Basic Digital Marketing

 Virtual reality and marketing might not seem like the most obvious partnership. That said, what the past year has shown us is that this is technological advancement that has caught on with consumers like wildfire. As virtual reality growth continues to further, and more come to accept it as a means of consuming media and content, this marks a real opportunity for marketers to connect with consumers in a new arena.

As each year passes, augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality apps get more inexpensive to create. They provide the customer with something immersive to have fun with and get people excited about a product, service, event, or brand. By 2020, it’s estimated the VR market will be worth up to $40 billion. Last year, in 2017, it was already valued at $6 billion. For websites, brands, and companies on the cutting edge, learning how to attract customers with it is going to be key.

 Professional, results-driven video marketing is challenging however when done effectively, it’s a real audience-builder. Capitalizing on existing video marketing trends, there are numerous ways to ensure your campaign is a success.

While we recognize every small business is on a budget, video costs add up quickly and that’s why we’ve put together this list. Here are seven ways to create a successful video marketing campaign for social media sharing.

 Search engine optimization (SEO) is great for building organic traffic however it’s not the only piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a successful website. Consistent, long-term online traffic seemingly built from SEO is oftentimes in part related to, yes, the SEO but also to what is supporting its efforts. No website should stop investing in SEO strategies. That said, it may be possible to heighten the success of your SEO efforts by using techniques such as these.

 Digital marketing strategies may not always produce the results you desperately want them to. Eventually, every company hits a brick wall with their digital marketing. Numbers begin to either stagnate or fall and the way forward might not be clear. At a time like this, hiring a digital marketing agency might be the best thing for you.

Digital marketing companies are tasked with the responsibility of producing results. When your marketing isn’t working for you anymore, a digital marketing company can provide a fresh, objective approach. Perhaps the marketing strategies you are using are outdated or maybe there’s been a change in the marketplace that has caused something that once worked to not work as well. Nevertheless, a successful digital marketing agency should be on the cutting edge of what works and they’ll be able to provide some insight into how you may be able to fix your exposure.

 Your home page is the most important and oftentimes the most viewed page to your website. A home page that does its job successfully should be introduce visitors to what you do, encourage visitors to explore other pages of your website, and convert a visitor to a lead.

If you haven’t already built your home page to leave a lasting impression, start now. Remember, always design with conversion in mind. Be sure to know what you’re selling, where you want to direct customers to finalize a sale, and always ensure CTAs are well positioned.

 Customers engaged in eCommerce online shopping expect many things. When an eCommerce site doesn’t deliver, a shopper will leave for a competitor resulting in lower than preferable conversion rates. Increase your online sales today with these four need-to-have eCommerce features that should be embedded into every one of your product pages.

1 – The Essentials in Product Information

There’s a long list of basic product information that should be included in every product page. This is the information shoppers will want to know before buying. These essentials include the product name and keyword, product images, details on dimensions and weight, price, product availability information, payment methods accepted, shipping and return information, available colors, and an ‘Add to Cart’ button to ensure making a purchase is no trouble.

 Link building is a strategy wherein a website will attempt to build search engine rankings by association with other sites. For example, it may involve linking from your site’s content to other sites, or it may be other sites linking to yours. Link building, combined with other search engine optimization strategies, has assisted countless websites build authority in the marketplace and thus, rank above where they would normally be placed.

Now, some web designers believe the best way to get links is to write and release high quality articles. While having excellent content on your website may absolutely get you links, there’s no guarantee that it will. Link building requires a more targeted approach. Seeking links from high authority sites blesses your site in the eyes of Google, advising them that the quality of content is high. In addition to seeking attention from high authority sites, one should focus on relevant and related sources to which they are linked. By this definition, the adage ‘less is more’ may apply. Use quality, relevant links and do not simply go for the easiest links available.

 User experience (UX) is a focal point of any website. The easier, more intuitive a website is to use, the more likely it is to create customers and convert leads into instant revenues. Though the key to UX is keeping things simple and enjoyable, there’s a lot more to it than that.

