Basic Digital Marketing

 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.

 Digital social marketing produces results however the unfortunate caveat to that is that it does take time. Unfortunately, some businesses may not have the patience to see their investment grow. The question of whether social marketing is worth the investment or is a waste of money is a very common question among small business owners and those new to the digital marketing game. As a company involved in digital marketing and having seen the results it can produce, here’s what we think about the ‘investment’ that is social marketing.

To begin, large corporations throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at social marketing hoping that something sticks and in large part because of the amount of money being invested, the results are sizeable. For smaller companies however, social marketing budgets are going to be a lot smaller. That is not necessarily a bad thing either. It only services to challenge social marketing companies such as Unlimited Exposure to stretch this investment to the maximum. To be clear, a website does not need hundreds of thousands of dollars in social marketing to get hundreds of thousands of dollars back. If one knows how to successfully create and maximize the potential of a sales funnel, and if the lead generation is strong, there’s no limit to what a smaller budget can achieve.

 Long-term SEO accomplishments take time to build. Thankfully there is always time to correct mistakes and improve upon strategies that may not be performing ideally. With literally thousands of variables that could affect your search engine ranking, there are no guarantees in SEO. In our time of doing SEO successfully in 2018, here are a few of the lessons we’ve learned.

#1 – There is no single SEO strategy that works for all

SEO strategies vary according to the client. Even with the right keywords, amazing content, and strong links, a strategy may not perform with one client the same way it did with another. Using the same strategy again and again is not necessarily a bad thing if it performs well. That’s no sure thing though. Clients come with different goals, competitors, and keywords. So be prepared to swap out what isn’t working to create new strategies and techniques to obtain long-term SEO success in 2018.

 Saturday Night Live has survived over five decades and counting. Though the popular late Saturday night television show has gone through its ups and downs, it has successfully thrived in the marketplace outlasting competitors and creating conversation. As experts on digital marketing, SEO, and internet brand development, we are always on the lookout for inspiration. No matter what one might think of ‘Saturday Night Live’, its drawing power has remained consistent and its success is hard to argue with. So here are four lessons to learn in marketing from Saturday Night Live that may apply to your digital business.

#1 – Tackling the key issues of the day

Saturday Night Live first aired in 1975 and even early on, the show was never afraid to comment on key issues of the day. Though a digital business may not wish to tackle satirical political commentary like Saturday Night Live or offering social commentary that wasn’t asked for, to market in a digital space is to know how and when to comment on key issues. Keep on the lookout for fun subjects in the news or hashtags you can piggyback on. Find out the conversations being had in your industry and participate. Use social media as a way to tap into the conversation and get to know what your customers are talking about.

 Cart abandonment is highly common on eCommerce websites and is the phenomenon of a visitor, after having picked out items and placed them in their cart, deciding to not complete the checkout process. That means, somewhere along the way, the checkout process lost the customer.

Common reasons for cart abandonment include high shipping costs, slow shipping times, and higher than expected taxes. There may also be issues with the checkout process itself, sometimes being too lengthy and/or too complicated. For eCommerce sites that can understand where they’re going wrong with cart abandonment, they are more likely to be able to resolve the issue.

 For a website, digital marketing can help find a bigger audience, more brand reach, and higher sales. Keeping this in mind, where online marketing might be failing you is in its limitations. If your website is not selling well, it’s not necessarily strictly because online marketing techniques are not working. It could be from any number of offline influences that directly impact the effectiveness of online marketing. If you’re not doing what it takes offline to support your online activities, it makes it difficult for digital marketing to successfully accomplish everything it claims to be able to do.

 Internet marketing algorithms are always changing and it’s sometimes a race to keep up. In response, more marketers are using influencer marketing to build followings for multi-national brands across the world.

Influencer marketing uses individuals and brands that already have audiences to build your own. For example, on social media, one might see Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Imagine being able to work together with those Twitter accounts to promote your brand. The same can be done through methods such as sponsoring a YouTube video from an influencer, brokering a deal with an Instagram influencer to promote your brand, and/or partnering with a popular Facebook page to highlight the products or services you offer. As a trustworthy strategy, influencer marketing is one method of getting the word out that has consistently delivered.

 Content marketing plans need to incorporate key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor whether a strategy is successful or not. If a marketer is not looking at web analytics data to measure the success of a content marketing campaign, it’s then impossible to know whether they’re on the right path. Evidently, there are some basic KPIs to keep in mind, including customer engagement and conversion rates. There are also more advanced KPIs that you might not be thinking of when it comes to measuring marketing success. This guide on KPIs for content marketing plans can hopefully share some insight into the analytic metrics to watch out for.

 The right eCommerce platform that’s best for online stores in Canada is a tough question to answer and yet it’s one of the most common we receive. There are numerous options available out there, each one meeting different needs. The best eCommerce platform for you will depend on what features and pricing you want, requirements, and personal preferences. Three of the most popular eCommerce platforms are Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify.