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!

Social Media for Your Business

5 main benefits of social media networks for your business

Did you know that 78% of businesses now have dedicated teams for their social media? This is up from 67% in 2012, demonstrating that increasingly, organizations are acknowledging the power of social media network marketing to attract and engage customers. Below we explain 5 key benefits of social media for your business:

Increased Brand Recognition

The use of various social media networks has a positive correlation with the number of users being aware of your business and their products or services. Businesses can utilize different ways of business advertising, including the creation of a business page and launching paid ad campaigns. If your potential customers will see your business on two or more networks, they will remember and recognize your business in the future, when looking for that particular product or service you offer. According to statistics, people spend on average 2 to 5 hours per day using social media networks, indicating that this is a great marketing channel.  By offering them a perfect combination of engaging information and branding content, you can achieve significant growth in your lead generation. One of the interesting examples of how social media has become the main contributor to brand awareness and brand recognition of the company is the Youtube campaign by BlendTec.


  The viral video efforts of manufacturer BlendTec gave the company a huge return-on-investment in terms of its worldwide brand recognition and sales. Blendtec founder, Tom Dickson, debuted on YouTube marketing channel in 2006 to promote his premier blender and prove that it could blend just about anything. Known as one of the most successful internet marketing campaigns in history, Will It Blend? garnered six million views in the first six days. Dickson has since uploaded over 150 videos blending marbles, Apple products, glow sticks, neodymium magnets, Bic lighters and many more. "I started Will It Blend? with just a $50 budget," said Tom Dickson, Founder, Blendtec. "The results have helped propel Blendtec onto an international stage where our blenders have been showcased for their powerfully advanced technology and premier blending ability."

Improved Customer Insights

Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in and how they behave, via social listening. For instance, you can monitor user comments to see what people think of your business directly. You can segment your content syndication lists based on topic and see which types of content generate the most interest—and then produce more of that type of content. You can measure conversions based on different promotions posted on various social media channels and eventually find a perfect combination to generate revenue. Bora says the unstructured data on social media contains countless insights that can help an organization to understand its customers. However, to engage with this information in a tangible way, it is essential to have the right methodology, technology, and expert assistance to provide the structure and insight.

Improved Customer Loyalty

According to a report published by Texas Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels with their audience enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. The report concludes “Companies should take advantage of the tools social media gives them when it comes to connecting with their audience. A strategic and open social media plan could prove influential in morphing consumers into being brand loyal.” Another study published by Convince & Convert has also found that 53% of American citizens who follow brands in social are more loyal to those brands. TVibes is a unique company that allows customers to create their own TV channels using their own mobile videos (stored in the cloud). They’ve come a long way since their humble beginnings back in 2014 (they launched a successful iOS app in 2015) and are best known for allowing users to choose their own audiences to view the channels.


  The main target is to establish loyal and engaged app users. The goal of the TVibes campaign was to encourage customers to use their app for mobile video storage. Since Facebook is an intuitive platform for lead generation, the founders of the company used the social media giant to try and gain more sign-ups and get more followers. Uri and Gilad - the founders of TVibes - instinctively knew they should integrate a social site like Facebook into their social app. This made it easy for followers to create accounts, log in and explore channels created by their acquaintances, all done conveniently from their Facebook home pages. To help encourage signups based on targeted audience groups, the founders made use of mobile app install ads. By sorting their audiences based on reactions to video ads and with the clever use of lookalike audiences, they had a brilliant strategy of optimizing their campaign. What were the results?

• 50% of new app installs driven by Facebook
• 10% higher loyalty and conversion from those Facebook-driven installs
• 20% higher engagement rates from Facebook user

Improved Search Engine Ranking

SEO is the best way to capture the relevant traffic from search engines, such as Google, but the requirements for success are always changing. It’s no longer enough to regularly update your blog, ensure optimized title tags and meta descriptions, and distribute links pointing back to your site. Google and other search engines may be calculating their rankings using social media presence as a significant factor, because of the fact that strong brands almost always use social media. As such, being active on social media could act as a “brand signal” to search engines that your brand is legitimate, credible, and trustworthy. That means, if you want to rank for a given set of keywords, having a strong social media presence could be almost mandatory.

Richer Customer Experience

Social media, at its core, is a communication channel like email or phone calls. Every customer interaction you have on social media networks is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your customer service level and enrich your relationship with your customers. For example, if a customer complains about your product on Twitter, you can immediately address the comment, apologize publicly, and take action to make it right. Or, if a customer compliments you, you can thank them and recommend additional products. It’s a personal experience that lets customers know you care about them.


  With more than 4 million followers on Twitter, to say Nike has a huge social following is an understatement. The company recognizes just how important customer service is, especially on social media, which is why Nike created a separate Twitter account just for responding to customer inquiries and issues: @NikeSupport. Nike Support is dedicated to all things customer service, making it easier for customers to reach out when they have a problem or a question they want answered. And Nike Support is very active, and like other companies with great social media customer service, very quick to respond. If you look at the account's Twitter feed, you'll see replies every few minutes. This shows customers that they can trust Nike to provide them with the help they need, when they need it.

