VIDEO IN DIGITAL MARKETING

The Role of Video Content in Marketing Activities

As the digital marketing industry becomes an important part of business, finding ways to differentiate yourself from the competition will need to be an increasing focus. Interestingly, one of the most powerful and important mediums to accomplish this is the use of video marketing (Ali, 2017).  


  Scroll through any Facebook feed today and you’ll see videos where static posts and images used to be. Video is quickly becoming the preferred medium of communication by businesses and consumers alike – and for good reason. Video is a quick, easy, and effective way to convey information in a way that is multi-dimensional, interactive, and entertaining. According to CBO.me, live action ads are also more likely to be shared through social media outlets versus text based information. It's been recently rumoured that Facebook has updated its algorithm to favor video posts above all other types of content. A business now has the ability to reach a larger viewing audience by creating or sharing memorable or funny videos. Video ads and promotions will entice a person to an emotional response. Most often, a person will share information they identify with the most, allowing your business free exposure to a potential clients friends, family, and followers. If you haven’t gotten on the video bandwagon and are wondering if producing videos are really worth the effort, here are a few benefits that might help you to make your decision.

Video Content Promotes Brand Awareness

The sheer multidimensional nature of video in combining images, text, and audio allows for the quicker and more impactful communication of a message. It is easier for consumers to recall a video they watched (versus just a static image or text) – and when they remember your video, they remember your brand. In addition, people are much more likely to share a video within their social circles, especially if you are able to present information in an entertaining and engaging way. This increases your brand reach and extends the ‘life’ of a video much further than an image or text. It is worth noting, however, that people are much less likely to share an overtly ‘branded’ video – an ideal balance would be to make your video content as memorable and relatable as possible, while adding in nuances of company identity through colours, fonts, logos, and subtle script messaging. Eric Vidal, CMO at BMG, points out how today’s buyer puts the level of connection they feel with a brand over the function of the product when making a purchasing decision. Your product or service might be amazing, but you won’t maximize your reach without giving customers a reason to choose your brand. Storytelling is another one of the latest marketing trends. The art of storytelling is as old as humanity, and online video is the latest medium. Use video to tell the story of how your company got started. Here are some questions to ask yourself to get the creative juices flowing:

• What was my state of mind when I first got the idea for my business?
• What problem was I trying to solve when I first thought of my business?
• Who helped me in turning my idea into an actual business?
• How do I think my business is different than other businesses in my niche?
• What about my company has a direct positive impact on society?

The goal with a brand origin story is to show your roots. It helps build a connection that primes leads for conversion. Wrap it up with a strong call-to-action and put it on a landing page. Also, studies have shown that videos generate more trust in customers than blocks of text or infographics. This makes sense intuitively, since the production costs of a video would discourage a spammer or fly-by-night website from creating them.

Video Can Boost Your Website’s SEO

Simply the act of placing a video on a page in your website can boost its SEO ranking, regardless of content, as Google gives preference to websites that contain videos. This is especially true if you first post your video on Youtube and embed the video onto your website. In a more roundabout (but still effective) way, videos also cause users to spend more time on your page, thus signaling to Google that your site has quality content. This also contributes to boosting your SEO ranking. A word of caution, however – make sure that your embedded videos are not causing your website to lag while loading, as that is a surefire way to increase your bounce rate and negatively affect your SEO!

Video Can Increase Sales

Research has shown that consumers are much more likely to make a purchase after watching a video about the product. It is unclear as to exactly what it is about videos that increase sales, but it is likely a combination of factors. After all, videos are more attention-grabbing and thus more consumers may be aware of your product. Videos are also a great way to show the product in action and provide enough information to convince the consumers of their need for your product. When creating product-focused videos to increase sales, a good tip would be to try to pre-empt (and answer) questions which consumers may have about the product. In other words, use your video to overcome the barrier to purchase that consumers may have – and you’ll find a sale much more likely. Product demonstrations, FAQs, and product reviews are all great ways to use your video to increase your sales.  


  Over 50 percent of consumers look up a product on the Internet before they make a purchase. Consumers want to see how your product works so they can visualize it solving one of their problems. Your personality matters just as much as the functionality of your product. The more passion you convey in your video, the higher your conversion rate.

Dominate the Social Media space

According to TheMarketingScope.com, video dominated the social media landscape in 2017, and it shows no signs of slowing down in 2018 and beyond. Conduct an audit of all the social media profiles for your business. Which platform do you get the most engagement with your community? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat all have video in some capacity. One great way to use video on social media is to give consumers a behind-scenes-look at your brand. Have your employees do account takeovers to showcase their role within your company. Show the production process in action.  


  Improving trust and humanizing your brand can Increasing sales with video marketing isn’t always about generating sales directly from a video. Sometimes the goal is to improve trust and humanize your brand through transparency, which indirectly increases sales.

Conclusion

Videos are also able to make a compelling pitch more quickly than reading would. Instead of allowing the visitor to read or skim whatever part of the page they choose to, a video can be hyper-focused to get the specific points you need to get across as quickly as possible. So if you haven’t already started producing videos, give it a try and see what they can do for you! And if you’ve already dabbled in video-making, try experimenting with different video ideas and formats to make sure the effort you’re putting into making your videos is paying off in the best way possible! Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing and develop a great landing pages for your website? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

Marketing strategy defines success

Why Your Business Needs a Marketing Strategy

Regardless of whether you’re a new start-up or your company has been operating in the business arena for over twenty years, a solid plan is the basis lying behind any long-lasting success. In addition to careful financial planning and product development, it is crucial to create a detailed, comprehensive and thought-out marketing strategy. As regards to advertising, the lack of planning is not only costly, but also risky, leading to unpredictable circumstances. Below are the key potential outcomes that might happen to your company, if insufficient attention would be given to developing a marketing strategy.