The ultimate user experience a website can deliver comprises of many different components. The four most prominent, arguably, are to minimize distractions, creating a logical hierarchy of elements across the page, optimizing navigation, and ensuring the layout is conventional. By employing these four techniques, a customer should never feel confused or frustrated trying to navigate your site.

 Landing pages make or break the success of a website, its marketing campaign, and its sales funnel. When a landing page isn’t working, any effort to sell through it becomes a waste. Creating a successful landing page is a key component to maximizing one’s marketing, ensuring visitors, clickers, and consumers who arrive at it see what they were promised.

Eliminate landing page distractions

Distractions are the ultimate way to dampen the effectiveness of a landing page. Be very careful with how you use elements on a landing page, whether that’s a sign-up form, a ‘free download’, or a purchase offer. Elements should be kept simple, font and typeface made bold when appropriate, and there should be nothing close to resembling clutter. The most effective landing pages are oftentimes the simplest, taking up the whole screen with only a few key pieces of information.

 Search engine optimization is a game you don’t want to lose at. Unknowingly putting bad SEO strategies into play could mean very negative consequences for your website. If you suspect you’re being penalized for bad SEO and/or you want to fight off any negative outcomes, here’s what we recommend.

There may be several reasons why one would suspect they have bad SEO practices on their site. If their website has experienced a sudden decline in Google rankings, it may be because of unknowing sabotage. There’s no reason to worry though! If you’re able to diagnose where the problems lay, you can fix them and in time, you may be able to re-assert your rankings. Declines in search engine rankings are not always due to bad SEO though. Sometimes, it may just be a competitor is doing better optimizations than you. Then again, sometimes it’s as easy as accidentally no-indexing your index.

 The ultimate marketing tool for your small business is a website. When successfully built, a website is easily the best salesperson you’ll ever have. A website can act as a net by which to gather new customers, can entice past customers to continue their relationship with your company, and is your very own online business card legitimizing your business and its operations. Here are 5 ways to keep things conversion-friendly and to help you generate tremendous results.

 Predicting what’s going to be the next big trend in digital marketing is something the industry seems perpetually fascinated with. Though no one can say for sure, the ability to look ahead and accurately predict where consumer behaviour is headed towards next promises rich rewards. Though we don’t claim to know anything more than what the top industry experts know, at Unlimited Exposure, we do have some ideas as to where you dollar might be best invested. These are the top 5 directions we strongly believe digital marketing to be headed towards in the next eighteen months.

 Voice marketing is a category still developing and it’s one that a lot of marketers have their eye on. As tempting as it can be to begin formulating voice-specific marketing strategies, here’s why you might want to give that a second thought.

There’s no question the growing popularity of voice-activated technology and voice search. Consumers are routinely buying virtual assistants like Alexa, Google Home, and more, and so it’s natural to question how this consumer behaviour might impact digital marketing and advertising.

 Social media marketing is something that even some of the world’s largest corporations don’t always fully understand. As corporations, small businesses, and entrepreneurs continue to learn how to use social media, they may be sacrificing valuable dollars.

If customers are leaving negative reviews on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and other social media applications, you may already be losing. This is the dark side of social media and it’s something that we all need to get a better grasp on.

 Digital marketing and eCommerce is a landscape in constant shift. To maximize sales, acquire more qualified leads, and convert visitors into buyers, it takes great finesse and attention paid to the latest trend. As eCommerce marketing stands in today’s marketplace, these are three eCommerce marketing facts we want to share that can help identify how to target success in this category.

Fact #1 – No Customer is Just a Number

Personalization in eCommerce wins big. Consumers expect it in this day and age. They’re not just a number. They expect a friendly, personalized service and communication that appeals to who they are as people. Personalization can be acted out in many ways in marketing. Personalized eCommerce email marketing campaigns have shown to be 26 percent more successful than the non-personalized alternative. Something as simple as including a personalized subject line will ensure more people see your marketing messages. Using things like the customer’s name in an email, mentioning previous purchases in marketing messaging, and incentivizing consumer participation in brief surveys as a means of acquiring consumer info are all key personalization strategies.

