5 Important eCommerce SEO Tactics for 2017

Increase your organic traffic this new year with these future-proof SEO tactics

Search engine optimisation is a constantly changing field, one that requires effective planning and actionable tactics to succeed.

This post is aimed at those who have a fast website, perfect on-page SEO and a good site structure, yet are looking for ways to take your website to the next level.

In this post, we’ll reveal our top 5 eCommerce SEO tactics that you need to implement in 2017. Allowing you to remain ahead of the competition and drive targeted traffic to your website.

1. Competitor Backlink Analysis

A competitor backlink analysis is one of the most simple, yet effective eCommerce tactics you can undertake. In short, you look at your competitors’ backlinks and see how you can also gain similar links.

If done properly, this can allow you to uncover patterns, problems and opportunities, simply from analysing the links your competitors have already built!

One of the best ways to do this is to enter your competitor’s domain into tools such as Majestic or Moz’s Open Site Explorer. This will provide you with all the backlinks that your competitors have built to their website.

In short, the aim is to take a deeper look at your competition’s links and ask yourself:

• What has worked for our competition?
• Are there any patterns?
• Is this something we can do, but better?

For example, your competitor appears to regularly feature authoritative guest authors on their blog. The author has a popular presence in your industry and are experts in a certain niche. If these posts are gaining many diverse and high-quality links from other blogs, you could look to do the same.

Similarly, if you sell kilts and your competitor is linked to from a variety of websites that list kilt suppliers, you can look to approach these sites and ask for a link.

Overall, carrying out a competitor backlink analysis gives you an idea of how competitors are building links in your industry. This can help you create a link building strategy, and it can also save you a lot of time by the “stealing” the links they’ve worked hard to build.

2. Featured Snippets

Featured snippets have become extremely important for SEO. By focusing on featured snippets, you can greatly improve the search appearance of your website.

So, what exactly is a featured snippet?

A featured snippet shows the summary of an answer to a user’s search query. It’s displayed at the top of the search results page and it’s been referred to as position #0.

This can enhance your brand’s search visibility, as not only will you appear in the top spot, it provides the opportunity to occupy two positions on the first page of the search results.

An example can be found below:

This is an effective, yet simple way to compete with other brands in your industry and is a tactic you should employ immediately.

How do I get a featured snippet?

Optimising your site for featured snippets is fairly simple. You need to identify a question searched by your target audience, provide a clear, concise answer to this question and set this up so search engines can find it easily. Most commonly featured snippets are displayed as lists, graphs or tables.

Rob Bucci recently spoke about the importance of featured snippets at Brighton SEO. He highlights how to earn more featured snippets. He stresses the importance of keyword research when considering featured snippets, and the need to research the most popular formats for feature snippets related to your target search query - whether this be tables, lists or other.

Rob Bucci also highlights that Google use featured snippets for a reason, they’re important as they enhance user experience. And as voice search advances and becomes more popular, featured snippets will play a more important role.

If you’re a Moz Pro customer, here is a handy step-by-step guide on how to use their Keyword Explorer to find featured snippets relevant to your industry.

How will featured snippets help me?

Hubspot carried out a great study on how they received more clicks through to content that appeared in the featured snippet compared to content that didn’t.

So, there you go, featured snippets will help increase traffic to your site – what more could you want?

In the fast-paced, ever-changing world of SEO, it’s vital to keep up with changes to the SERPs. Therefore, featured snippets should most definitely be a tactic you utilise!

3. Create Linkable Assets

Put simply, a linkable asset is something you create that is of interest to your target audience and is therefore worthy of linking to.

I’m sure it’s no surprise that creating linkable assets gets a mention in this post. Building links forms the basis of SEO and therefore, creating linkable assets will remain a vital eCommerce SEO tactic for the foreseeable future!

Linkable assets can take various forms. But, for this post, we’ll focus on content. Creating valuable content that’s relevant to your brand/industry, and is shareworthy, can effectively build a number of high-quality links to your website and improve your ranking positions.

This content needs to have a hook that makes it link worthy. The most successful content often provokes an emotional response in the user. Additionally, content that has a geographical angle can help to attract a broad audience and spark conversation.

Depending on your industry, budget, time and resources, this content can range from a helpful eBook to an interactive map using data. Whatever the content, it needs to be unique, newsworthy and credible, as the overall aim is to gain a high number of shares and/or links, driving targeted traffic to your website!

It’s important that you closely base the content piece on the products your website sells. This will ensure that the websites that link to you are relevant and from within your industry, therefore, targeting your customers.

4. Community Engagement

Community engagement is an effective eCommerce SEO tactic that will allow you to understand more about your customers, their queries and their interests.

This is a broad tactic that can be approached in a number of ways. The main aim is to raise awareness of your brand whilst distinguishing yourself as an expert within your industry. You can do this through being present on platforms where your target audience hang out.

For example, search on forums and Q&A sites, such as Reddit or Quora, for problems and queries relating to your products. The aim is to help users to solve these queries through speaking to them and offering your expertise.

As always, don’t be salesy when answering questions. Offer great advice and if there is a chance to link to your product, or a blog post you have written that adds value, then include it.

Another form of community engagement is blog commenting.

Now, you’re probably saying “isn’t that a spam tactic used many years ago?”.

You’re right!

But, if done correctly, it can be a great way to help prospective customers whilst also increasing brand awareness.

Rand Fishkin recently presented a Whiteboard Friday on the subject of community participation. You can check that out here.

Furthermore, you can use the customer’s problems to create engaging content ideas for your own blog. This will help to further distinguish you as experts within your field and, potentially, gain extra search traffic.

5. Guest Posting

Guest posting can be a controversial term when it comes to link building. However, speaking directly to your audience by posting on another website’s blog is still a valuable SEO tactic. So long as you avoid using this tactic in a spammy way to build low-quality links.

Research relevant, popular and high-authority websites within your industry and approach these for guest posting opportunities. As mentioned above, guest posting on sites such as this will help to build awareness of your brand, allow you to speak directly to your target audience and create engaging content whilst building relationships.

If done properly, this will help to distinguish you as an expert within your field, whilst increasing referral traffic to your website.

There are many tactics you can implement to improve your SEO. Following the 5 eCommerce SEO tactics above will help to build links, build brand awareness and drive targeted traffic to your website!