Lack of market research leads to huge losses

Comprehensive industry research and market trends analysis are the cornerstones of any good marketing strategy. Without the in-depth research, you’ll just be wasting your ad budget on the wrong audience, using wrong marketing channels. Careful planning leads to the well-informed decisions, which are crucial for your business functioning. Strategy planning allows you to focus on your business goals: you can determine the best direction and avoid losing sight of your objectives. Apart from that, by outlining your objectives you can develop a timeline of tasks, milestones and deadlines you need to meet in order to fulfil your objectives. In that case, you and your team members will be held accountable for completing their tasks in a timely manner. The most famous example of the failure to implement sufficient market research is the Coca Cola’s commercial in Saudi Arabia. The company wanted to show how the drink helped people survive the hot weather common for that region:  
  However, the published advertisement turned out to be a real disaster, as Coca Cola did not take into account that Saudi Arabia is different from the rest of the world, as people there read from right to left. The wise advice for the businesses being in the midst of strategy planning process is to pay maximum attention to the accuracy and timeliness of the collected information prior to strategy implementation. Relying only on one source is not enough – 2-3 sources are the optimum amount to ensure the full reliability of obtained data. Market research plays a crucial role in marketing, as it allows to understand your customers better. By providing insights into clients’ behaviour, preferences, needs and wants, market research assists in developing the pathway of the future strategy planning and implementation. Understanding your audience makes the whole process easier, as you know who your customers are and what they prefer. Nowadays, it is a common trend for many start-ups to attempt to target as much customers as possible, paying little attention to audience segmentation. Is this a right strategy? Many businesses would say yes, as they believe – the more people you target, the more customers you can get. No, no, and again no! The important element of any market research is to understand who is that person you are targeting. Male or female? Teenager or retiree? Single or Married? What does he/she like? And many more questions that you need to answer before starting your planning. In the world of marketing, this is known as ‘creating customer persona’. Below we provide an example of the customer persona created by Brightspark Social Media, a digital marketing agency:  
  By outlining all the details including age, job position, preferred communication methods and the main needs and wants with regards to digital services, Brightspark Social Media is a successful business, as they know everything about their clients! Sounds great, right? Another interesting example of the detailed customer persona is presented by UX designer James Donovan. Just have a look at how real and holistic the customer persona is!  
  There is no fixed set of points that you have to include in your company’s customer persona. Are you opening a beauty saloon? Find out what beauty products your clients use; how often they go for haircut or manicure; what beauty pages they follow on Facebook. Are you starting a fast-food chain? Explore what the eating habits of your customers are: how often they eat; meat-lovers or vegetarians; prefer eat outside or order delivery? We can provide thousands example, but only you know your business better than anyone else! Take a piece of paper, describe your business in 5-6 points and start building your customer persona based on it. Surveys, interviews, and social media websites are also your best friends in this journey!

You can’t fix your mistakes if you don’t know what they are

Frequently, when you are in the process of implementing your marketing plan for a long time, the tasks become a daily routine and you go on auto-pilot without paying sufficient attention to your performance. Business in general, and marketing in particular, are the fast-changing environment, where the continuous updating of practices and methods used is vital for the company’s survival. This is particularly true for online marketing strategies, where trends that were popular just yesterday could be completely outdated for your audience tomorrow. The continuous evaluation of the performance is another important element of the marketing strategy implementation. Comparing the obtained results against set goals, milestones and competitors are necessary to ensure that work process is going according to the agreed plan. However, still keep in mind that making changes to the initial plan is acceptable and in some cases necessary, to ensure that only the best results will be achieved not only for marketing, but also beyond it. The famous example of the company that failed to keep up with the fast-paced technology trend is Kodak. Founded in 1988, the American technology company, Kodak, was built on the culture of innovation and change. Kodak held a dominant position in the photographic film at that time. Its tagline “Kodak Moments” was so popular that it was used for promoting various events.  
  Kodak's failure in 2000s was mainly due to their inability to recognize how powerful the threat of new technologies would be to their business. Although the company essentially invented the digital camera, it suppressed the technology out of fears it would threaten the revenues it made from traditional fil, however, Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm took advantage of it. The wise advice for businesses is to always be aware of the current and changing trends in the industry and market. Ranging from reading news to conducting surveys, the wide variety of research methods allows companies to continuously keep up with changes occurring in the business arena.

Insufficient attention to the details can cost you your credibility

Nowadays, businesses face a wide variety of marketing channels that they can use for advertising purposes, ranging from traditional methods, such as magazines and newspapers, to internet and mobile marketing. Thus, it is difficult to find a company that utilizes only one of those channels. A cross-channel marketing campaign is like a big machine – if one component isn’t working, the entire machine will fall apart. Despite being a whole, the clear outline of goals for each channel is crucial in order to keep the work process organized. For instance, when using both Linkedin and Instagram for digital marketing, businesses need to be aware that while Linkedin is more suitable for B2B conversion purposes, Instagram aims at establishing deeper relationships with existing clients. The bright example of how the inappropriate promotion through one of the marketing channels has affected the entire company’s image is Bloomingdale’s case on Twitter. The picture, which shows a man side-eyeing a woman, eerily reads: “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking.” Understandably, the horrific suggestion -- which falls under the message calling for alcohol-fueled date rape – resulted into disgust and contempt across social media.  
  Later, Bloomingdale’s apologized in 140 characters on Twitter, however, the Internet post left a significant impact on the customers’ perception of Bloomingdale brand image even after that.  

Conclusion

Not having an online marketing strategy makes achieving your business goals significantly harder, because you’ll just be implementing random non-related activities. It is like walking through the desert without ha ving a map or a compass. However, a detailed plan of action ensures that all the efforts, time and money that you invest on marketing your business are well-spent to produce the best results.

Thorough Market Research. Performance Monitoring. Attention to Details.

Three simple rules to follow and you can be sure that your online marketing strategies have a strong foundation, a constant control and a quick response to meet the changing requirements of the fast-paced business environment. Consider your marketing tasks as your building blocks vital for achieving the company’s major goal. Best digital marketing is more than just advertising: digital marketing is a science revealing the success secrets for your company. As any science, it takes time to learn – thus, be judicious in your planning and actions. Careful preparation and planning determines half of success. Take a deep breath and … are you ready? So, let’s start!

EMAIL MARKETING

Maximizing Your Email Marketing Potential

Most companies have some sort of email system set up. Maybe it’s a welcome email to people who have newly signed up with you, or a weekly email to tell your consumer database about your latest promotion. But are you doing enough to maximize on the full benefits of email marketing? Research has repeatedly shown that email marketing has among the highest ROIs of all the digital marketing channels. All you have to do is make sure you’re staying updated with the latest developments in the world of email marketing. Email marketing involves collecting email addresses from those who have purchased your digital products or who have expressed interest in your business. After that, you need to segment those email addresses based on each individual consumer's position in the sales funnel.  
  Email is almost 42 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping businesses acquire new customers (McKinsey). As explained by Ciked, unlike many other marketing opportunities, email marketing can provide businesses with various ways to target specific customers. To do this, make sure that your email marketing software allows for lead scoring. This will allow you to define various milestones or actions that a user exhibits through interactions within emails or your website. Once a user has met the criteria you have defined, then you can follow up with them with targeted messaging to further drive them down the funnel.

History of Email Marketing

Email celebrates its 46th birthday this year, let’s explore a bit more about it. According to Autopilothq.com, in 1971, the first email was sent through a network set up by the Department of Defense called ARPANET. The network was basically the foundation of the internet as we know it, and this first email send was one small step for inboxes, and one giant leap for email kind. ;) There’s a large gap in the history after that, since the internet was being built and email was primarily being used for inter-organizational communication. Fast forward to the 1990s. The internet started to catch on with the general public and AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail were introduced to the world. “You’ve got mail” became a thing, and digital marketers started to pay attention.

