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The Benefits of Inbound & Outbound Marketing

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

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

High Quality Backlinks1

The Importance of Earning High Quality Backlinks

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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smart goal examples

How To Incorporate Smart Goals Into Marketing Plan Development

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?

DOWNLOAD OUR GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL TRADE SHOW MARKETING
video marketing

What We Can Learn from Viral Video Marketing & Examples of How It’s been Successful

Viral video marketing entails creating and disseminating video content with the goal of broad online sharing. It is a subset of viral marketing that uses videos to generate excitement and raise interest in a specific product or service. When it comes to creating content, going viral is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, there’s no blueprint for viral video marketing. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars on a 30-second video jam-packed with visual effects, hilarious dialogue, and well-known actors, and it still might not go viral; yet, some random person might upload a ten-second video of their cat and somehow it gets seen by a billion people within a day.

Although there’s no perfect formula for viral video marketing, there are certain things that you learn from successful viral videos from the past. Copying these videos won’t help make you go viral, but learning what made them successful can help you improve your video marketing in general. The following are a few things worth learning from some of the most successful viral videos in the past:

1. Know Who Your Audience Is

One of the most popular ads in recent years is the Dollar Shave Club video. In this video, the owner introduces viewers to the concept of the Dollar Shave Club by walking through his factory. The video is notable for its humor and extreme directness. It goes so far as to use swear words in the dialogue, and even the title of the video has a censored swear word in it. They know exactly who their audience is or else they wouldn’t have been so bold. It might turn some people off — but those aren’t the people they were trying to reach.

2. Invest In The Production

It is possible to make video content on a small budget these days, especially when considering how affordable video equipment has gotten. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put money into the production of your content. High-quality production does not go unnoticed. Just look at the Old Spice Man video. On the surface, it’s relatively simple — a man talks to the audience in a humorous tone to sell Old Spice deodorant. However, the backgrounds are constantly changing all within one shot. He starts in a bathroom, transitions onto a boat, and ends up on a horse at the end. It’s the high-quality production of the video that sells it.

The Power of First-Person Experience Videos

3. Get Their Attention

If your video isn’t interesting off the bat, the viewer isn’t going to stick around to watch the rest of it. This means that you need to grab their attention within the first 10 to 15 seconds of your video. The Poo-Pourri video is a good example of this. For most, the idea of a Poo-Pourri ad sounds kind of boring, yet it starts off with a hilarious line of dialogue that captures your attention right away. It then transitions into a music video, at which point the viewer has likely committed to watching the video all the way through.

Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Use

4. Evoke Emotions

You want your video content to stick with someone after they’ve seen it. To make sure it’s not instantly forgettable, you need to evoke emotions from your audience. This can be in the form of humor or even in the form of empathy. Take Budweiser’s ad Someone Waits For You At Home. Within one minute, it establishes a loving relationship with a dog and its owner that everyone can relate to. At the end, the dog is waiting for its owner, who may or may not return — a message against drinking and driving. It’s a heart-tugging cliffhanger that leaves an emotional impact on the viewer.

These are a few things that some of the most successful viral video marketing examples of the past have in common. While using these tips won’t ensure that your videos go viral, they will help to greatly improve their quality as well as their effectiveness. At the very least, they’ll put your video content in a much better position to go viral.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES
mql vs sql

The Differences Between MQL vs SQL

One of the biggest challenges businesses face is the lack of communication between their marketing teams and their sales teams. It’s not uncommon for a marketing team to use a variety of strategies to convert a lead and then move on to the next one, assuming sales will pick up where they left off. However, not all leads are the same. Some leads need to be nurtured further and aren’t ready to be engaged. Without any kind of communication with marketing, your sales team is more likely to engage leads that aren’t ready to make a purchase yet while missing out on leads that are. This is why identifying leads as MQL (marketing qualified leads) or SQL (sales qualified leads) is important. But how exactly do you determine whether a lead is an MQL vs SQL?

The Difference Between MQL(marketing qualified leads) vs SQL (sales qualified leads)

Not all leads are of high quality. Just because someone is visiting your website doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a good prospect. You won’t want your sales team wasting time trying to engage with someone who might only have a passing curiosity in your products or services. That’s why you’ll want your marketing team to identify leads who are MQLs. An MQL is a lead that has been identified as someone who is likely going to become a customer, which means that they have value to your business.