Thanks to Bachir Smahi for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Bachir Smahi is a Director of the London based Magento ecommerce and digital marketing agency, Best Response Media. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-strategy/5-important-ecommerce-seo-tactics-2017/

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The Benefits Of Obtaining Professional Global Relocation Services

Why Humans Should Attend Conferences — Like Adobe Summit 2017

You’re seated 20 rows back from a massive stage. The lights dim, the music swells, and 38 coordinated projectors light up the backdrop with engaging motion graphics and video. Amazing presenters and thought leaders position themselves centerstage and deliver presentations that make you rethink the ways in which you are managing your business. You keep thinking of all the people who should be here with you, listening to all this great advice. The whole experience is overwhelming. It’s not only an inspiring experience, but also emotionally engaging — you can feel it.

If you’ve ever experienced this, you understand why being physically present at an amazing conference is so powerful. Sure, you could spend some extra time browsing the Internet, searching for interesting topics and articles. You tell yourself that you’ll keep up with the news and trends or strike up conversations with a few peers in the industry. But the truth is, you never do it.

And that’s why you should attend a conference as big and as amazing as Adobe Summit — it forces you to grow.

Adobe Summit — The Experience
Adobe Summit brings together hundreds of speakers, thought leaders, and experts who feed you all the latest trends and inspiration you can digest — all while you sit back in your seat and soak it all in. Plus, you’re surrounded by marketing peers who share their experiences with you, helping you feel more confident about how to improve your company’s digital marketing.

It’s an experience that provides vision, confidence, and real-world expertise — an emotional experience that you can’t always achieve just by watching a few videos online or reading a single article. The combined inspiration and impact far outweighs the time or cost it takes to attend the conference. It’s all about the experience.

Adobe Summit’s Revamped Marketing Innovations Track
Adobe Summit is an experience you can’t afford to miss. And, when it comes to inspiration, we’ve made some improvements this year that are certain to sweeten the deal.

This year, we’re excited to announce a reimagined Marketing Innovations track at Summit. We’ve expanded the track to include three times the number of sessions, and we’ve elevated the type of content and insights to better help companies not only understand, but also thrive in the new digital landscape.

The new Marketing Innovations track will focus on two types of inspiration — innovation of thought and innovation of action. For innovation of thought, we’re hosting a variety of speakers, best-selling authors, and thought leaders who will inspire you with big ideas, trends, and guidance on digital transformation. For innovation of action, we’re inviting a variety of brands, CMOs, and entrepreneurs who will share insights as well as examples of how they are using technology to push the limits of digital marketing with their companies.

In addition to numerous outside experts who will be joining us in the Marketing Innovations track, we have several experts from Adobe who will provide deep insights on topics such as future digital trends, the value of design in business ROI, and the role of technology in digitally transforming your company.

The idea is to expand the inspiration you typically find on mainstage presentations and make it available through a variety of topics and at times that will fit your conference schedule. The sessions in the Marketing Innovations track are available to everyone at Adobe Summit — from CEOs to practitioners. Simply visit Summit.Adobe.com to view our session catalog and read more details about all our sessions in the Marketing Innovations track.

Final Thoughts — The Importance of Experience
Today, the brand experience is what differentiates the leaders from the followers. The customer experience is everything. It’s the collective emotions and associations we give to a company. It’s how we, as humans, connect with brands.

If you are a marketer or leader who is trying to better understand how you can create the right experiences for your brand, then attending Adobe Summit is essential. It not only offers a real-world example of an amazing brand experience, but also gives you the tools and knowledge you need to build experiences for your brand that are just as powerful.

In short, it will inspire you beyond your own efforts to keep up with the constant change in digital marketing. So, check out this year’s sessions and tracks and join us for Adobe Summit 2017 on March 21–23 in Las Vegas — and prepare yourself for a truly inspiring experience.

The post Why Humans Should Attend Conferences — Like Adobe Summit 2017 appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/humans-attend-conferences-like-adobe-summit-2017/

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7 tips to create a mobile-friendly website for your small business

How to set up a good mobile friendly website

Having a mobile-friendly website extends beyond good practice, it’s a requirement if you want your business to succeed. Mobile now exceeds desktop Internet usage and this means mobile users expect businesses to provide an excellent experience optimized for their device. In fact, nearly half of consumers won’t return to a website if a website doesn’t load properly.

If you aren’t sure if your site is mobile-friendly, you need to make sure it is as soon as possible. It’s crucial to find ways to convert leads into sales and not turn people away because your website fails to load correctly. Customers on the go have their mobile devices in hand and want to be able to look up your business no matter where they are located – and possibly even contact you. There is a lot of competition in the small business arena, so remember that the ability to access your website via mobile is crucial.

Take a look at these 7 tips to make your site more mobile-friendly.

Pay attention to font size and button size.

The font size and button sizes are important to consider for mobile devices. Font size needs to be 14 px or bigger. While that may seem large, it’s better to err on the side of caution so your users don’t have to zoom in to read the content you share. The buttons should be as big as possible to reduce the chances that the user will miss the button or inadvertently push the wrong one.

Do not make a second website for mobile.

It used to be common to design websites for the “mobile web” and remove content to make it fit on a mobile device. Google does not like duplicate content, though, so if you build two separate websites that feature identical content without using canonical URLs you won’t rank well in a Google search.

Make sure your content is available on all mobile devices and platforms.

It’s essential not to exclude a group – if you do, then you’ve unintentionally created alienated customers who will look somewhere else to buy their products or services. Mobile users expect a harmonious experience across all devices. Make sure you deliver and that your content is viewable on all devices and platforms – this is one way to have an effective mobile content marketing strategy.

Use responsive design.

Responsive design gives website developers the ability to build a website that is viewable on devices of various sizes and slashes the amount of work website developers need to do when they create a site. When small business websites use responsive design, the web page has the ability to identify the consumer’s screen orientation and size and adjust the layout as needed.

Always keep in mind that your customers are on their phone around the clock, so ensure your content is accessible 24/7. Responsive design boosts your traffic because it makes it easier for your customer to share your content. Users appreciate convenience; so take the necessary steps to make their experience with your business seamless at every touch point.

Use high-resolution images.

High-resolution images are a really important part of your responsive website to make sure your visitor’s experience is excellent. The newest models of iOS devices have high-def screens that need an image that is double the resolution of a desktop computer. Images that are very high resolution will prevent you from having blurry or pixilated images when viewed on a high-definition screen. An unclear, poorly cropped, or distorted image makes your website, and therefore your business, come off as unprofessional.

Utilize YouTube videos.

The use of video is one of many ways to boost your business – consumers love video and is has become a core part of social engagement. Viewers like content that keeps it real and video can envelop your audience with experiences unlike other forms of communication. If you choose to put a large number of videos on your website, it alters the way the video is viewed via mobile. Turn to YouTube videos as a solution to prevent any potential issues when viewing videos on a mobile device – the YouTube embed code is already responsive. Through using YouTube videos, you save multiple steps because you eliminate the process of making sure each of your videos is mobile-friendly.

Ensure your site is well-developed.

Users admit that they would not recommend a service or product that has a weak website. If your call-to-action button on your mobile device is so small it cannot be activated, it does no good and will not result in a high rate of conversions. Check to make sure actions like swiping can occur without a hassle. Your customers will enjoy their experience on your website if it’s well developed and therefore, visit it more often.

Your mobile strategy needs to focus on ways to increase traffic and ensure that devices respond quickly. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly yet and doesn’t strive to give customers a compelling experience, it’s time to make some changes and get on board to set your business up for mobile success.

What changes have you made to your website to ensure it’s mobile-friendly?

Thanks to Sohail Abbas for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Sohail is a freelance writer and digital marketer. Sohail is the founder and ceo of AllTopIdeas. He currently writes for several big Magazines. In the past, he has also worked for various publishing houses and literary agencies, both reading, marketing and editing. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-design/7-tips-create-mobile-friendly-website-small-business/

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The Digital Duopoly Cements Itself

Chart of the Day: Google and Facebook online ad revenue surges whilst revenue of all other providers shrink.

Healthy markets are defined by competition. Consumers have many providers to choose from, and those providers must constantly innovate to improve their service or make efficiency savings to be able to reduce their price - or else the consumers will move to a competitor which is doing so. Monopolies are terrible for consumers because they are defined by a lack of competition - hence why in most countries regulators explicitly ban companies from establishing monopolies in most sectors. But what about Duopolies? This is when a market is dominated by two large players - they still compete, but often the competition is less fierce because of the lack of other providers.

As new stats from IAB, Facebook and Google show, the digital ad market is entering duopoly territory. Google and Facebook saw very healthy rises in ad spend, but other digital ad providers saw sales shrink.

As you can see from the chart below, Google and Facebook now make up 2/3rds of the online ad market, leaving everyone else making up only 1/3rd of online ad sales.

This may be because Facebook and Google offer superior service and better value, but it is important that the market retains other providers to keep it dynamic.

• Source: IAB Ad Spend Stats
• Data Sample: US online Ad revenue

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/internet-marketing-statistics/digital-duopoly-cements/

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How to build a quality keywords list and choose the right match type

A detailed tutorial on how to research your AdWords target keyword list to improve your ROI from PPC

Keywords trigger your ads. Building and maintaining the right list of keywords is vital to getting the best return on your paid search spend.

Keywords are organised into ad groups. You assign ad creatives (ad text) to these ad groups, which appear when triggered by these keywords. Therefore, knowing which keywords will perform best is important.

Keyword research is the process of building keyword lists, based on the frequency at which consumers search for these words and phrases.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keywords are the nuts and bolts of your AdWords campaigns. They let you control your visibility in search results, as well as affecting the amount you spend.

If you’re setting up an account for the first time, it’s essential to build a robust keyword list as soon as you can. The quality of this list will determine the frequency at which your ads appear, and the relevancy of your ads to users’ search queries.

Even if you’ve been running AdWords campaigns for some time – or you’ve recently inherited an account – it’s still important to regularly review your keyword lists to discover missed opportunities.

Keyword Research Tools and Techniques

While there are many third-party, non-Google Keyword research tools,  your starting point should be the tools made available by Google.

• Google Keyword Planner: The Keyword Planner, Google’s own keyword research tool is invaluable, as it provides solid data on the popularity of keywords from Google itself. The tool also provides keyword suggestions, lets you organise keywords into ad groups, and forecast visibility based on varying bids. Google Trends is an alternative with a higher-level view of the data.
• On-site search: Search data from your own website such as the Google Analytics Search queries report can provide plenty of insights to help you start your keyword research process. The terms your browsers use to find products and services using your on-site search box will very likely be reflected in the terms they use to search on Google.
• Search terms reports: The Search terms report from AdWords provides a list of search queries that triggered your ads within a specified time frame. This is useful if you’re looking to optimise your existing keyword lists further, or discover new keyword opportunities.

For example, search terms data may bring to light a new synonym for your products you hadn’t previously considered. Using this synonym as a starting point, you could use Keyword Planner to discover further keywords, and create a new Ad Group to categorise them.

Best-Practice Tips

• Think ‘quality over quantity’. Creating a ‘quality’ keyword list doesn’t necessary mean creating a lengthy list. Strong, relevant keywords should take precedence over generic keywords with high search volumes.

• Think about budget. Consider search volume and CPCs when finalising your keywords, so you can be sure you can afford to bid on all the keywords you’ve chosen.

• Keep an eye on competitors. You can use competitor review tools to analyse how rival businesses are bidding on keywords – and uncover new keyword opportunities.

• Think like a consumer. Don’t assume the terminology you use reflects the way your customers search for your products.

Deciding on Match Types

Match types (or keyword matching options) let you choose who sees your ads, based on the similarity of users’ search queries to your chosen keywords. They are the most widely used targeting options for search ads in AdWords.

AdWords lets you choose from five main match types:

Exact match

Set your keywords to exact match, and their ads will show only when a user’s search query matches the keyword exactly.

The only exception to this rule is when a user searches for a very close variant to your exact match keywords. In these cases, your ad may appear.

Phrase match

Like exact match, phrase match triggers ads when a user’s search query matches the keyword exactly (or is a very close variant).

However, it will also trigger ads when the search query includes additional words before or after the keyword.

Broad match

Broad match keywords will show ads for a wide range of queries that may be closely or broadly related to the keywords themselves.

Users can see ads with broad match keywords if:

• They search for synonyms
• They search for words in a different order
• They search using long-tail queries that broadly relate to the subject matter
• They use incorrect spellings

Broad match modifier

Broad match modifier is a cross between broad and phrase match. It offers a greater level of targeting control than broad match, because it won’t display ads when users search for synonyms or related searches. And unlike phrase match, it will show ads when users search for words in a different order.

Negative match

Negative match lets you define queries that will stop ads triggering. The obvious candidates are potentially offensive keywords, but there may be other obvious negatives that are specific to your industry or brand.