Few Interesting Facts and Tips to remember…

It has been proven by studies that emails with a personalized subject line are opened 27% more than emails with generic subjects. Simply putting the name of the recipient in the subject increases the open rate by nearly 16%. You can easily do this if you use an email service like MailChimp.  This personalized approach to emails improves the click-through-rate (CTR) by 14% and your conversions by 10%. Also, Wordstream reports: Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind only colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders. 86% of business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. CTRs are 47% higher for B2B email campaigns than B2C email campaigns. 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation. 56 percent of brands using emoji in their email subject lines had a higher open rate, according to a report by Experian. Tuesday is the best day of the week to send email (according to 10 email marketing studies). As stated by Arcalea, email marketing is extremely effective in generating customer interest. When implemented correctly, a newsletter is cost-effective, fast, and simple way to keep customers informed on (and excited about) new product launches or new promotions.  
  Email marketing has greater chances of being noticed, compared to the social media updates where they can miss out announcements and just scroll up their news feeds. With a few clicks, emails can be sent to the thousands of users. Those users are free to read at their own convenience- whether online or offline.

Make Sure Your Email System Has a Mind of Its Own

Automation, segmentation, and personalization are all current buzzwords in email marketing. As digital technology advances, email systems are programmed to predict consumer behavior based on actions they have taken or where they are on their consumer journey. They can then use that data to make sure that the right emails are sent to the right people, at the right times. Setting up these email systems does take time and effort, but mostly in the beginning as you teach your email system what you would like it to do. After that, you should theoretically be able to sit back as it does the work for you: automatically adding and moving your consumers into different segments based on their actions, and sending them emails that are personalized to their needs at any given time. This helps to build relationships with your consumers and keeps an open channel of communication going without a lot of manual effort on your part.

Make Your Emails Interactive

It used to be impossible to add elements other than text to emails without making them chunky in size and slow to load. However, that’s not true today. Images, GIFs, even videos, are all currently easily compressed and embedded into emails without compromising the user-friendliness of the email itself. Use this to your advantage and incorporate design elements, images, and movement to capture your readers’ attention and highlight the most important aspects of the email. Make sure to include clear call-to-action buttons to encourage further action after the email is opened.  
  It is also important to make sure that all your emails and visuals are mobile optimized, given how heavy mobile use is in the community today. The effort you put into copy and design would be wasted unless your consumers find it easy to access and use.

Make Your Emails Worth Opening

Ensuring you are sending quality emails that are giving people value – whether it be in the form of information, offers, or entertainment – is crucial to a long-term email marketing strategy. The more people are convinced that they are benefiting from opening your emails, the more likely they are to continue to open them, and to encourage their social circles to sign up and open your emails too. Be sure to study consumer data and take note of the types of emails that do the best for your business. Think also how best to tailor your email to what the consumer needs at any given point in their journey (e.g. a new buyer could benefit from an email giving suggestions about using your product, while a lapsed buyer might benefit from a discount coupon enticing them to return to make a purchase). You can then automate these emails using your email system. And lastly, don’t discount the value of a good subject line that is catchy but to-the-point! Use more interactive elements such as emoticons and language that is easy to understand at a glance.

Conclusion

Email is a big part of our lives as professionals and individuals, and, even consumers. Think about this, how many people do you know without an email address? Millions and millions. According to Radicati Group, more than 3.7 billion people worldwide use email. That’s almost 54% of the world’s population! Data from Pew Research also shows that 92% of adults use email, and 61% of these email users are checking and sending emails on an average day. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

Does social media marketing require IT knowledge

Does social media marketing require IT knowledge?

I have to answer with a resounding YES! But not for the reasons you might expect. As others have pointed out, the average daily duties of a social media marketing manager don't require you to have even remotely the same skills as anyone working in IT. You can totally get by in social media marketing without having any IT skills. However, I did say, you can "get by." Having these skills can be a HUGE asset! The IT skills are super useful in many ways: Buying Social analytics & management tools. When we are researching which tool a client should use for social media data analytics or as a dashboard for responding to posts on Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc, we know when the vendor is lying about limitations imposed by Facebook's API, and can infer what is really going on, how likely they are to fix (or be able to fix) problems with the tool, etc. This helps us (and our clients) avoid potential problems with these tools that someone without the same knowledge might miss. Building social analytics reports and platforms. We have a lot of knowledge in-house on how to build custom social media reports using API calls and even built our own in-house SMM analytics tool that automates a ton of weekly and monthly reporting that we used to have to do manually in Excel. Even back then we utilized Excel "personal" spreadsheets to easily store and run macros we created in-house to automatically create graphs from the KPI's we wanted to measure and copy them into Powerpoint decks. The sheer amount of work we were able to automate has allowed us to remain a small team without relying on freelancers, and to spend our social media reporting time focused on what happened, why and what our clients should do as a result, rather than on manually building graphs.  
  Understanding our clients better. Many of our clients are technology companies. Having a deeper level of understanding as to how their products work makes us more effective at working with them. As Reem already mentioned, people's assumptions about consumers are often incorrect. To really understand your online social communities, you need to analyze the social behaviour data to learn more about them, so having the knowledge to easily build social media reports for whatever information you want or need without having to spend hours every week in Excel just building the graphs before you can even begin working on actually analyzing them is a valuable skill to have. Again, you don't necessarily have to have these skills to work as a social media marketer, nor will most positions expect you to have them, but they most certainly are a great value add for anyone who might employ you, giving you a leg up that most of your competition just won't have. Also, just because no one expects you to have these skills doesn't mean your agency/client-side employer doesn't still need them. Your lacking these skills just means they also have to hire someone else who does have these skills to support you, or pay a third-party for the social media analytics tools that can save you time, but cost your employer money. Or, even worse (for you), it means you have to go without them entirely, and lose out on the time saving benefits that those skills could have brought you. This means you end up spending more time grinding away on busy work, rather than providing value for your employer/clients. That's another great reason to learn these skills. Not only does it make you more valuable to brands and agencies, but it can also help you learn to automate tasks and save yourself time. If you're spending less time on building graphs on social media behavior and more time on analyzing them and understanding the what, how, why, when, and who of what happened, and what needs to happen next as a result, then you're going to be more effective at your job because you're spending more of the portion of your time devoted to social media analytics on providing value, rather than spending more of that time on busy work that gets you to the point where you can finally start providing value.