Similar Article: A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

However, just because they are likely to become a customer does not mean your sales team should engage just yet. They are likely still in the beginning stages of their buyer’s journey and are still doing research on their own. Trying to close a sale at this point may push them away. It’s only once the lead has taken actions that indicate that they are likely going to make a purchase that they become an SQL. It’s once they are an SQL that your sales team can engage with them.

mql vs sql

Determining MQL vs SQL

The most effective way to label leads as MQL or SQL is through the use of a lead scoring software. Lead scoring software allows you to designate points based on certain qualifications. For example, you can assign a point for downloading an eBook or watching a video on your site. It’s not just specific actions that you can assign points to either. You can assign qualifying points based on demographic information, company information, social engagement, and email engagement as well. You can even assign negative points. For example, if you’re a local business and the lead fills out a form that indicates they live outside of the country, then negative points can be assigned. This ensures they don’t get mislabeled as an MQL.

You will need to determine at what point total a lead becomes an MQL and an SQL. This will require input from both your marketing and sales teams. As to how to decide on how many points to assign to certain qualifications, you’ll need to make use of your analytics. For example, you might find that leads who download a specific whitepaper are more likely to go on and make a purchase. As a result, you’ll want to assign more points to this action.

 

Knowing where your leads are in their buyer’s journey is essential to knowing when to engage with them. As a result, using lead scoring to identify your leads as MQLs and SQLs will help to increase your sales team’s success rate. However, in order for your lead scoring system to be effective, your marketing team and sales team are going to have to work together.

lead generation tips
50 powerful call-to-action phrases

3 Helpful Tips To Improve Your CTAs To Generate More Leads

Calls-to-Action (or CTAs) are images, buttons, text, etc. that prompts one of your website visitors take some kind of action. CTAs could be trying to get visitors to download a white paper, read an article, or contact for more information. Improve CTA is the beginning to convert website traffic into leads.

Here are three ways for you to improve your CTAs and to make sure they are maximizing their presence on your website and generating the most contacts.

1. Use Action-Verbs and Be Specific

2. Grab Attention Immediately

3. Test Your Results

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5 Ways to Revamp Your Email Marketing Strategy and Increase ROI

Email marketing is an affordable and effective tool to help your rand stay in touch with customers to ensure more revenue. In fact, studies show that robust email marketing strategies have an ROI of about 4400%.

If your email marketing performance is subpar, there are several strategies you can implement to ensure better results. The following tips can help improve your email marketing results and grow your business.

  1. Plan Your Emails

Your emails may contain helpful and resourceful content, but you may not get optimum results if they’re not well-planned.

The email subject line is the first aspect your recipient sees before opening the message. Ideally, the brief statement should grab your recipients’ attention and compel them to open and read your email.

Similarly, no one wants to read a disorganized email with a cluttered layout. This overwhelms your recipients, increasing the chances of abandonment.

Instead, plan and organize your layout to maximize user experience. This means you should incorporate white space and strategically place the visuals and text to make the email easy to navigate and digest.

  1. Build a Quality Email List

Building a quality email list is one of the most complex parts of email marketing strategies. However, you can simplify the task by determining your business’s best subscriber acquisition method.

If your website attracts many visitors, you can use it to convert the traffic to subscribers. Most importantly, even a slight increase in subscribers can impact the number of people that become your customers.

You can start by improving the exposure of your lead magnets by including them in relevant content across different channels. Alternatively, depending on your brand offers, you can develop quality lead magnets focused on the type of subscribers you want to attract.

The goal is to optimize the available opportunities for visitors to opt into your email list by ensuring your most popular content has valuable downloadable resources for your audience.

  1. Segment and Personalize Your Emails

When you send a similar message to your email list, you forego the opportunity to get optimum returns in your campaigns. Instead, break down the subscribers into different segments depending on their engagement levels and stages in the buyer journey.

Ideally, you can use the purchase frequency or other significant customer data to group your subscribers based on your goals.

Your subscribers want different content depending on their needs, so you should customize the messaging to serve their needs. However, this doesn’t happen in a day. Start with two segments –frequent customers and non-customers and proceed from there.

Personalization works in tandem with segmentation to ensure optimum email marketing performance. And since open and CTRs are the top KPIs in email marketing campaigns, personalization is critical to enhancing engagement rates. Typically, custom emails have a 26% higher open rate and generate more transactions.

For instance, addressing your audience by name can boost engagement due to higher open rates. Most importantly, using various data sets, like customer interests, demographics, and engagement behaviors, can enhance your personalization strategy. This helps establish and nurture a relationship with your audience, essential for higher conversions.

  1. A/B Test Your Emails

People often get comfortable once they establish a routine. While routines are critical in email marketing, tweaking the approach can be beneficial. It helps you gain the invaluable insight necessary for improvement.

You can pick an element in your email marketing strategies and adjust it to determine the performance. For instance, you can start with email length and format to see which version performs better. If your emails are concise, but some of your customers want more content, you can add more sections and observe the performance of your newsletters.

Regardless of the size, ensure the content is resourceful and awesome to ensure high customer engagement levels.

