Basic Digital Marketing

Small business website design that delivers big business results are the effect any web design professional should be going for. There are numerous benefits to having a website for small business owners. A properly formatted website authenticates and establishes a business in their local marketplace, helps brands reach whole new audiences of people, and can make a small business feel more successful or bigger than it actually is. For new businesses looking to maximize their success, there’s no question a website needs to be a part of their strategy.

To accomplish everything that’s possible with a big, professional website, a few things need to happen. To begin with, having a website puts a company on the same level as any other in their field. That means you’ll be compared with every brand from the worst of the worst to the best of the best. Take a look at some of the websites of your competitors. While you don’t necessarily want to imitate a competitor’s design, functionality, or content, this exercise can give insight into what will be expected of your website. By partnering with an experienced digital marketing company, they can assist in identifying the positive qualities of competitor’s websites and the opportunities there are to exploit underserved markets.

The worst thing that can happen with a small business website is that it becomes an ineffective tool at generating customers for your own company while subsequently generating leads for a competitor. Surprisingly, this happens a lot. Customers take a quick glance on a site, see they can’t find the information they’re looking for, become frustrated or annoyed, and move on to a competitor’s site. Due to risks of this happening, it’s integral for your small business website to present the right information in the right way. Customers who arrive at your site should see the ambition, the authority, and the scale of your operations. There are also additional strategies that can be used to help make a company’s website look extremely professional.

Image use in SEO is important, for many reasons. Using images specifically for search engine optimization is something that needs to be done strategically. As top Toronto digital marketing and SEO specialists, we hope to provide some insights here in how to use images for SEO.

Images are great for readers and website visitors. Images can help to break up the monotony of paragraph after paragraph of text. They are also easier to create and produce than video. Be it photography or graphic work, images play a key role in keeping audiences engaged. Now, in SEO terms, images must conveniently fit into the page. Assessing page layout and structure, images should be placed in a natural way. In addition to ensuring images have natural placement, alt-tags and description keywords can also be used to direct search engines as to what an image contains. For any website that wants images to play a role in their search ranking, these are the sorts of things one must be expected to adhere to.

The world of search engines, social media, and digital marketing is a complicated place. As wonderful as search engines are, they make for a very competitive place for small businesses looking to rank. These are five commonly asked questions about SEO we hear regularly from new customers.

Why all SEO companies are not the same

SEO companies come in all shapes and sizes. There are some who are just a single expert and others who employ upwards of a dozen or more employees. There are those who specialize in social media marketing, eCommerce marketing, digital marketing, and more. Discuss with your SEO specialist their field of expertise and ensure it aligns with your vision.

Viral marketing is something many brands aspire to yet so few achieve it. It’s not easy. Imagine creating and releasing a single piece of contact – image, video, blog, or graphic – that nets a huge return of tremendous volume in a single day.

‘Going viral’ is not something anyone can promise or even predict. Some brands have made attempts and succeeded, others have had viral marketing campaigns backfire and spur a negative effect, and then, there are some who have had expensive campaigns fall entirely on deaf ears. If you want to give viral marketing your absolute best, here are 4 ways you can.

The rise of influencer marketing has been inspiring for marketers like us because it gives us the chance to get creative. Influencer marketing succeeds based off of creativity, relevancy of choice, and execution. If you’ve never done influencer marketing before and are looking for some examples of influencer marketing, read below to get a sense of what works.

Giveaways with Marshalls

The combination of giveaways and influencer marketing can be a unique way to get conversation going about your brand. Marshalls recently connected with YouTube influencers, providing some of their loyal followers with custom-designed complimentary giveaway boxes. These complimentary boxes were put together using Pinterest posts from followers. The reactions of opening these boxes were filmed and posted to YouTube, generating more than 475 million social media impressions. Not only is this a great example of using influencer marketing and tapping into their audiences, but it’s also an excellent way to make use of social media.

You’ve done everything right. You’ve invested time, effort, and money in all the right places. Your website looks great, is mobile responsive, and has all its CTAs properly distributed. Yet, even so, it’s not generating leads.

Sadly, a well-designed website does not mean the leads are automatically going to start rolling in. There are several things that could get in the way, unintentionally sabotaging your efforts. If you’re not getting leads and/or are still struggling with a low conversion rate, here are 4 reasons why you may be stuck.

Links to your website have important influence on aspects of site authority and thereby, SEO. By recommendation, links like these immediately associate your site to that which is providing the link. The more backlinks you have, the more indicative it is to search engines that your site has important information on it worth consuming. When this happens, search engines are more likely to rank your site higher which should ultimately provide you with more views.

Despite the benefits of backlinks, there is a dark side to them as well. If websites less popular than yours are referencing your website, this can have a negative effect. There’s also anti-marketing techniques out there that competing websites could employ to use backlinks to decrease the popularity of your website to search engines. For this reason, we recommend monitoring backlinks and checking in regularly. This way, if there’s any suspicious activity going on, you should spot it early enough to be able to stop it.