Other important skills to have

According to SproutSocial, there is a number of other important and useful skills that social media executive and / or manager must possess: Community Management. One of the core foundations of what social media was built on is being inherently “social.” This means that establishing and building a digital relationship is still a treasured attribute. Community management refers to being able to navigate the online sphere of promoting your brand while engaging with your customers. It can mean slowly converting an observer into a customer by patiently answering questions. It can also be demonstrating what your customers are talking about when they post on social media.  
  Sales and Customer Service. If your sales and marketing funnel involves social media like it should, you’ll find that sales leads inevitably fall into your inbox. Make the sales lead transfer as seamless as possible by asking for the information upfront instead of making them email you. When 34.5% of customers prefer social media as their customer care option, you need to be able to navigate the ‘flow’ of the customers. Being able to provide empathetic care in a short, digital format is different from face-to-face customer service. The social media manager should be able to clearly articulate solutions for the customer while making the customer feel heard. Besides, Hootsuite states, understanding the link between search engine optimization (SEO) and social media reach can be confusing. Google suggests that social signals do not overtly affect your SEO rankings, but the full picture is more complicated. Content that has a high social reach and gets lots of shares, likes, and comments is likely going to get similar engagement metrics that will be read by Google’s algorithm and positively impact your rankings. This is a correlation rather than a causation, so while you do not want to build your social media plan around SEO, it is a great idea to know the common mistakes that social media managers often make. Luckily, there are some great SEO tools out there. LSI Graph will identify relevant keywords and phrases according to what has been searched on Google along with your main keyword.  
  Apart from that, some video content creation skills are important. Video content is unquestionably an important way to reach your audience. Over 500 million people are watching video on Facebook every day, according to Cisco’s research into global IP video traffic. And few years from now, video content is poised to account for 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic. Social media managers need the abilities to create compelling content for platforms like Instagram Stories, Facebook Live broadcasts, and Snapchat Stories. And with all these options, you will also need to know how to optimize your video for all of your different social media marketing channels.

Conclusion

One of the main advantages of social media for businesses is that it enables you to interact with your potential and existing customers. Social networks provide the opportunity to start a conversation with your consumers and deliver the right marketing message to the right individual. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Social Media Marketing ? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR MILLENNIALS

MILLENNIALS | HOW TO REACH YOUR AUDIENCE THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

  One of the main advantages of social media for businesses is that it enables you to interact with your potential and existing customers. Going through the tweets and Facebook status updates that are posted by your customers gives you insights into what they need. This is important for helping your company formulate marketing strategies that address their needs. Social media makes the process of providing and receiving feedback easier. If your customers have concerns with what your company offers, they can let you know in a timely manner. Social media gives clients a convenient and accessible way to express what they feel and gives businesses a chance to respond. With such platforms, businesses are able to monitor complaints and ensure their customers that their problems will be coped with. Social networks provide the opportunity to start a conversation with your consumers and deliver the right message to the right individual. To market towards multiple demographics takes great powers of empathy – and a deep knowledge of how different types of people interact with the digital world. You need to know how different demographics use digital, and how they experience it. Today, we will have a look at millenials: who are they? What do they like? What can we do?

MILLENIALS: HOW ARE THEY?

 
  In October 2004, researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss called Millennials "the next great generation," which is funny. They define the group as "as those born in 1982 and approximately the 20 years thereafter." In 2012, they affixed the end point as 2004.

Curiosity

Millennials are a curious generation. They are excited to learn new skills, and are willing to invest the time in becoming better employees. Just take a look at the trillion-plus dollars in student loan debt millennials are willing to take on in order to expand their minds.

Tech-savvy

We are all surrounded by technology and millennials spend 5-10 hours a day consuming copious amount of online content. So creating a brand experience within this digital world with relevant content is the first step in captivating this generation.

Advice-Seekers

Millennials unfortunately don’t trust a brand’s message. When deciding what to purchase, this demographic seeks opinions of friends, family members, or even strangers before making purchasing decisions. It’s important to rebuild trust with relevant content and user-generated content.

MILLENNIALS: MARKETING PREFERENCES

According to Geneca, millennials are all about experiences. Everything we do, buy, or eat, all stems from the experience we get from it (FYI this is why we post everything we do on social media-we like to share our experiences with others). So, if you want to be noticed by the millennial group, interact with us by creating an experience for us! A great way to gain brand recognition with millennials is to have live events that we can be a part of. 78% of millennials are more likely to follow or take part in a brand when the company puts effort into implementing face-to-face interactions. For example, Dove engaged their audience by putting on experiential marketing for their ‘Choose Beautiful Campaign’, and Coca-Cola connected with millennials through their ‘Coke Hug Me’ campaign, which advertised a free coke to anyone that hugged a vending machine.  
  Millennials need to see your company as a professional industry with stability and growth potential, but if we have learned anything about this generation, it is that they want to love and have fun with what they do. Think about it this way, give your company the mullet haircut! Just like the mullet, business in the front and party in the back, you want your company to also have a fun/party side! By having a presence on Snapchat and Instagram, you can connect and show millions of millennials what your company can truly offer them. Almost half of the Snapchat audience are millennials. They consume about 30 minutes of content every day on Snapchat. This will give you a chance to interact with millennials by capturing events, sharing different promotions, or giving your followers an exclusive sneak peek behind the scenes of your culture.

FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM OR MAYBE YOUTUBE?

Useful Insights by MarketingProfs.com 

Consumers see social media as creating more accountability for brands in a number of ways, including by uncovering unfair treatment (80%), giving consumers power (75%), encouraging transparency (70%), amplifying issues (65%) and helping employees share experiences (55%). Although Facebook is the most popular social network across generations, it is not as dominant with younger people as it is with older ones, according to recent research from Sprout Social. The report was based on data from a survey conducted in January 2017 of 1,000 Millennials (age 18-34), Gen Xers (age 34-54), and Baby Boomers (age 55+) in the United States. Some of 65% of Gen Xers as well as Baby Boomers say Facebook is their favorite social network. Facebook also ranks as the most popular social network with Millennials (33% of them cite it as their favorite). However, Instagram (22% of Millennials rank it as their favorite) and Snapchat (16%) have much more Millennial fans than they do older ones.  
  The youngest set of Millennials surveyed (age 18-24) rank Instagram as their top network (25% cite it as their favorite), just ahead of Facebook (24%) and Snapchat (23%). Respondents across all three generations are more likely to pick YouTube as their favorite social network over Twitter or Pinterest.

MILLENNIALS: WHAT CAN WE DO?

If your small business isn’t on a social media platform, you will need to be on one to market millennials. In fact, we’d recommend you get on more than one platform. Your social media presence is where your business can easily connect with your target audience. It’s where they spend a large portion of the day and where they go for information. Millennials grew up always being connected and building relationships with people through social networks. So, when they look for a brand or business to buy a product from they are also looking to build a relationship with that business. Insightful posts, product recommendations, useful information about your business and your product will help your brand build that important relationship. When reviewing your social media accounts in order to attract millennials to your business make sure you have a clear and developed brand personality. Express your personality by posting interesting and engaging information on your social accounts multiple times a week. Post videos of your product in use or testimonials on how people (particularly other millennials) have benefited your business. Also, engage with your customers, to show millennials coming to your pages that you can form a relationship. Engagement consists of answering your followers’ comments, sharing their posts, and asking questions to welcome feedback.  
 