Also, you can test different subject lines for specific groups and analyze the performance. After some experiments, you can determine the best variation for different groups in your email list segments.

For instance, you can test different CTAs, like buttons and links. You divide the subscribers into two groups and send a different CTA for each group. After collecting and analyzing the data, you can quickly determine the most effective option since the two groups share specific characteristics.

The insights can inform your present and future decisions when adjusting or deploying your next email campaign. The idea is to pick the best format based on your results.

  1. Mobile Optimization

Most subscribers open and read emails on smartphones, accounting for 41% of email views. Therefore, mobile optimization is critical to maximizing your email marketing ROI.

Maximize your use of plain text and break content into scannable sections that fit into smaller screens. In addition, keep them brief to enhance engagement. Quantity doesn’t always win when it comes to mobile users.

High-resolution images may look stunning on a desktop, but they may work against you when targeting mobile users. Therefore, make sure to use lower resolution for mobile content.

However, you can still use high-resolution images with the right tools to compress the images based on the user’s device. It’s always a good practice to consider the resolution capability of most device users to ensure the images are crisp across all devices.

Bottom Line

The email marketing process consists of multiple parts that require careful planning. While the process can be overwhelming, you can make the project manageable by developing a robust strategy to implement and track your campaigns.

Most importantly, you should create email marketing strategies you can use to simplify things depending on your business goals. Regardless of your approach, it would be best if you implemented a measurable strategy that streamlines your efforts when creating targeted campaigns.

 

email marketing program

 

Learning from the Best: 10 Examples of Great Website Design 

Building a website is simple. But designing a website that meets all the modern web design requirements and works for your unique customers and business is challenging. Most companies create compelling websites but end up sacrificing performance or the user experience. Others prioritize simplicity and convenience but end up with poorly optimized sites. In the sections below, you’ll explore 10 examples of great website designs to inspire your creativity the next time you design a website.

1. Dropbox

 

If there’s one website that has done a great job designing a super rsponsive website, it’s got to be Dropbox. This cloud storage and file hosting company has made sure that every site visitor, regardless of the device they use to access the site, enjoys the best navigation, graphics, and content.

Every aspect of the site design, from the font color to the navigation buttons, has been carefully customized for every device, ensuring compatibility and interactive experiences for the varying screen sizes.

For instance, on the desktop, a small arrow directs users to scroll down for more content, helping to minimize the bounce rate. However, this is absent on the mobile version, as users are more likely to scroll down easily.

2. Freshbooks

 

 

Freshbooks is an accounting website with one of the best homepage designs, thanks to the simple and minimalist copy, inspiring visuals, and the strategic use of white space in web design. The site also uses a perfect blend of colors with easy-to-spot CTA buttons. There’s also a well-organized navigation system that makes it easier for first-time site visitors to find solutions to their complex accounting problems.

3. Walmart

 

 

Walmart is one of the leading online marketplaces offering a one-stop shopping experience. The retail giant has prioritized convenience by streamlining the checkout process. Once you’ve selected the items you want to buy, you won’t be taken to a new checkout page. Instead, an on-page checkout sidebar allows you to complete your shopping without even signing up. A cart storage option saves your cart for up to three days if you forget to complete the checkout process or are distracted while on the site.

4. Nike

 

 

Nike is one of the leading sportswear companies whose success is rooted in simplicity and convenience. The same is reflected on its website, which prioritizes a minimalist design and easy navigation. Nike’s checkout process, for instance, is one of the simplest yet super interactive. If you enter the correct information during checkout, a green checkmark appears, allowing you to continue shopping.

There’s also an auto-fill address feature that saves you time during checkout. By simplifying the time-consuming steps and focusing on web design principles that boost conversions, Nike has successfully attracted and even retained more converting prospects.

5. Uber

 

 

Uber falls into the category of companies that prioritize their homepage design, and it’s obvious why. Imagine landing on the Uber website and reading through needless copy, images, or videos before requesting your ride. Now think of a ride-sharing or service company that has made its home page simple, straightforward, and effective. You need to choose what you want, and you’re directed to the service almost instantly without going through the tedious sign-up process.

 

  25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales

 

6. Wired

 

 

WIRED, a leading technology magazine and online publication, is among the many sites that have done a lot to improve the user experience. When you browse through the site using a PC or desktop, you’ll find multiple columns and a handy sidebar, but switching to your mobile transforms into a single column for smooth navigation.

The company also pays keen attention to details, such as adjusting image ratios to fit perfectly on each device. And for even more simplicity on mobile, they’ve combined search and newsfeed filter icons into one button.

7. Slack

 

 

Slack is a business messaging app that’s been in the market for nearly a decade. The brand is known for its focus on simplicity, and they have successfully made it one of their competitive advantages. Slack has ensured that its site is easy to access and navigate, no matter the screen size of your device.