 Digital marketing channels are plentiful. Knowing which rabbit hole to go down is sometimes unclear for brands and websites. If you’re looking to pursue the channel with the highest ROI, there’s a lot to consider.

Depending on financial resources, the target audience, the products and services being sold, and more, how one leverages their digital marketing may be different from how others do the same.

Large corporations and small businesses alike tap into digital marketing strategies across different channels. Those that are successful learn how to maximize sales and generate leads on the channels most appropriate for them.

Marketing to different industries and professionals might mean tapping into LinkedIn. With a user base of more than 500 million users, building a LinkedIn blog and using LinkedIn as a social media marketing tool has its advantages.

As a brand, if you’re going to use LinkedIn to communicate with an audience, it all starts with optimizing one’s profile. Be sure to complete every field, as appropriate, of your profile and to include professional photos. Particularly as it applies to a professional photo, studies have shown that content with a headshot or headshot-similar image generates 7 times more views on average.

IKEA made some big news earlier this month when it announced it was changing its approach to marketing. IKEA is looking to do more in the digital marketing arena and to invest in more experiential marketing, reducing the investment in print catalogs.

Whether your company is brand new or has been around for twenty-five years, digital marketing is a space that every brand is focusing on. It’s one of the most effective marketing channels with higher returns than traditional, offline methods. Combine the digital with the experiential, and that’s a combination that is going to lead a lot of people to success in the present and future.

 SEO is getting started on a journey that goes beyond simply writing blog after blog, re-coding a website, or embedding certain strategies on a web page. SEO comes with many questions and as a bit of an introduction to the subject, we hope to address some of them here.

What is SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about designing and marketing a website with the focus of getting its pages ranked on search engines like Google, Bing, and others. When a site’s pages rank high on Google, it usually equates to more visitors. Whenever someone searches for a keyword related to the information on your site, they will see your brand, click it, and with that comes the opportunity to inform, sell, promote, and share what you have to offer.

 Analyzing page views for any website with healthy flows of traffic will reveal that some visitors will arrive to your page beginning at your home page while others will find you through a landing page. There are some differences to both that are worth noting for web designers, digital marketers, and small business owners. By knowing how to maximize the potential of these differences, you help to boost conversions, get a higher return, and produce a better result.

Every digital marketing campaign should come with a landing page. This page’s only goal is to convert a user from ‘visitor’ to ‘customer’. A landing page does this by incorporating actionable buttons and keeping the focus on conversion. A landing page lives and dies by its conversion rate. Images, text, and structure is all based around this. Think a captivating headline, a high resolution image, a list of advantages or benefits to your offer, and a highlighted call to action. This is the basic anatomy of a landing page. When done correctly, you should see that needle move.

 The #1 factor that determines the success of an SEO marketing campaign is content. With this in mind, the days of low-rent, keyword-rich content are long gone. To be successful within the SEO game, a site’s content marketing strategy needs to be focused on quality above all else.

Search engines have changed algorithms a lot in the past decade and they will continue to for the foreseeable future. Content quality is one of the only factors that has remained consistent throughout all of these changes.

Google has done great at providing to web designers an arsenal of business-friendly digital marketing tools. Though Google Analytics is highly recommended, it’s also one of the obvious ones. If you want to go beyond Google Analytics and see what else Google has to offer, consider any of the following tools to help craft the perfect digital marketing strategy for your website.

Google Correlate

Correlate tracks search trends over an extended period of time. See how keywords interact with one another during certain events, track keywords over time, and/or identify keyword opportunities during certain times of year. Correlate also allows a user to build charts and graphs related to keyword trends which is quite useful for those needing to make a digital marketing presentation to stakeholders.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a lot of potential in application across various digital marketing channels. When it comes to email marketing, AI has the potential to release more relevant content, to target one’s email offers better, to trigger optimized email releases. There are already different applications that can take over these components of email marketing. For entrepreneurs, small business website owners, and email marketing enthusiasts, getting in on AI early may help in achieve more success.

SEO strategies pumped up in time for eCommerce sales days can generate big ROI. The most successful of these campaigns are known to increase revenues before and after sales events as well.

For some, more than 50 percent of a company’s annual revenues can be generated from specific sales days and events throughout the year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two shining examples of sales days that generate millions of dollars for key brands.

Today’s social media crowd is a more diverse bunch age-wise than ever. If you don’t think baby boomers are heavily involved in social media platforms like Facebook, you’re wrong. Despite the fact that so much of the advertising and marketing on video sites like YouTube target younger people, the older crowd is there with money to spend and time on their hands. For brands targeting older audiences, using video marketing is a recommended move in 2018.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a web marketing strategy that fixates on getting your website ranked number one across search engines like Google and Bing. By zeroing in on specific keywords, successfully build for yourself an online presence with real momentum. As fancy as digital marketing strategies are, you need to have some technical aspects of web design prepped and optimized to truly maximize the opportunity.