CONCLUSION

Besides knowing what social networks your audience uses, it is also helpful to discover their interests outside of the industry that you are serving. This used to be a very difficult thing to do, but now that everybody’s interests are plastered all over social media, as well as the sites that they frequent, the data is there if someone is aggregating it. Fortunately, Google Analytics makes the data pretty easily available by enabling their demographics feature. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Social Media Marketing? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!  

With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!

SEO: Best Examples

Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices & Examples

“On a broad scale I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the same way TV, radio, and print are traditionally thought of as marketing tactics.” © Duane Forrester The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices are vital in order to survive in the modern competitive business world. To stand out of the crowd, businesses all over the world need to put enormous efforts by developing a comprehensive thought-out strategy, taking into account the company’s major goals, preferences of targeted audience, and ‘rules’ of search engines. Today we will introduce to the key benefits of SEO for business, best examples of optimized websites and present few very interesting statistics. Let’s get started!
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Key Benefits of SEO practices

SEO Helps You Stand Out from Your Competitors

On the first page of a SERP (search engine results page), there are up to six paid positions, three map listings, and 10 organic listings. If you can align your keyword strategy to appear in a paid listing, a map listing, and an organic listing, you’re increasing your likelihood of a site visit and decreasing the likelihood of a searcher clicking to visit your competitors.

Take Your Business to the Next Level

SEO can bring it thousands upon thousands of visitors to your website a day. This may put your company in a position of needing to expand to a larger web server to accommodate the traffic and sales to your website. Your customers may recommend you a product or service that they were looking for when they visited your website. SEO is a really great investment for your company and could be what you need to take it to the next level.

A Good SEO Strategy Enhances PPC Quality Score

We all know how important Quality Score is for PPC campaigns. But, did you know that Quality Score and the content on your website go hand-in-hand? A good SEO strategy includes creating pages on your website for your products and services and using relevant keywords through your site. By aligning your text ad messages to the content on your website or driving PPC traffic to relevant landing pages (like a page for a specific product or service), you can improve your Quality Score, which can, in turn, reduce your cost per click and improve the performance of your pay-per-click advertising.

SEO Boosts the Effectiveness of Your Other Marketing Efforts

Because of an increased market share in SERPs (search engine results pages) with SEO, you can boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts like PPC and retargeting. For example, coupling SEO and search advertising can improve traffic by 50%. Coupling SEO and retargeting can increase brand awareness. You can also use the insights from your SEO strategy to fine-tune your PPC campaigns – if you have keywords that are performing well for your organic search, you can add those to your PPC campaigns and test whether or not performance improves.

The Results are Low Cost

Organic listings are essentially free. When you are listed at the top, you don’t need to pay per click or allocate a budget for business advertising, one of the main benefits of SEO is that it is the gift that keeps on giving. With a little bit of effort you can watch your website get consistent traffic. You don’t have to pay $10 for every person who clicks on your ad. Unlike pay-per-click advertising, your traffic will not drop to nothing when it stops. SEO gets rid of the need to have thousands of ads across the web. _________

3 Great Examples of Best SEO Practices

Have a look and get inspired by new ideas!

Cloudbakers

 
  Cloudbakers, optimizes SEO through a strong homepage. The page contains a strong call to action (CTA) as well as keyword links that link to content on their other pages. This design gives the company more opportunities for their site to be found by providing specific keywords that are easy to locate because of their page placement and will increase page ranking in results. Why it's exceptional:

• Direct call to action: "Talk to someone who does"
• Secondary call to action: The three thought bubbles below the main CTA link directly to their products page, allowing the user to learn more information if they're not ready to talk to someone, as suggested by the primary CTA.

MULESOFT

 
  Marketing campaigns often create a big bang, but they all too often lose momentum and fizzle away. MuleSoft, an integration software company, recognizes that sustainable and impressive results come not only from campaign activity, but from the continual application of technology and continued iteration of marketing best practices. Still, easier said than done. To keep campaign momentum going, MuleSoft’s digital marketing team invested in a smart integration strategy, achieving great results when all of their digital channels where working together. For starters, their SEO team altered their metadata structure and audience segments, resulting in a hefty increase in organic traffic to their website. Their marketing leads instituted real-time personalization, and their social team increased revenue a whopping 115% through expanding Account Based Marketing (ABM) efforts. They also prioritized creating a top lead-converting asset by recycling old assets into a long-form book. The results? You guessed it: stellar sales and revenue performance. In addition to killing their integrated marketing game, they also aren’t afraid to go behind-the-scenes and write about their culture, too. Don’t miss one of our favorite blog posts: Putting our culture of innovation into practice. Why it's exceptional:

• Good H1 tag: "Transform your business with API-led connectivity"
• Very prominent call to action: "Get Anypoint Platform"

Mouseflow

 
  Another strong example of SEO success would be Mouseflow, a tech company that uses an online customer tracking heatmap software that facilitates a clear analyzation of a user’s online experience. The Mouseflow home page has strong on-page optimization, with a clear and relevant H1 tag along with an effective call to action. The page is full of relevant keywords which equate to higher SERP ratings. This provides an insightful framework that many other websites can follow in order to construct a SEO -friendly website. Why it's exceptional:

• Good H1 tag: "Do You Understand Your Visitors?"
• Good H2 (including bolded words) that also serves as a concise description of the product
• Eye-catching call to action (the video and also within the main navigation bar)

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Mind-Blowing SEO Statistics You Have Not Heard About!

•  Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day
•  50% of search queries are four words or longer
•  93% of online experiences begin with a search engine
•  The first organic search result will get nearly 33% of clicks
•  75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results
•  High-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website for search
•  Long-form content of over 1,000 words consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content
•  Marketers see SEO as becoming more effective, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise and 42% of this group stating effectiveness is increasing significantly
•  In 2018, the average firm is expected to allocate 41% of their marketing budget to online, and this rate is expected to grow to 45% by 2020

Conclusion

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial aspect of the company’s success in the online business world. Despite of the fact that SEO does not brings fast results, consider it as a long-term investment giving unbelievable ROI in the future. Highly-qualified SEO specialists are of a great demand nowadays, and our team members are those you are looking for! Do you want Blueninja.io to help you? We are waiting for your call! Our search engine opitimization (seo), social media marketing (smm), and search engine marketing (sem) services will help you to be on the first page of Google Search and social media network newsfeed! We are looking forward to meet you!