 Critical now more than ever, a mobile marketing strategy is an efficient way to succeed in the marketplace regionally, nationally, and internationally. Today, there’s more than 50 percent of eCommerce customers shopping on mobile platforms, and more than half of online searches are done via smartphones and similar mobile devices. Any small business eCommerce site should have an aggressive smartphone-only mobile marketing plan to increase sales, revenues, and profits.

Digital media consumption is continually shifting towards mobile and handheld devices. A decade from now, the amount of users on smartphones and similar devices will be even higher. Yet still so many eCommerce platforms are still not adaptable to mobile platforms. That is an immense mistake! Consumer preference is to shop easy. When they tap into your eCommerce platform and see there is no mobile-only version, they will in all likelihood leave and go to a direct competitor. Thereby, the first step towards successfully interacting on smartphones and mobile marketing channels is to ensure your website is mobile responsive.

 To gauge whether an SEO strategy has been successful, it requires one to know where to look to measure. The most obvious answer regarding how you know whether an SEO strategy is working is in how much activity your site is generating. That said, it’s not always easy to tell whether a strategy is reaching its full potential or whether there is something else happening.

There are four key areas that you want to measure to see whether a strategy is responsible for a site’s success, including the most important of which is the amount of traffic. Cite Google organic traffic to get these numbers. Ideally, you want to separate between any organic traffic and paid search advertising traffic that may be ongoing. Areas of the site to see traffic numbers are main pages, category pages, and specific blog postings. By targeting specific areas, you should be able to narrow in on where efforts are working.

Learn how to successfully implement a content marketing strategy and maximize the opportunities out there to promote. As digital marketing specialists, we’ve been publishing and promoting content marketing plans for years, and with great results! Here are five things to keep in mind when publishing and promoting content marketing on your website and sharing platforms. By utilizing these five basic strategies, help bring in more potential customers.

1 – See your Content from the Perspective of the Audience

Search engine optimized content should always be written for the audience first and not the search engines. If it resonates with the audience, believe us when we say it will show up in your analytics and it will have a positive effect on your search ranking. Google’s algorithms actually penalizes those articles that are a little too focused on search engines and keyword inclusion.

 A decade ago, doing digital marketing for events in Toronto, Canada successfully may have been as simple as creating a Facebook Event and spreading the news. Today, things are a lot more complex. Thankfully, the rewards are there to be achieved. Tech has allowed brands to promote events in ways that would have cost $1,000s decades ago. Build events like seminars, promotional events, group meetings, concerts, speaking engagements, and all sorts of event fun through social media, website SEO-driven strategies, and more. Here’s how!

Email Marketing Blasts

Email marketing is a much-needed component to any site’s and brand’s marketing plan. Email blasts can be used to spread word on an event. That said, email marketing should be built off of getting regular customers, fans, and visitors to subscribe. This is not marketing spam. This is email marketing to a targeted client base that is already interested in your brand. Blasts specific to events marketing are known to have an average open rate of 30 percent. The percentage of people from there who actually make it out to your event is going to be similarly minimal. That said, email blasts are a necessary part of using every opportunity to promote.

 Content marketing is all about writing SEO-friendly copy that will engage readers. Creating effortless SEO-friendly content marketing is an art and a science. It could take months to master it and throughout that whole time, as SEO trends and strategies change, your whole approach may have to be uprooted. Thankfully, there are some basics to hang your hat on, ensuring you maximize every opportunity to produce the most effective piece of content possible.

#1 – Highlight Key Info

Before setting out to write content marketing, have bullet points of key information. Prioritize that information into an easy-to-read format. Also, providing the most important info towards the beginning of an article is recommended, ensuring the reader gets what they expect early on.