At a later stage, you should build this list out at campaign level – but only when you have a better understanding of which keywords convert, and which don’t.

Optimising your Match Types

Make sure you audit and optimise your match types regularly. Without control of your keyword targeting, you won’t have control of your budget. If you have clicks from irrelevant, non-targeted search queries they are less likely to convert and cost you money.

Each different match type affords a greater degree of control over targeting (and therefore budget). Exact match offers the most control, followed by phrase match, modified broad match and broad match.

Broad match should be avoided most of the time, as broad match ads are likely to appear for low-value and irrelevant queries.

In an ideal world, your account would have all keywords set to exact match, with all possible keyword variations covered. This would allow the maximum level of control over targeting and budget.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. So we have to use phrase match and modified broad match to help us reach our customers without spending too much time optimising our campaigns.

Brand Keywords – Dos and Don’ts

It is also important to look at branded keywords. This is important to ensure brand protection.

Until 2008, Google didn’t allow advertisers to bid on competitor brand names. Then the floodgates opened.

So now you can bid on competitors’ branded terms, but you may not be able to include them in your ad text if they are trademarked. Nonetheless, this means that no search query is safe – even customers searching specifically for your businesses website could end up being enticed by a rival company’s ad.

For this reason, you should take reasonable steps to protect your brand in search.

Does this mean bidding on your brand name as a keyword? For some businesses, yes – but for others, it’s just not worth it.

A small business in an uncompetitive market, for example, may find that no competitors are bidding on its brand name.

For this business, bidding on its brand name simply to secure a top position in Google search may be a waste of money, as it will likely already appear as the #1 organic result, with no paid search competition.

However, a big retailer in an aggressively competitive marketplace will likely have to bid on its own brand name, or risk competitors pushing their search results below the fold.

This retailer will also have to ensure that its bids are set high enough to ensure customers go straight to its site. Whenever possible, you should aim to appear in position #1 for your own brand terms – you can’t rely on organic results to bring in clicks!

Best-Practice Tips

• Consider match types. Depending on your brand name, broad match may or may not be a viable choice. Certain brands, like AstraZeneca or Microsoft, could get away with setting brand-name keywords to broad match, as their brand names are either unique, or inexorably tied to the products and services they provide.

However, brands like Apple should avoid broad match at all costs, as brand names based on common words are most likely to bring in unwanted traffic. Apple, for example, may appear on searches for ‘apple baskets’, ‘apple pie’ and countless other irrelevant terms.

• Consider targets. Brand keywords are often more profitable than generic keywords, for a simple reason – people who search for your brand have likely already made up their mind about the retailer they want to purchase from. For this reason, you may wish to set different targets for brand versus non-brand keywords.

• Consider reputation. Reputation management is an important consideration in PPC, especially when it comes to brand keywords. As well as thinking about the keywords you want to bid on, you should consider the queries that you don’t want associated with your brand. For example, keyword constructions like [brand + ‘scam’] or [brand + ‘sucks’] are unlikely to bring in traffic that converts. As part of your audit, you should identify terms like this and add them to your negatives list.

Building an effective keyword list takes time, and maintaining it is an ongoing process. However, if you want your ad campaigns to succeed then getting the building blocks right at the beginning will give you a sturdy base on which to build.

For more on how to use keywords and match types to maximise on your campaigns read ClickThrough’s latest e-Book – The Best-Practice Guide to AdWords Audits: Part One. Download your copy now to find out more about keeping up and moving with the industry.

Thanks to Phil Robinson for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Phil Robinson is the Founder of ClickThrough Marketing, a leading UK digital and search marketing agency specialising in helping companies increase leads and ecommerce sales. You can follow ClickThrough on Twitter or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid-search-strategy/how-to-build-a-quality-keywords-list-and-choose-the-right-match/

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Persuasion Marketing: How to Create Personas to Better Engage Your Audience

Improve audience understanding for more persuasive marketing campaigns in four steps

Gone are the days of randomly placing keywords and ranking for any term we liked. Today’s savvy marketer recognises that in order to succeed in the Google search results, and more widely online, we need to forget old school techniques of trying to appeal to the search giants and focus instead on our end user.

Customer personas are a powerful marketing tool which enable us to better articulate our audience’s needs and complexities in a usable manner. Here, I’ll explain how to create useful marketing personas to guide your marketing strategy.

Back to basics: audience demographics

The first step to better understanding your audience is to extract basic demographical information. There are various ways to do this.

Ask your client/team

The first place to look for audience information is your client (if you work in an agency) or your team (if you work in house).

Gather your marketing team, your sales team, your customer service team and ask them:

• Who are our customers?
• Where are they based?
• What jobs do they do?
• What do they need?
• Why do they buy from us?

We did this exercise with one of our clients, Donington Park (an events venue here in the Midlands), as a workshop. We had big pieces of paper and fat pens and we discussed our ideas as a group. Using the workshop method meant that everyone in the team felt they could contribute and we extracted insights that they hadn’t shared with one another before, as well as all of those ‘obvious’ aspects of their audience which they spoke about every day.

Review your sales data

Sales data is really useful in helping you to learn more about your audience.

If you use a CRM, you should be able to extract information about existing customers as well as new leads. You’re looking for as much information as possible about things like job titles, locations, gender, age, financial status and so on.

Gather sales insight

Your sales team will likely have their own way of segmenting new leads. Ask them how they qualify new leads into the business; are there any desirable attributes which they look out for as signals of the lead’s propensity to buy? Are there any undesirable attributes which they would exclude based on their knowledge that those leads don’t convert?

At this point, you’ll have some good insights into the basic demographical information surrounding your audience base. For many marketers, this is where the road to audience understanding ends. They create segments based on this basic information, often driven by age or location or job title, and believe that’s enough.

But I believe it doesn’t stop there. To truly understand our audience, we need to delve deeper.

What motivates your audience?

The next level of understanding comes from asking what motivates your audience. You want to find out:

• What needs do they have?
• What challenges do they face?
• What are they looking for when reviewing your product or service?

Again, there are numerous ways to extract this information.

Customer surveys

Customer surveys can be extremely powerful. They not only give you the opportunity to gather valuable information, studies have shown that asking customer feedback can increase conversions and improve retention rates too.

Surveys can be done face to face, via email or over the phone. You might run a poll on your social media channels or even host a pop up on your site. The end goal is to better understand the answers to the questions I posed above.