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

How Understanding Your Consumer Influences Your Business Success

Most companies start out with a general idea of their target consumer group in mind. Maybe your product is targeted at middle-aged working professionals, or busy mothers, or young male gym-goers. But how well do you actually know your consumer. According to GrowBusiness.org., knowing your customer is key for any company endeavor. Successful business owners understand what their customers want and the most efficient way of making their products available, both online and offline. The depth of the knowledge is vital as well – it requires knowing more than just their names, ages and incomes. As a business owner, knowing your customer’s preferences, tastes and interests along with what they watch, listen to and read can be a profitable advantage too.  
  There isn't a single "best way" to better understand your customer base. Instead of emphasizing on just one or two methods, find the right tools that provide you with information about your customers and lead to broader conversations about marketing and business choices. Understanding their buying behavior is also very crucial for developing successful digital marketing plan. As a business owner, you need to comprehend what type of person is most likely to need the product or service you offer. These are a number of questions that successful business owners need to ask themselves on a daily basis:

• What is their reason for purchasing your product or service?
• How often are they going to need to buy that product or utilize the service?
• Who are they buying for?
• Where are they most likely to purchase?
• Do they prefer digital (online e-commerce) purchasing options or traditional ones?

This is an area many businesses overlook, although it can have a huge impact on your business (digital) success, especially in the following areas:

Creating a Brand Identity

  Deciding who you are as a brand is greatly influenced by your target consumer group – and not just such Google Adwords demographics options, such as age and gender. You need to identify what your consumers’ lifestyles are like – what their hobbies are, the kind of food they eat, a typical day in their lives. You identify what they care about, the issues they face, and the solutions they seek. Then, you can use that information to shape your brand into an ideal that appeals to your target consumers, and create an image of a community that they want to be a part of. This brand identity will drive all communications with your consumers, in the ‘voice’ of your copy, or the style of your visuals. This will make your brand relatable to your target consumers in a much deeper way than a generic communication would be to a broad audience.

Developing New Products

  Every business needs a reason for their customers to buy from them and not their competitors. This is called a Unique Sales Proposition (USP). Your USP can be identified by completing the phrase "Customers will buy from me because my business is the only one offering... "Your USP can change as your business or your market changes, and you can have different USPs for different types of customer. Once you have identified the issues your target consumers face and the solutions they seek, you can then put this information into the development of new products, as well as the improvement of current products. By going into detail and understanding what your consumers care about, you can streamline your efforts to make sure that you are putting effort into something that will actually matter.  
  According to McKinsey.com, what Unilever, Philips, Amazon have in common, though, is that they drive growth by meeting consumer needs better than their competitors do. Core to this consumer focus is a strong belief in customer insights, and in the active use of a diverse mix of insight tools—new and old, qualitative and quantitative, digital and analog—to get better answers. Unilever, for example, has successfully engaged in consumer cocreation to launch TRESemmé, a fast-growing dry-shampoo brand that is now one of the best-selling mass hair-care products in the US. Philips has achieved major market-share gains in highly contested home-appliance categories through city-level growth analysis. Thanks to its data-driven recommendation engine, Amazon attributes more than one third of its revenue to cross-selling, and Netflix saw its subscribers triple between 2011 and 2015, largely because of its ability to develop hit shows such as House of Cards, based on advanced analysis of subscribers’ past viewing behavior. Developing a better understanding of customers is increasingly a strategic necessity, because fast-moving markets, new digital technologies, and new business models are changing what customers want and how they shop. Remember, you can’t be everything to everyone – so aim your resources towards meeting the needs of your target market, and let the other things go. For example, if you own a shoe company and find out that your target market consists of women who are on their feet all day, then it may be more important to prioritize the comfort factor of your shoe line, than to spend resources produce a wide variety of colour options for each design.

Creating the Best Customer Experience

  Understanding your target audience and their behaviors also allows you to meet their needs for a good customer and user experience, whether online or offline. If you are catering to an older population who may not be as tech savvy, making sure your website is clean, easy to navigate, and presents key information in an easy-to-understand manner is key. Conversely, a younger target audience may respond better to multimedia elements such as GIFs, videos, or an interactive 360-degree display of your product. You can also expand this to include perks or services that come with your products. For example, you could offer an extended return period if you’re targeting people who are not used to shopping online to reduce their feeling of risk. Or perhaps, you could include a free demonstration video for a product that is complex to use.  
  Whatever your business is, there is always a benefit to understanding your consumer and showing that you care for their needs as a brand. At the end of the day, your business can’t lose by having happy, loyal customers!

Conclusion

  The better you know your customers, the easier it becomes to predict their behavior, to communicate effectively with them, and to anticipate their needs. Understanding your customers allows you to create accurate customer personas, which helps you target your customers based on specific categories. Know your customers better because only they can help you get more lead and more business. Understanding customers is the key to giving them good service which in turn results into strong customer relationships both online and offline and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendation. However, understanding the customers’ psyche is not easy and most often requires a thoughtful analysis to identify their preferences or purchase patterns so that you can anticipate their needs, exceed their expectations and develop a thought-out marketing and digital marketing strategy. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

YOUR EFFECTIVE WEBSITE

HOW TO CREATE A HIGHLY CONVERTING WEBSITE

Introduction

Living in the modern digital world makes a website a necessity for a business, both for big and small. If you have a business and don’t have a website, you are most likely losing a number of great opportunities for your business. A website is used by businesses to accomplish a variety of different marketing strategies to help your business grow. The web has a significantly wider reach than any other form of modern advertising. Your website will be the center of your company`s online presence; through your website, you advertise your business around the Web on social networking websites, forums, as well as through pay-per- click advertising programs. Even the smallest business can utilize the power of the internet to be more efficient and to build revenue. Once you start thinking about it, it's easy to get excited about the potential for your website.  
  Simbla states, a website development tool provides companies with a podium for this necessary web presence and allows them to get in touch with millions of web surfers all over the world, widening the range of their potential customers. This doesn't just make the companies accessible, but accessible to the global population. It also gives businesses the chance to portray themselves in the ways they want to be seen, with a platform that's built on their terms and can effectively market the services or products that they offer. In addition, a website will make businesses look more reliable if they're represented in a professional way. To develop a website in accordance with specific criteria, the business can either hire a web developer or do it themselves by choosing from the best web development software, which will assist in creating polished websites. Today we will explore the effective ways of converting your website into the highly converting marketing tool.

Create Engaging Content

Most website owners create contents with a sole purpose to rank and get website traffic from search engines. Although optimizing your contents for search engines is important, you need to remember that search engines aren’t the one who buys products or services from you—the searcher or person does. According to Openvine, compelling content attracts visitors and leads them through the sales funnel. Gone are the days that potential customers call to get all of their information from you or someone on your sales staff. Savvy consumers now look to your website and to social media to learn about your products/services, to see comments others have made regarding your business or product, and to judge your credibility and expertise. The more informative, helpful web content you provide on a consistent basis, the better your chance of turning these visitors into customers. Here are some tips for creating great content for different mediums. Besides, the content on your website needs to be dynamic. According to Forbes, dynamic content is when the content that's displayed on your site changes based on who the visitor is. Usually, it's based on geography. For example, if someone is visiting from the U.S. during a national holiday, then your homepage would display products/services that relate to that holiday or would display a simple holiday greeting. A perfect example would be TripAdvisor. They display the name of the city, region or state on their homepage. For instance, their Restaurants tab displays the city that you are currently in and offers you the best restaurants in that city. The result is that the visitor identifies with the content more, has a better user experience and is more likely to buy your product if you’re using dynamic content. Omniconvert states that there are countless examples of websites that use dynamic content in order to personalize their user experience. For example, Booking.com implements this solution when displaying the number of visitors that look at the same listing at the same time, in order to increase the urgency. Here are some other examples:  
 
  Some common parts of text that can be transformed into dynamic content are the user's location, weather & temperature, system details. These are all pieces of information that can immediately be used even during first-time visits on the website. However, if the user has already been on the website and maybe has already created an account, other more specific data can be used to personalize the content such as name, gender, products that they visited, actions they previously made.