Conclusion                   

The importance of social media for business cannot be underestimated. Digital marketers all around the world are exploring new opportunities offered on social media arena on a daily basis. Despite the high competition in the modern business world, companies have a chance to stand out from the crowd by offering the highest possible level of engagement on social media. Do you remember the case of BlendTec? The company uses Youtube channel to promote their new products by showing how their blenders can destroy IPhone and other devices. Millions of views have been gained due to one key reason: this is something users have never seen before. Offer your audience something that they don’t expect, but will definitely fall in love in when see it. Use social media networks marketing as a basis for your creative marketing ideas and anticipate enormous amount of new customers! Do you want Blueninja.io to help you? We are waiting for your call! Our social media marketing (smm), search engine opitimization (seo), 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!

YOUR CUSTOMER PROFILE

Creating a Customer Profile For Your Business

What makes up a customer profile? It depends on whether your customers are businesses or consumers. In either case, you typically start with your own customer data (such as location, purchases, spending volume), append additional consumer or business data, then group into segments that share similar characteristics. Customer profiling provides much needed structure to a marketing plan. It helps you (and us) understand what the ideal customer is looking for, what matters to them most and how best to speak to them.  


  In one of our previous articles, ‘Marketing strategy defined success’, we have slightly touched the meaning and role of customer persona for business: 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:  


  One of the most common mistakes small businesses make as they try to grow is attempting to be everything to everyone. “Tapping into” a new market seems lucrative and exciting, and very often, the leap is made even before proper research is done into whether that market is suitable or even brand-aligned. To truly understand a consumer group (especially the one you already have), more effort needs to be put into diving deeper than the surface. At the end of the day, truly understanding and meeting your consumers’ needs is the key to a thriving business. So how do you go about getting to know your consumers in a deeper, more relatable way? And how do you put that information into a ‘consumer profile’ to benefit your business? 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? 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!

Start with the data you have

Look first to the data that is most readily available – usually, this will be the data that you obtain from Facebook, Google Analytics, and other platforms like Adwords. This will give you the basic demographic data of your consumer base, such as age, gender, and location. From here, you can identify your ‘typical’ customer by looking at the age range, gender, and location that comes up the most. You can then extend your hypothesis a little to include factors like spending power, disposable income, marital status, etc. After identifying your main consumer, you can also make note of smaller categories that you may be able to target in the future.

Look beyond demographics

Next, take your consumer profile a step further by filling out the details a little more. Consider the lifestyle that your typical consumer leads. Do they travel? Go to the gym? Shop online? Consider also their knowledge and skills – are they tech savvy? Are they mobile? Are they familiar with the product you are selling? Finally, consider the issues your consumers face, and how your product gives them a solution. Once you have this consumer profile set up, target your communications to match this profile to make yourself relatable and “pull” your consumers in (as opposed to “pushing” your product on people). According to ConsumerPsychologist. the study of consumers helps firms and organizations improve their marketing strategies by understanding issues such as how:

• The psychology of how consumers think, feel, reason, and select between different alternatives (e.g., brands, products, and retailers);
• The psychology of how the consumer is influenced by his or her environment (e.g., culture, family, signs, media);
• The behavior of consumers while shopping or making other marketing decisions;
• Limitations in consumer knowledge or information processing abilities influence decisions and marketing outcome;
• How consumer motivation and decision strategies differ between products that differ in their level of importance or interest that they entail for the consumer; and
• How marketers can adapt and improve their marketing campaigns and marketing strategies to more effectively reach the consumer.

 
 

Consider focus groups/surveys

Even after you set up your consumer profile and begin your marketing plan, it’s always a good idea to run regular focus groups and surveys to continuously check that you are on the right track. In your focus groups/surveys, try to resist focusing purely on ‘business’ – i.e., “What product should I launch?”, or “What price point should I set this at?” Instead, include questions that give you a clearer picture of who your consumer is, and how you can make their lives better. The better you understand your consumer, the more effective your marketing will be – above and beyond details like packaging and price point.

Impact of Digital Marketing on Consumer Behaviour

The digital era has and will continue to change consumer behavior. Consumers today are not following the traditional tunnel whilst social media has revolutionized the way people converse on a personal level. Brands need to adopt a radical new thinking when approaching digital to stay relevant and drive home their message with impact. According to Intelliassist, the biggest change in consumer behavior is that consumers expect a consistent and personalized experience. Consumers desire and expect personalized messaging from brands. Marketers should connect with them at the right places at right times, which involves increased real-time localization. Modern consumers are not loyal customers, they are more variety seekers. This has left previously logo-heavy companies struggling to assimilate their product to suit modern tastes.  


  The prime change in consumer behavior is that consumers increasingly turn away from anything they perceive as marketing. As consumers are becoming tech savvy they are becoming impatient towards intrusive or irrelevant content and messages. More than 25% smartphone users have installed ad blockers and this number is increasing rapidly. Instead, they look towards small groups of people who have a high level of credibility in their specific industry or category to influence their buying decisions. As consumers spend more time on these social media platforms, decisions about what to purchase often reflect interactions with friends and other influencers. In response, leading marketers are adapting their strategies to reach increasingly networked consumers and placing more stress on tactics such as word-of-mouth marketing and storytelling, which nowadays have a greater impact on marketing decisions of consumers.

Conclusion

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!

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!

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!