moment, this can change in the future. It’s why you need to continuously do market research so that you can keep up with who your audience is. With that in mind, the following are seven market research strategies that you should use to better understand your audience and what their needs are:

1. Send Out Customer Surveys

One of the easiest ways to collect information about your target audience is to send out surveys to your customers. Basic NPS surveys can give you a good idea of what they think about your products and services and give you more detail about what they liked and didn’t like. This will give you a better understanding of whether you’re meeting the needs of your audience or not.

Of course, NPS surveys aren’t the only type of surveys you can use. They are certainly helpful and easy to complete, but you might want to consider sending out surveys through the mail, asking website visitors to do more in-depth surveys on your website, or even performing telephone surveys.

2. Perform Customer Interviews

Contact customers and request personal interviews. These can be in person or over the phone. When performing a personal interview, make sure that your questions are unstructured and open-ended questions. When you first contact a customer, do so with the intention of scheduling an interview in the future and not performing one on the spot as they are more unlikely to do this. Incentivizing a customer to take the time to do an interview may be a good idea as well, just make sure that by doing so, you’re not affecting how they answer your questions.

3. Hold A Focus Group

A focus group can be an excellent way to find out what customers think about your brand. During a focus group, a moderator will ask a series of scripted questions to a group of customers at a neutral location. The conversations that take place are videotaped so that you can review them and learn about what your customers think.

4. Observe Your Customers

It’s worth noting that customers may give answers in focus groups, interviews, and surveys that conflict with their actual behavior. It’s why you should consider observing customers in action. You can do this by recording customers in your store to see how they behave. Also, try inviting customers to try out products or services and record them (with their permission of course) so that you can see how they interact with your product in person.

Similar Article: Simple Ways that Small Businesses Can Use Data to Build Better Customer Relationships

5. Monitor Your Competition

You can learn a lot about your audience by reviewing what your direct competitors are doing. Routinely check out the content they’re posting on their website, their press kits, their advertisements, and their social media activity. Doing so can provide you insight into how they are positioning themselves and what kind of audience they are targeting and engaging with. This should also provide you with some useful information in the form of what their weaknesses and strengths are that you can apply to your own marketing efforts.

6. Monitor Discussions About Your Brand

Customers will often talk about your brand without you even realizing it. You can use a variety of tools to track mentions across social media channels. This allows you to identify when people are talking about your brand and what they’re saying about it. You could even join in on conversations to ask people follow-up questions to their comments.

7. Join A Trade Association

Joining a trade association can be quite useful. It provides you with access to information about your industry, making it easy to keep up with the latest trends and market shifts. Not to mention that you’ll have access to networking events and conferences. There, you can glean all kinds of information about both your industry and your audience.

By better understanding your audience, you will be able to keep up with their needs and improve your products and services to meet those needs. Use these seven market research strategies to stay up to date with who your audience is and how their needs are evolving.

Customer Experience vs User Experience: Understanding the Difference

December 23, 2019/in Articles, Consumer Marketing, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

When it comes to building your website and providing the best possible customer service, it’s all about creating a positive experience that will help increase conversions, retain customers, and improve your brand reputation. You may refer to this experience as the “customer experience” or the “user experience”. However, these two types of experience are not actually the same thing. Knowing the differences between the two is very important. This is because by knowing the differences between customer experience vs user experience, you will be able to improve both.

What Is User Experience?

The user experience refers to how people interact with your product or service and their experience with it. For example, how a visitor interacts with your website refers to their user experience. If your pages load slowly and they leave without visiting more pages, then they had a bad user experience. However, if they spend a long time exploring your site’s different pages and engage in several ways, such as by filling out a form and signing up to an email list, there’s a good chance that they had a positive user experience.

Improving The User Experience

To improve your user experience, you need to focus on the four user experience elements: value, usability, adoptability, and desirability. Consider these four elements in the context of a website and how they affect the user experience:

Value – Does your website provide value to the user? If it’s nothing but advertisements for your products and services, then it probably doesn’t. However, a website full of informative and helpful content that is relevant to your brand and the user’s needs does.
Usability – How easy is it to use your website? For example, is your content organized so that visitors can find it easily? Do you have links to the major pages of your site clearly marked on your home page? Is it easy to contact you through your website? If your website isn’t easy to use, visitors will become frustrated, resulting in a poor user experience.
Adoptability – How easy is it for visitors to start using your website? Do pages load quickly? Is your website optimized for mobile devices? If they can’t even begin to use your site, their impression of your business will turn negative.
Desirability – How engaging is your website? If you have content that’s relevant and informative but has poor presentation, it’s not going to be very engaging. You can improve desirability by creating a variety of different content, using images and using an engaging personality in your writing.

Although these four elements are described in reference to a website, they can be used for any product or service.

Check out these 4 Tips for Leaving Lasting Impressions on Customers

What Is Customer Experience?

Whereas user experience refers to the experience using a product or service, the customer experience refers to the experience interacting with your brand as a whole. For example, this could include exploring your website, signing up to an email newsletter, downloading several eBooks, speaking with a sales associate, making a purchase, then continuing to engage with your brand post-purchase. Basically, the user experience factors into the overall customer experience.

Improving The Customer Experience

The following are some major elements that make up the customer experience:

Your customer service – Customer service includes any direct interactions users have with your brand, such as through a live chat feature, email, phone, text or social media. Your customer service reps need to engage in a friendly and helpful way, whatever channel they’re on. Remember that customer service doesn’t stop after you make the sale.
The sales process – The sales process should be convenient and painless for the user. Any issues they have, whether it’s with checking out, trying to use a promotional coupon, pricing issues and more, can hurt the customer experience.
Your marketing efforts – How you market your products and services to a user affects their customer experience. If they find that your attempts to engage them are overly promotional or not relevant to their needs, they may become annoyed. That’s why it’s important to know who your audience is and only engage in a relevant manner.
The user experience – The user experience with your product or service has a big impact on their overall customer experience.

One thing to keep in mind — a customer might have a good user experience with your product, but that doesn’t mean they’ve had a positive customer experience. For example, they can like your product but dislike the quality of your customer service. Because of this, it’s important that you focus on providing both a positive user experience and overall customer experience.

Understanding the difference between the customer experience vs user experience will allow you to improve both. By thinking that they’re the same, one or both are likely to suffer. Although they differ, the two work together to improve the customer’s overall experience.