Great SEO Strategy

Forbes  explains, SEO focuses on making a site accessible to search engines for the purpose of improved rankings. CRO is the art of improving the user experience to get higher conversions. One discipline is geared towards search engines while the other is focused on users. Very few sites can successfully combine both to create a stellar site that provides a great user experience and also ranks highly on search engines. The secret is using SEO tactics to improve your conversion rate and to make your site searchable.  
  Optimizing your content for search engines is different from optimizing your content for conversions, but the results you achieve with one complement the results you reach with the other. While SEO/SEM helps you bring more traffic to your site, CRO helps you convert these visitors into leads and customers. Just driving more traffic to your site doesn’t guarantee more conversions. A CRO program complements the increase in traffic generated by an SEO program.

Effective Use of Call-to-Action Buttons

As stated by Blue Fountain Media, call-to-action buttons come in various of shapes and sizes – but all of the best ones offer an emotional trigger while standing in the contrast to the rest of the web page they are featured on. While CTAs are important, sometimes the actual emotional trigger that a CTA uses to be effective isn’t in the button – it’s in the copy that surrounds it. A great example of this idea in action can be found on Flex Studios’ website. Featuring scrolling background images, the page changes the text that accompanies each image while giving a consistent green CTA button with the copy “Book a Class”. What’s particularly interesting about this site is that each set of copy provides different emotional triggers that could feasibly interest someone enough to book a class. The initial copy focuses on highlighting Flex’s location in New York City’s Union Square, as their target customer is in that area. For the second image and batch of copy they focus on the three different workouts they offer in an effort to get users to see what different classes they could book by clicking on the call-to-action. Finally, they highlight their discount pricing for a first class.  
  In order to maximize your efforts and your CTAs, you need to use the kind of language, approach, and wording that captivates and engages your audience. Your CTAs mean the difference between whether your customer converts or clicks on the exit. A persuasive, compelling call-to-action can convince even the most hesitant prospect to convert, but there’s more to it than just a tempting offer — you have to speak your customers’ language.

Conclusion

Developing a well-designed, professional looking website will get your foot in the door of the online market, and give you a base from which to build your clientele. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Web design and Website Development? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article! With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!

Digital Tech Trends 2018

Technological Advances and Digital Marketing in 2018

Introduction The constant flow of technological progress means that digital marketing is always evolving to keep up. Today’s digital marketing tactics look completely different than they did five years ago – and it is likely they will look completely outdated by the time another 5 years go by. But for now, here’s how technology is currently impacting digital marketing – and what you have to do to keep up with the times. Forbes  has suggested a new term, known as Digital Marketing 4.0. The prior framework includes website traffic, email campaigns, digital advertisements, basic social media management and basic blog publishing. It only focuses on increasing visits to websites but has no focus on lead conversion and proper online lead qualification.  
  This most recent trends, though, include: Integrated Global Marketing: Inbound and outbound marketing should now be combined. In comparison to cold-calling, consider this "warm-calling." For instance, after someone reads a blog article on your website, follow it up with an email sharing more meaningful content. Omnichannel Marketing Strategy: This includes deep analytics and data mining, such as AI and machine learning. Omnichannel marketing brings a diversity in mediums when it comes to communicating your brand and value-add. Focusing only on one medium can be limiting, especially if your buyers don't exist on that channel. A Comprehensive Marketing Technology Integration: No one software tool can save the day. Marketing is not about the creative aspect alone anymore. Marketing technology infrastructure needs to be designed and integrated correctly. One social media tool alone will not save the day, nor will one CRM tool be the solution to a challenge anymore. Consider your full stack and how it can work together. Instant is the New Speed Gone are the days when web pages took 5 seconds or more to load. Technology and connection speeds have progressed to a point where everything is expected to be instantly available on-demand. To the younger generations especially, to be constantly connected to instant information is the norm. And, as they move up to fill more of the buying market, businesses will need to cater to diminishing attention spans to ensure they don’t miss out. Engage IT personnel to work on streamlining your website load speed and run frequent tests to ensure it falls within an acceptable range to avoid a high bounce rate. If you put out any content or communications, ensure they get to the point quickly to keep users engaged. Lastly, you can make use of the numerous “Live” channel features on social media to interact with your consumer base in an on-demand fashion.

Mobile Devices Take Over

According to BonsaiMediaGroup.com, with the mobile-first index due out on in early 2018, it’s no longer just competitive advantage to have a mobile-friendly, responsive site. Without the proper precautions and set up, your rankings and your business are sure to suffer. Over 60% of search is now mobile, and nearly 20% of mobile queries are voice searches, which means that your site needs to be mobile-friendly from both a search engines and a user’s perspective. Nowadays, the prevailing use of mobile devices is becoming a common trend. Search engines, social media  networks, online shopping websites, books, movies, and any sort of information are accessed with the use of smartphones, rather than desktops. Think about yourself: how often do you use your phone compared to PC? Yes, you get my point. Google is observing the rising number of mobile search enquiries since 2015, and now it is time to make changes. 2018 is announced to be a year, when Google will officially start to rank and index web pages based on mobile experience and its content, while desktop version will be a less influencing factor. You can find more information about Google Mobile Index in our article.  
    Smart phone evolution, ubiquitous Wi-Fi, and ever-increasing data allowances mean that people are constantly ‘plugged in’ and ready to receive information. 65% of all digital media time is spent on mobile devices – and yet, all too often mobile optimization is overlooked as a priority. Ensure your IT personnel are well-versed with mobile optimization in terms of design, as well as functionality and always test your website on various mobile devices (of different resolutions, screen sizes, display settings, and so on) to make sure that it looks good and is easy to use. Besides your website, don’t forget to mobile optimize the other communications you put out – whether it be ads, emails, articles, and so on. Who knows – as time goes on and mobile dependency gets higher, it is possible that the new norm will be to design for mobile, then optimize for desktop. From mobile-optimized pages to tailored mobile advertising, creating dedicated mobile marketing may seem time and resource-intensive, but it is an extremely worthwhile investment in 2018.