We ran a survey for another client, Company Check, in late 2015 where we asked 1,000 business users of the site to provide their feedback on a series of questions around business matters. The results provided a valuable insight into their experience, including information on the challenges they expect to face in 2016.

We also asked participants to tell us what industry they operated in and what size their business was, which gave us loads more information about our user base. We are now creating content which appeals to those needs. You can see the survey itself here.

As an aside, this survey was also featured on Forbes, International Business Times, Yahoo News and many more, showing that surveys can also be a valuable digital PR tool.

Keyword research

If you work in SEO, you’re likely to be very familiar with the practice of keyword research to better understand the phrases your target audience uses when searching for your services.

But have you considered what keyword research can reveal about your audience’s motivations?

I like to use the related searches on Google to gain this insight. Simply search for a phrase that’s important to your client, something top level like ‘SEO services’, for example. The scroll to the bottom of the results and Google will make suggestions of other related searches.

In this example, the related searches include ‘seo service pricing’, ‘how much do seo services cost’ and ‘seo service price’. This indicates that price is a factor for this audience. We also see ‘seo reading’, ‘seo kent’, ‘seo nottingham’ and so on, suggesting location is also a factor.

There are lots of other tools you can use for this, some of which I’ve listed for you here.

What interests does your audience have?

The next step is to consider what interests your audience has. You want to find out:

• What do they enjoy?
• What are they thinking about?
• What’s topical in their industry?

Here are some techniques to help you here:

Conference Topics

One technique I find really helpful is to follow the conferences that are targeted to my audience. I want to see what topics they are covering, as this can give me an insight into the trends in that industry.

It’s also worth looking out for any hashtags being used by the conference on Twitter. You can track this to see what attendees are talking about, giving you access to real time insight. I like to use Hootsuite for this, and have written a guide to using Hootsuite, but there are other social monitoring tools available.

Targeted publications

Do you follow the publications and websites which target your audience? This could include blogs, forums, online/offline magazines and competitor sites.

It’s highly likely they’re going through the same processes as you to understand their audience so by reviewing the content they share, you can get inspiration for your own.

YouGov Profiler

This tool is great for adding those more personal traits that will make your personas into ‘people’.

Free to use, the YouGov Profiler gives you information on your audience’s hobbies, interests, brand affiliations and much more, based on records from over 400,000 survey respondents.

Building your personas

Once you’ve gathered this information, you’ll be ready to build them into personas. Remember, personas are meant to be tools for your use, so consider how to make them easy to use for everyone in your business.

The most common way to do this is to create a one-page visualisation. This includes a photo, name, summary and other key information from your research. Here’s an example of one I created for my client Company Address:

I recently spoke at Brighton SEO, the UK’s leading digital marketing conference, on the topic of personas and how to use them to guide your strategy. You can view the slides and video of my talk here:

• How to Develop Useful Audience Personas to Guide Your Digital Strategy

I also wrote about how to use personas in your content marketing strategy on Smart Insights here:

• 3 tools for creating an effective content marketing strategy

Laura Hampton is the digital marketing manager at Nottingham SEO agency Impression. She specialises in SEO, digital PR and content marketing. You can follow Laura on Twitter @lauralhampton or @impressiontalk.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/persuasion-marketing/marketing-personas/persuasion-marketing-create-personas-better-engage-audience/

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Eight Steps to Creating Extraordinary Content

From networking equipment to retail goods, the purchasing process across products and industries has changed — consumers have taken control. Now, when a young family goes to pick out their first vehicle, they don’t head to the showroom floor. Instead, they connect with brands online and build their dream digital vehicle, choosing every detail from engine model to seat fabric. Only then do they head to a local dealership with their custom product specifications already in hand.

In response, nearly every company today practices content marketing as a core strategy. Because brands from every industry are catching on to the importance of their content as part of a valuable customer experience, they are dedicating more resources to finding their secret sauce for standing out in this crowded space.

As a result, they are discovering that creating truly useful content to meet customers where and when they will find it most valuable is an organization-wide endeavor. To meet the demand, many brands are shifting their strategies to create a culture of content that permeates every internal department and team.

These Eight Changes Can Help You Build a Culture of Content in Your Company.
Here are eight changes we’re seeing in content marketing and how brands can — and are — taking advantage of those changes to effectively create an internal culture of content.

1. Customer Experience Is NOW a Part of Company Culture.
The writing’s on the wall: in the next 10 years, Business Insider projects that 40 percent of companies will cease to exist after failing to meet changing customer needs. Yet, while brands know the need is there, making the shift from a product-focused business to a customer-first company can be challenging and takes time. Rely on data to obtain leadership buy-in and make it a strategic imperative. Strive to include the entire organization — a company-wide commitment to being customer obsessed. And remember, a company transformation takes time, so expect at least a five-year commitment to the process. To keep commitment high along the way, celebrate even the smallest wins.

2. Brands Are Getting Serious About Defining Their Content Strategies.
In 2017, according to Curata, 51 percent of companies will have an appointed executive — a chief content officer or VP of content, for example — whose work is dedicated solely to the brand’s content marketing strategy. In addition, 75 percent of brands are increasing their content marketing investments. This means that, to stand out, brands are treating their content as a strategic asset.

Defining your content marketing strategy can help you better understand where you need to go with your content, what you need to get there, and how to measure success once you arrive. A written, documented strategy justifies the budget, helping you meet the needs of your target audience while adding value to your organization. Begin with outlining the need for content marketing by creating a business case. Define audience personas and develop your brand’s story. Finally, create a channel plan to determine the best placement for your content.

3. Companies Are Shifting Audience Preferences to a Front-and-Center Position.
At this point, buyers expect you to deliver relevant, meaningful content whenever and however they want it. And, they won’t take “no” for an answer. A full 43 percent of consumers say they ignore companies that deliver irrelevant content, and according to a survey by Gigya, 32 percent will go as far as to boycott brands’ sites and apps for the same reason. So, brands are taking time to understand the interests, goals, and aspirations of the people whom they want to motivate to interact with their brand and are extending their reach to be where their customers are.

When millennial Trevor Noah took over the host position for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, viewers began searching for Noah’s marital and relationship status online. The brand saw an opportunity to engage and created hidden videos of the host responding to these and other popular fan queries. The videos, which could only be found when searching promoted terms on Google, were a hit with fans and demonstrated Comedy Central’s reach beyond the television screen.