Video marketing has been a growing trend in the marketplace since 2013 and if these 4 video marketing facts are anything to go by, this year will be its biggest yet. If you’re not already tapping into video marketing to promote your products, services, and brand, now might be the time.

Fact #1 – 81 Percent of Businesses will use Video Marketing this year

In 2017, approximately 63 percent of online businesses were using video as a marketing tool and this year, that number is expected to increase to an all-time high of 81 percent. Though this might mean extensive competition in the video space, as more marketers begin using video as a platform, it has opened up this marketing channel across sites like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Video, Twitter, and more. If you’re looking to jump into video marketing, know that more sites than ever are using creative storytelling, animations, and high-tech production values to woo audiences. Needless to say, to succeed will not be easy – though extremely rewarding.

 SEO and Google are a relationship every online marketer has their eyes on. Where Google goes, so does the entire search engine optimization industry. Throughout the past few years alone, Google has implemented numerous changes that has changed the way we do SEO. In some ways, things have gotten easier and in other ways, they’ve gotten a lot harder. SEO in 2018 is not the same beast it was last year. Needless to say, here are some of the updates we’ve had to adapt to.

Google has impacted numerous aspects of SEO-driven content production, release, and promotion. Today’s SEO by Google expects higher quality content with better spelling, grammar, and sentence structure than ever before. If Google’s bots pick up low quality content on your site, don’t expect it to make a positive difference towards where you place in the rankings. As Google’s algorithms have gone through updates over the years, the bar for quality has gone higher and higher.

For multi-national retail giants, some of the biggest brands in fast food, and the world’s biggest companies in consumer goods, email plays a huge role in their success. For smaller businesses looking to gain market share through content marketing and SEO, email may have equally promising ROI as social media. If you know how to implement a successful email marketing campaign, chances are your brand is going to be well-served to fight even the biggest of its competitors.

Ignoring the reach of email can be a big mistake for marketers and SEO specialists. To connect to social media platforms, register for eCommerce, and in general, to use the internet, one must have an email. Though there are oftentimes much more attractive, trendy marketing strategies that we like to talk about, the effectiveness of an email campaign has not diminished over time. Just as reliable as ever, email has the potential to pull back in past customers and to increase revenues in healthy ways. If your focus is exclusively on content marketing and SEO, and there are no efforts being made to engage in follow-up marketing through email, you might be limiting your success.

 We live in a world where anyone can create an eCommerce site. The influx of uneducated, low performance eCommerce sites has made it difficult to stand out. There are few methods to gain exposure more valuable than strong, five-star customer reviews. Establishing trust with an eCommerce brand and building confidence in specific products, customer reviews give new customers a sense of security.

Whether you are an established brand in eCommerce or new to the game, customer reviews have an equal impact. Even for consumers who may already trust your website, customer reviews work to promote specific products, giving insight into other consumers’ experiences with them. There are many factors that go into whether a customer makes a final purchase or not. If they have questions not already answered by the product description or their own research, reviews are another way to retrieve unbiased information. The latest research shows up to 85 percent of consumers trust eCommerce customer reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family – that says a lot about their power.

 A ‘sales funnel’ is the design of the processes a customer must go through to make a purchase. The sales funnel begins with first attracting the attention of the customer and then concludes when a sale is made.

The effectiveness of a sales funnel depends entirely on its ability to attract attention, close sales, and increase conversion rates. The five stage of a sales funnel are ‘exposure’, ‘discovery’, ‘consideration’, ‘conversion’, and ‘retention’. By learning about these five stages, one can successfully maximize its potential.

‘Exposure’ is the point at which a business must attract its customer which may or may not include inbound and outbound marketing techniques. Digital marketing ads and social media marketing are two highly effective methods of maximizing exposure in the sales funnel. More businesses are also using YouTube video marketing and blogging to tap into the attentions of potential customers.