You’ll see customer logos in a neat three-column layout on a computer. But they have switched it to a single-column design on mobile phones for better viewing. And their call-to-action buttons? They span the whole column on tablets and mobiles, so you won’t accidentally click something else.

8. Shopify

 

 

Shopify has built a reputation as one of the leading e-commerce website builders thanks to its robust features, comprehensive support, and intuitive user interface. The Shopify website is one of the few that has managed to strike a delicate balance between site consistency across devices and enhanced user experience.

If you access the official Shopify website from a desktop or phone, you’ll find that most things remain unchanged except for the CTA buttons and a few menus. Additionally, Shopify is among the few sites that enjoy impressive web page speeds despite using graphics-intensive image carousels.

9. IBM

 

 

As one of the leading technology companies, IBM has set an excellent example for companies looking to create a fully-immersive site experience. The company has gone the extra mile to make its site not only responsive but also interactive, unique, and modern.

When you land on IBM’s homepage, you’ll be greeted with a responsive background, interactive videos, and a bold CTA. And while the IBM website is far from simple, it has incorporated complex design tools, from AI features to game-like functions, to create an immersive site experience.

10. Airbnb

 

 

Airbnb uses some of the best design strategies, such as easy navigation, a consistent color scheme, and text minimization, to ensure user-centricity and enhance the customer experience. The homepage, for instance, displays lightweight graphics consisting of images and short, engaging videos.

All the media elements on the homepage have been carefully chosen to engage and convert without compromising site performance. The images of stunning rentals, from all across the globe, for example, create a sense of urgency and encourage site visitors to book their dream Airbnb.

Bottom Line

In today’s interconnected world, online presence significantly influences marketing, customer engagement, brand identity, and business growth. However, the discussed 10 examples of exceptional website designs emphasize that merely having an online presence for the sake of it is insufficient.

To truly make an impact, you must rethink every aspect of your online presence, considering not only how your website looks but also how customers can access, browse, and interact with it. Moreover, it is essential to incorporate these considerations into your digital strategy and plan regular updates to your website and its features.

 

 

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How To Outshine Your Competition with Effective Ecommerce Marketing

While not all businesses have an e-commerce page, many do. If you’re selling products or services online, you’ll want to make sure that you have an effective ecommerce marketing strategies. If you don’t, it’s going to be difficult to stand out from all the other e-commerce sites out there. Through the use of digital marketing strategies, you can build awareness of your ecommerce page as well as generate more traffic. Thereby, you can improve your chances of closing sales. The following are a number of effective ecommerce marketing tips that will help you do just that:

Ecommerce Marketing Tips

social media

Diversify Your Social Media Presence:

One of the big challenges of ecommerce marketing is figuring out what social media platforms work best for certain markets. You won’t want to pour all of your resources into one or two social media platforms, only to realize that they are ineffective for your e-commerce site. Instead, diversify. Establish a presence on several social channels and use analytics to determine which platforms are successful and which aren’t. Finally, ditch those that don’t work and focus on those that do.

Create Original Content:

Some companies will use existing content because they want to focus more on other business tasks. However, unique content is much more likely to have an impact on potential customers. Creating original content will help improve engagement with prospects, and bring more potential customers to your e-commerce page. Additionally, you can use the content you create to teach consumers about your products and services.

Personalize Your Content:

Personalizing content, such as the emails you send to your leads, can contribute to an increase in revenue. This is because content will be more engaging if you address the lead by name, and tailor content to meet their needs by using collected information. If it feels like you’re actually writing to your leads, and not just sending out advertisements to everyone on your email list, you’ll be more likely to capture their attention and improve your odds of conversion.

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Implement A Loyalty Program:

As focused as you may be on finding new customers, don’t forget about your existing customers. The majority of your revenue will come from regular customers. Regular customers are important because they are more likely to act as brand ambassadors that can help drive more potential customers to your site. Implement a loyalty program that rewards them for their business. This can include offering special promotions based on their purchase history, or offering some sort of reward point program.

Optimize For Mobile Use:

Many customers shop for products and services on their mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets. It’s also how they consume content and engage on social media. If your e-commerce site isn’t optimized for mobile use, you will miss out on a significant number of potential customers.

 Automate Social Networks:

To successfully leverage social media and bring in more customers, you’ll need to have much more than just a social presence. You’ll also need to engage on a regular basis by posting content regularly. Otherwise, followers will forget about you and your social presence will become irrelevant. However, this can be quite time-consuming, which is why you should automate some of your social media tasks. For example, you can use automation tools to post content at specific times based on your schedule.

Digital marketing is a must for any business that maintains an e-commerce site if they want to stand out. These are six marketing tips for ecommerce you should follow to improve your ability to attract and retain customers.

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