To respond to customers’ demands for relevancy, begin by gathering all customer data under one umbrella — regardless of device or channel — to create a single view of your customers. Then, take inventory of audience behaviors and learn how your audience members react with your brand so you can offer personalized messaging wherever they are.

4. Following the Customer Journey Is Now an Official Job — Complete With a Title.
As much as 78 percent of consumers will not engage with brand offers if they’re irrelevant to them based on their previous engagements with the brand. For content to drive results, it’s critical to optimize it according to its position along the customer journey. And, while 65 percent of companies have not appointed a central authority responsible for overseeing the customer journey, some brands are catching on to the need and are dedicating whole teams to the endeavor.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) created an exclusive team of superstars — called “Superstar DJs” — whose sole purpose is to manage the customer journey and their content’s place in it. Take a page from their playbook and assemble a team to look at your brand’s customer journey holistically rather than focusing only on individual touchpoints. Look at how your customers interact with your content at each stage of the journey. Test and troubleshoot to deliver highly relevant content exactly when the customer needs it. Then, empower your team to deliver streamlined customer experiences by enabling them to create, test, publish, and analyze content without having to rely on other business units. Lastly, don’t forget to make it a fun experience for the team. As a result of these efforts, RBS’s Superstar DJs cut the rollout of streamlined customer experiences from months down to weeks.

5. Marketing Collaboration Is Taking on New Meaning. Collaboration Is Cross-Functional.
RBS’s Superstar DJs use a real-time dashboard to track sudden changes and collaborate to act in the interest of their customers. In addition, they share this dashboard across all areas of the company and even bring in “Guest DJs” from other departments — their call-centers, HR, and legal departments — to share relevant insights and perspectives they’ve gleaned about customers’ needs and wants. These insights are all used in strategies that shape the brands’ winning customer experience.

For content strategy to make a difference in the customer experience, all parts of your organization need to work together, efficiently exchanging information and sharing insights to create a complete strategy. Knock down organizational silos by providing a real-time environment for coordinating project schedules and details. Give teams access to a shared dashboard with metrics and goals and ensure everyone knows which part of the journey they are accountable for.

6. Content Is Being Delivered at Lightning Speed.
With so many choices, enticing people to consume and engage with brand content is more difficult than ever before. Seventy-one percent of marketers say they have to create 10 times as many assets to support their different channels, and 85 percent say they’re under pressure to create assets more quickly. As a result, brands are putting processes and systems in place that allow creative teams to produce high volumes of assets quickly and empower marketers to publish and update without having to wait for approvals.

Essilor of America struggled to keep up with the content demand of their four distinct brands — all requiring television and digital campaigns and all with unique identities. They used standardized templates and digital assets that they could quickly customize to align with each brand identity. In only six months, they launched their new site and had three new sites poised to launch within 10 weeks.

You can see these types of results, too. Create powerful content by developing a process that’s agile, ensuring brand consistency across channels and leaning on data to deliver relevance at scale.

7. Brands Are Aligning Business Goals With Customer Experiences.
By 2020, customer experience will surpass both price and product as differentiators. And brands are preparing for this shift. One-third of companies are going the extra mile to ensure great customer experiences by tying employee incentives to customer-experience metrics. To do so, they’re updating their metrics to measure the customer experience. For example, interaction metrics measure how deeply content is resonating with consumers, and engagement metrics — percentage of content consumed, for example — measure the quality of brand content.

Translate your vision for customer centricity by identifying which areas are most relevant to teams and developing appropriate metrics for employees to work toward. Then, use refined reporting to allow your team to see what’s working and what’s not at every customer touchpoint — not just the last click — so they can optimize for best results every step of the way.

8. Employees Organization-Wide Are Being Rewarded for Customer-First Performances.
To ensure their employees go above and beyond to create exceptional customer experiences, RBS induced internal competition with a billboard that displays how each of their DJs are performing around their customer-centric metrics on a weekly basis. Then, they extended this recognition to guest DJs — executive board members and managers from across the organization. Lastly, they rewarded qualifying DJs with a shiny new pair of Diamante headphones. In doing so, they sent a message across the organization that customer-centric employees will be noticed, appreciated, and rewarded.

Find innovative ways to show employees that what they do contributes to the overall goals of the company to create engaged, motivated, and productive teams. A happy workforce leads to higher profits, increased productivity, and greater customer engagement — the path to happy customers and better experiences. Encourage customer-centric behaviors in your employees by empowering them to do whatever is needed to improve the customer experience and arming them with the training and tools to do the job well.

Final Thoughts: How Brands Can Stay on Track for the Long Haul.
Without strong content processes in place, your content marketing efforts — and, by extension, customer experiences — will never be more than mediocre. Becoming a customer-centric organization that delivers the experiences your customers demand in 2017 is challenging — but not impossible. Once you’re on your way to a culture of content, make it worth your while by keeping the momentum going and on track with these final tips:

• Let strategy be your guide in developing processes around content that moves your brand forward in the most efficient and agile way.
• Identify your contributors for fresh perspectives and unique ideas.
• Establish controls and be clear about who can do what with channel and brand guidelines.
• Know the ‘why?’ behind every piece of content, ensuring customers move smoothly through the journey.
• Plan your calendar with content scheduled in advance.
• Test, optimize, analyze, and repeat.

For a more comprehensive overview of creating a culture of content, download our whitepaper, “The Culture of Content — Nine Steps to Content Marketing Excellence.”

The post Eight Steps to Creating Extraordinary Content appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/eight-steps-creating-extraordinary-content/

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Even Better Strategies for Measuring Mobile App Success

When Facebook first rolled out to the public back in September 2006, it was pretty green — in fact, we were all a little green. Yet, success was instantaneous, and the platform’s user base grew exponentially practically overnight. Analysts used the growing number of people active on the platform as a measure to guide strategy and future success.

But failing to properly align your strategy with the right insight — not using the right metrics, measures, and key performance indicators (KPIs) — can have a negative impact. Facebook quickly learned that, despite a staggering user base, misaligned metrics were demonstrating a false positive. Analysts knew how many people were using the platform, but they didn’t know the actual value of each user, which mattered — quite a bit, actually — as lack of insight at this level meant they were unable to monetize properly. Eventually, they discovered they were ineffectively targeting mobile, but no one knew it.