More Reliance on Artificial Intelligence

According to Mobilebusinessinsights.com, driving digital transformation is much more than managing the creation of a minimum viable product. The solution must also have the agility to support innovation going forward.\ The MarketingScope.com states that AI was in the headlines across business disciplines in 2018, from supply chain planning and finance to production and, of course, marketing. Average daily searches for the term doubled from January to December 2017, according to Google Trends. It’s not a tool itself, but AI technology is being applied to marketing tools like ad serving to help target ads more effectively; marketing automation software to personalize content; and analytics tools to find patterns at a speed and scale humans can’t match.  
  Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing every day to better understand human behaviors, interests, and thought processes. This is a benefit to both users and marketers, as AI is able to segment large audiences based on their characteristics and show them content that is relevant. On the user side, AI acts as a filter towards the huge amount of information out there, selecting and curating an experience for each individual according to their interest and behaviors. On the side of the digital marketers, AI is used to save costs by ensuring that marketing materials are shown only to the people most likely to be interested. Thus, in all your online marketing channels, make sure you are making full use of the AI available to segment your audiences and show them the most relevant content – whether it be based on their interests or by where they are in their journey through the buying cycle. This will enable you to meet their needs in a much more relevant and engaging way – a win-win outcome!

Conclusion

The evolution of technology is changing the way we form a digital marketing strategy. This creates a growing challenge for industry professionals to keep up with evolving trends, as well as find the best way to incorporate them into their marketing plan. Inspireinfosol.com states marketing is no more people-only driven, it is equally driven by technology. Having mentioned that, we support marketing function teams with technology that will ease analytics, provides insights, implements automation, lead generation, conversion optimization and branding. With marketing you would need help in either creating a digital collateral, system integration, implementation or analytics. The recent development in the marketing technology space is to be able to find the right resources for your business, network with and execute task-driven projects. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Digital Marketing? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, PWA System Development, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!

SEO BACKLINKING

SEO TIPS | LET’S TALK ABOUT BACKLINKING

Importance of SEO for businesses

With businesses that are ranking high organically, consumers and website visitors know that they have not just paid to be there like the businesses in the ad spots above them. They know that you are more likely to provide the solution that they are desperately searching for. Thus, SEO can be considered as one of the tools for earning customer trust and loyalty. The goal of any search engine (Google, Bing and others) is to deliver unbiased results that provide information you are looking for as quickly and as accurately as possible. In order to do this, search engines are capable of identifying all relevant information online and ranking them in order of their quality and relevance. Thousands of factors are involved when search engines rank sites in an organic search. Amazingly enough, they can analyze billions of pieces of data in as fast as a half of a second! The actions you take in order to optimize your website will have a direct effect on your SEO ranking. Components, such as H1 tags, the keywords used in your website meta description, content and keyword density, permalinks, and backlinks are some of many things that you can leverage to boost your ranking. Today we will have a closer look at backlinking and the effective strategies for your SEO activities.

What is Backlinking?

According to Scrunch, a backlink is the term used for a link that points to your website, whether it be to the homepage, a product page or another page. A backlink can come from your onsite blog, or it could be from an offsite destination, such as a blog, business directory, news website or industry resource.  
  Search engines, such as Google use search spiders to index all websites based on the quality of backlinks they have. When you build backlinks of a good quality, you drive more quality traffic to your website. As a result, you become more relevant in search queries and get higher ranking on SERPs. It is important to keep in mind that when search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site.

Quality Matters

A quality backlink originates from the relevant authoritative domains in your niche. If the site linking to your website has a high Domain Authority (DA) and has similar unique content, your backlink will be good for SEO. As mentioned by Seohermit, Google wants to see links coming from high-quality sites that are associated with the outbound link given. Therefore, if you have a link from a completely unrelated site, it won’t be as valuable as a link from the related website. For instance, if you are a carpet cleaning company and you are getting links from an internet forum about TVs, something would seem wrong and ‘unnatural’ to the search engines. Why would a forum discussing TVs want to link to your carpet cleaning company? It doesn’t make sense to users and it will not make sense to the search engines either.  
  Another factor to consider is diversity. Google likes to see lots of links, but not lots of links from the same domain. For example, if a website has 1,000 incoming links, but all originate from the same domain, those links will not improve the website’s rank as much as 1,000 links from 50 domains. Diversity is the key. Google is looking for lots of links that stem from many different domains, but even still, quality will outrank quantity every time.

Important Tips to Remember

You have to give websites a good reason to link to your posts. Relevant, authoritative, engaging and most importantly, unique content forms the backdrop of all inbound linking activities. Carefully go through your current website and develop a list of your most-read content and keyword phrases that bring in the highest website traffic level. You will use these as a springboard for your upcoming backlink development efforts. Guest posts enable you to add natural backlinks to your website from a wide range of sites. It takes time to develop quality content for other sites, so acquire good writing skills before preparing guest posts. Don’t repurpose existing content or use duplicate content; that can hurt both your SEO efforts and the website you are targeting.  
  In addition, the rising trend observed in backlinking practices is the use of Q&A websites for posting. Why? Nowadays, we can clearly see that there is a significant increase in the search volume of question queries, while at the same time a slight decrease in the search volume of generic primary keywords. Search engines have essentially become answer engines. Their job is no longer resource discovery, but rather to answer users' questions. Another evidence for this phenomenon, can be found in the fact that the traffic to QA and "how to" sites has been dramatically on the rise in the last 5 year. Using Compete comparison, we can see the yearly change among some of these sites (unique visitors):  
  Everyone wants better organic rankings and maximum visibility. Few realize that optimal user experience is a big part of getting there. Google has learned how to interpret a favorable or unfavorable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a crucial element to SEO success. The last but not the least, it is important to pay attention to your anchor text. While including targeted keywords in the anchor text of links to your company website can help improve your search rankings that does not necessarily mean that you should include as many keywords as possible or place these links on sites or pages where they do not make sense. Please make sure these links are used in a way that is relevant to the content of the pages that are linking to your website, and use natural language rather than random phrases built around keywords you want to target. Besides, speed of acquisition matters. You can’t suddenly have a thousand of backlinks appearing overnight. It will make search engines suspicious. Getting a thousand backlinks can only be possible if you bought them and Google will penalize you for trying to trick them.

Conclusion

The well-thought-out SEO strategy in general, and backlinking strategy in particular, has a huge impact on the brand visibility in the online space. According to statistics, it takes 5-7 brand impressions before someone will remember your brand. SEO is a direct driver of improved visibility and impressions in the search engine results. Websites that appear higher in the search results are viewed as more trustworthy and credible. In fact 98% of all searchers choose a business that is listed on Page 1 of the results. Improved brand awareness, business credibility, customer trust and loyalty are just few out of many benefits SEO provides for your business! SEO rewards your business for your efforts at a higher rate than all traditional forms of offline advertising — the same can be said for almost all types of internet marketing. The reason is because SEO is an inbound marketing strategy, i.e., it allows you to market to people when they are looking for the products and services your business provides. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with search engine optimization (SEO) ? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article! With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!