Schema markup tags

Schema markup data is used by search engines to determine how relevant content on a web page is to the keywords being searched for. Though search engines will crawl your web page on their own, having schema markup tags makes the process easier and increases the likelihood that it will appear in front of a relevant audience. Though markup does not affect search engine placement, it does impact the accuracy of your site to the search term.

Facebook can be a pretty mysterious social media platform for new business accounts. It’s regularly undergoing updates and algorithm changes. In the past decade, due to these algorithm changes, it’s gotten increasingly difficult for small businesses to successfully launch non-paid Facebook marketing campaigns.

Even reaching one’s own followers can prove to be a huge challenge. Though it was once promoted as an ‘organic social media platform’, Facebook is anything but these days. If you’re noticing that your posts are barely reaching an audience, you’re not alone. The average Facebook page in 2018 boasts an organic reach of only 2.6 percent.

Buying fake followers to elevate your social media account is something so many influencers and businesses have either done or considered. Considering the consequences though, we’re confident in saying that buying fake followers on social media is just a bad idea. Any business who gets involved in social media marketing does so expecting success. Building the largest platform and maximizing engagement is the dream. Even with high quality content and consistency in posting schedule though, success in social media is not guaranteed. In these moments, it can seem extremely tempting to buy likes, followers, and shares. Here’s why we think you should hold off!

Google, Bing, and similar search engines are used every day. They still account for a sizeable chunk of any digital marketing budget, even in the face of other marketing channels growing exponentially.

The opportunity to generate traffic via search engines is key to business success. By developing content that is high quality and consistent in its messaging, this helps your website in ranking high on search engines. By nabbing a high ranking, this maximizes exposure and allows potential customers to easily find your website. The latest insights into web marketing, trends in search engine optimization, and consumer behaviour all highlight key ranking factors to keep in mind.

For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the biggest search engine in the world, Google. They use hundreds of different ranking factors in their algorithm to determine where a website places.

Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to bring together various marketing channels, such as social media and content marketing, in a bid to derive revenues and increase engagement.

Corporate brands and small businesses alike are engaging with video marketing on sites like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and more. There are a variety of different things that can be done with video marketing and no shortage of opportunities, either. Choose from posting how-to instructionals to promoting new sales, introducing new customers to your brand, an entertainment-based product that relates back to your brand, interviews with management or ambassadors, testimonials, and/or examples from your portfolio. For those that don’t know where to start, consider Instagram where there are more than 1 billion monthly users, Facebook which has more than 2 billion monthly users, and YouTube which boasts 1.8 billion users every month.

New and existing business owners are beaten over the head every day with the advantages of digital marketing. Sometimes though, digital marketing has actually been a bad thing for some businesses. It’s easy for a company to make all kinds of promises about boosting company’s growth and yet, so much more difficult to deliver on these claims. If digital marketing has done you wrong in the past or if you have concerns about hiring a digital marketing agency, keep this list in mind. Browse below for a quick recap of 4 things digital marketing may get wrong about your business.

Tech-savvy under-30 millennials come with a number of stereotypes attached to their name, such as being ‘cheap’, shopping online, and being constantly engaged in their smartphones. This aside, if a brand wishes to market to millennials, it takes looking beyond these myths and digging into the facts of marketing to millennials.

The facts are that millennials are considered to be the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Approximately 50 percent of them have attended or graduated from college or university. They are the first generation to have grown up in and around household computers, the Internet, and technology. In most cases, you may see millennials willing to spend more than previous generations on seemingly casual purchases, outspending other generations significantly. Any brand inexperienced with marketing to millennials can start with these 4 key strategies.

Using apps on your smartphone, tablet, and computer to monitor digital marketing campaigns is a smart idea. Instantly tap into real-time data and see whether a strategy is working or not. If a digital marketing strategy is working, great! If not, you’ll have the insights to change it. Though some apps might claim to automate marketing campaigns, that’s not what we’re trying to do with apps. In large part, digital marketing is not something to be automated. That said, apps can be used to provide better monitoring and to maximize a strategy while it’s working.

App 1 – ‘Seriate’ for the Instagram-specific user

If your digital marketing strategy does not involve Instagram, consider skipping this one. For those that do use Instagram, it’s a highly competitive environment. As one of the most popular social media platforms out there, Instagram is not so easy to use particularly from desktops. ‘Seriate’ is an app that allows an Instagram user to create posts, schedule posts, and make posts across multiple accounts at the same time. The automation capability of Seriate makes it easy to coordinate an Instagram marketing campaign. Sort and repost based on hashtags, geographic location, or set up likes, follows, and direct messages, and automate it all!