In the developing world, where many potential users only had connectivity via their mobile devices, the platform was earning a measly 32 cents per user in 2012. With an almost saturated market elsewhere, it was critical for Facebook to focus on this segment. When analysts learned that one of their KPIs was making money through mobile, they shifted focus, and the metrics started to make business sense. With this information, Facebook was able to begin optimizing to boost key mobile metrics and effectively quadrupled this segment’s value within a span of three years.

Four Strategies for Measuring Mobile App Success
Let’s assume that you’re not just doing mobile simply because everyone else is, but that you realize it’s a strategic business enabler. What now? It’s time to dig deep to develop your mobile app strategy, understand its place and value in reaching your business goals, and design KPIs that are aligned with those imperatives. Facebook’s ‘strategy conundrum’ isn’t rare, but it can be avoided. Here are four strategies for measuring mobile app success in relation to your business goals.

1. Think More Broadly About KPIs.
Every mobile app campaign is unique, and KPIs vary significantly not only by industry, but also by the stage of the customer journey in which you want to drive insight and action. Traditional metrics have their place, but it makes sense to think more broadly about KPIs in terms of how they roll into your overall marketing strategy or strategic imperative and then create more granular KPIs to reach those imperatives.

Decide which broad KPIs to target based on your business goals. For example, if your goal is to increase revenue, look at how your mobile app is driving net new revenue. What growth opportunities are available? Are there new markets or customer segments that could help drive that revenue growth? If brand building is the goal, think awareness or loyalty. Are the right audiences using your products?

Then, look at how these broad goals can be broken down into more specific and tangible KPIs to measure their success. Lifetime value is a KPI associated with the goal of obtaining new revenue growth. Intention as a KPI addresses brand loyalty. Other KPIs include average revenue per user, daily active users, and monthly active users, among others. The key is to think broadly — to understand the context of KPIs within the framework of strategic imperatives and then match specific KPIs accordingly.

But, be careful that you test to understand whether these KPIs are effectively giving you the insights you need. For instance, on your website, average time spent onsite could indicate deeper engagement and content relevancy; however, a longer average time spent on your mobile app could indicate that your user is stuck and, thus, frustrated. If your customers are consistently lingering on a specific app task, it may indicate a problem.

2. For Accurate Insights, Take Your Mobile App Strategy out of the Silo.
It’s important to track success across the entire mobile app lifecycle — acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention. But, it’s just as important to understand, analyze, and drive insight from your customers’ end-to-end multichannel journeys. More than the mobile app lifecycle, your strategy needs to look at mobile in its entirety and within the context of a much larger, multichannel approach that includes traditional mobile web, desktop, and even the Internet of Things, when applicable. Take your mobile app strategy out of the silo and obtain a more reliable, big-picture view.

For example, without looking at a specific customer’s or segment’s entire journey with your brand, it may seem that an in-app message announcing a new item isn’t receiving engagement and, therefore, isn’t resonating with your audience to drive revenue. The reality may be that those same users have already received a similar promotional email and perhaps even purchased the product as a result. By looking at the entire customer journey across channels and devices, you can better measure what’s working and what’s not to drive revenue and achieve your business goals.

3. Create Custom Metrics to Better Serve Your Needs.
Mobile apps and their usage are extremely contextual, making it easy to create some pretty specific KPIs that align with business objectives. For example, it’s easy to determine whether an app was downloaded but never opened or if a cart was abandoned. But remember, KPIs are assessment tools to measure how well your mobile app is helping to progress your business goals. So, when developing KPIs, always start with your business goals and create your KPIs around them. Custom KPIs can be derived from or calculated by combining simple metrics into a unique, standalone formula.

In this process, there’s one important distinction to keep in mind: all KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. Metrics measure the health of your marketing activities, but KPIs are directly aligned to your business goals, informing you if you’re moving the ball in the right direction relative to your strategic imperatives. In Facebook’s case, their initial metric was number of users, but their business goal was to monetize their efforts, not to show how popular the platform was. So, the true indicator of success was not number of users, but rather, their metrics surrounding mobile, as this was where they could determine whether they were properly monetizing the platform. By tying their metrics to their business goals, they created KPIs that truly indicated whether the platform was successful from a business perspective.

With the right tools and capabilities, it’s possible to reach fairly granular levels of customization and segmentation that can provide even more insight into which metrics are true indicators of business success and how you can optimize your app to boost those numbers.

4. Focus on Your Customer to Build Long-Term Value.
Is it possible to measure how effectively your app is meeting customer expectations? Are you designing your app to deliver the best experience possible by reducing fields or making rewards easier to use? Take advantage of great mobile and omnichannel analytics solutions to help answer these questions. Simple, intuitive insights into customer touchpoints along the journey can help you measure customer experience and attribution. Understanding dissatisfaction, and then taking marketing action, places the focus on the customer, improving customer experience and building long-term value.

Here’s a great example. National Australia Bank is recognized as a leader in digital strategy with a robust, multichannel marketing group that includes mobile. Through customer-journey analysis, they noticed an abrupt drop-off at a certain stage for users who were trying to navigate the application process for loan approval. Once they identified where the fall-off was happening, they were able to attribute it to a small glitch in a smartphone platform. By placing the focus on the customer, they identified and fixed the problem, improving the customer journey, streamlining the loan-approval process, and increasing revenue potential via the mobile app channel by nearly 600%!

Final Thoughts
Driven by a misinformed, misaligned strategy, mobile app metrics can become nothing more than vanity, creating false positives and leading to inaccurate conclusions about where your strategy is headed. Establish thoughtful KPIs that are aligned to your business objectives and identify metrics that will best represent those KPIs. Take the time to better align your mobile app strategy with insight, think broadly, get out of the silo, and drive the end-to-end multichannel insight necessary to achieve your higher level corporate and strategic imperatives.

The post Even Better Strategies for Measuring Mobile App Success appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/even-better-strategies-measuring-mobile-app-success/

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Building a Knowledge Centre for Your Brand

Pinterest add ad groups to their ad platform for better organisation

Chart of the Day: 42% of marketers are planning on increasing the amount of time they dedicate to Pinterest

This week, Pinterest have announced the addition of ad groups to their ad platform for marketers to better organise their sponsored pins. For anyone familiar with Google Adwords or Facebook Advertising it always felt strange that Pinterest didn’t have the ability to arrange their campaign into ad groups. This development shows how Pinterest is trying to capitalise on the interest in the network from marketers by having familiar features. A lower bar to entry for a marketer to get up and running quickly will ensure that they at least give the platform a fair chance to prove its worth.

This announcement is interesting when you consider the charts below from the Social media marketing report from Social Media Examiner. The report showed that there is an eagerness from marketers for the platform with 45% wanting to learn more about the platform. Also by launching updates to the Ad platform for marketers rather than new features for the everyday user they are showing a commitment to increase their revenue by capitalising on the 42% of respondents who plan on increasing their marketing activities on the network. With 150 million users a month, the potential is there for brands to achieve a good level of ROI from any activity.

Social Media Platforms Marketers Want To Learn About

How will marketers change their future Pinterest activities?

• Source: Social Media Marketing Report
• Respondents: 5,086 Marketers
• Recommended toolkit: Social Media Marketing toolkit

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-platforms/pinterest-add-ad-groups-ad-platform-better-organisation/

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11 quick digital marketing fixes every small business or startup needs to know in 2017

How to avoid the costly mistakes that plague small businesses

So… you’ve started your new business or start up and 2017 is going to be your year! But not wishing to dampen your enthusiasm there are several small business marketing mistakes that can lead to your untimely downfall. To help you prevent this We’ve put together a special guide for small business andstart-upss highlighting the common mistakes not to make this year.

Digital marketing excellence isn’t just for big business. In our guide to small business digital marketing mistakes we’ve noted the top 11 digital marketing mistakes that are commonly made by small business.

The guide contains not only highlights the mistakes, but also gives actionable recommendations to help you fix the issues. Our top 10 covers all stages of the RACE digital marketing planning framework so you can easily add them to your digital marketing plans in 2017. Here’s an exclusive peep into what’s inside…

Mistake #1: You don’t have a written digital marketing plan

A staggering statistic - according to our latest research 50% of business don’t have a written digital plan. Admittedly most small business owners are too focused on running the business but it doesn’t have to be that way. #2. You are not doing market or competitor researchUnderstanding your market and the competition is a crucial business activity for any small business, startup or entrepreneur. Are you doing it? #3 You want to be No1 in search engine results A common mistake that often results in palm face with digital marketers. Many small businesses have unrealistic expectations about the time and return on investment from marketing particularly SEO. Times have changed a lot, get with it by avoiding outdated SEO tactics that can land you in hot water. There are many ways to improve your visibility through an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Mistake #2. You are not doing market or competitor research

Understanding your market and the competition is a crucial business activity for any small business, startup or entrepreneur. Are you doing it? #3 You want to be No1 in search engine results A common mistake that often results in palm face with digital marketers. Many small businesses have unrealistic expectations about the time and return on investment from marketing particularly SEO. Times have changed a lot, get with it by avoiding outdated SEO tactics that can land you in hot water. There are many ways to improve your visibility through an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Mistake #3 You want to be No1 in search engine results

A common mistake that often results in palm face with digital marketers. Many small businesses have unrealistic expectations about the time and return on investment from marketing particularly SEO. Times have changed a lot, get with it by avoiding outdated SEO tactics that can land you in hot water. There are many ways to improve your visibility through an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Mistake #4 You don’t have a Business listing on Google Maps, Apple Maps Connect or Bing Places

A Google My Business profile is an essential for local businesses and SEO. It’s free and will enable you to appear in local search results for searches specific to your products or services. Go the extra mile with Apple and Bing listings. We’ll show you how. #5 You spend more time on Social Media than your website.

Mistake #5 You spend more time on Social Media than your website.

Yup it’s the classic social media marketing faux pas - trying to be active on too many social media platforms or the latest shiny new one. Another common mistake is focusing on the wrong platforms. Use our guide to manage your social media activity effectively and with business goals in mind.

Mistake 6# Your website sucks or you don’t have one.

Many small businesses start out with websites built by their big brother in the spare bedroom. Don’t do it, just don’t, full stop. Your website is the content hub for all your online goals.

Mistake #7 Not making the most of email marketing

So you think email is dead and your last disastrous email campaign open rate confirmed it. With 92 percent of online adults using email, and nearly two-thirds (61 percent) using it every single day, email marketing is still the main component of any effective marketing campaign. Get the basics right. #

Mistake #8 You’re Not Optimised for Mobile

How often do you search the web or buy products on your phone? According to researchers mobile digital media time in the US is now significantly higher at 51% compared to desktop (42%). The statistics are crystal clear, the world is moving towards semantic, mobile and voice search and so don’t be left behind.

Mistake #9 Doing nothing to build links to your website

Unfortunately, many small business owners build a website then completely ignore the ongoing SEO and inbound link building process. While link building can be time-consuming and confusing to some small business owners there is little doubt that if your goal is to improve your online visibility, you needinbound links and quality ones at that.

Mistake #10 Spending too much time on brand or website perfection instead of clear positioning, messaging and a compelling story

Too many startups obsess over their product development, brand name, website too early aiming for perfection. We’ve got news for you - sorry, nobody is that bothered. Investing in perfection too early in terms of your brand assets will lead down the yellow brick road to a waste of budget. BONUS #11 You don’t have Google Analytics set up.Sadly, very common for small businesses. If you don’t track results, you really don’t know what’s working for you - fact. At the very least have a basic analytics dashboard setup. Stop whistling in the wind. Download our guide to learn more.

Mistake #11 You don’t have Google Analytics set up.

Sadly, very common for small businesses. If you don’t track results, you really don’t know what’s working for you - fact. At the very least have a basic analytics dashboard setup. Stop whistling in the wind. Download our guide to create data and performance driven analytics dashboards and KPIs for your small business.
Do these mistakes ring any bells? How many on this checklist make you want to say ‘guilty m’lord’ Want some quick fixes that make it a super 2017 for marketing your SaaS, retail business or start up in the New Year? You’ll find solutions to your marketing aches and pains from Smart Insights expert membership. If you are looking to skyrocket your business in 2017 get actionable digital marketing advice on what really matters.

Thanks to Yvette Bordley for sharing her advice and opinions in this post. Yvette (aka Webyogi) is a highly experienced digital marketing consultant who believes in integrating online marketing into a strategic digital marketing plan through the RACE framework. She mentors budding entrepreneurs, through the Entrepreneurs Academy, creates digital strategies for small business and startups worldwide and also provides digital marketing training. Yvette loves mindfulness, yoga, vegan banoffee pie & people who smile quite a lot. You can follow Webyogi on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

from Blog – Smart Insights http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/11-quick-digital-marketing-fixes-every-small-business-startup-needs-know-2017/

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