6 Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

 

Today’s competitive world demands digital marketing for growth and establishment. Digital marketing agencies elevate communication and association of your brand with targeted clients to a higher level. Through social networking sites, instant messaging and mobile applications, it escorts your business to the next level. If you are a business holder, deciding on a marketing strategy can be confusing. Most companies lack in resources to deal with the diverse digital channels that are available today. Digital marketing agencies can rescue you during such situations and help prioritize the channels to be focused.

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Already excited over the idea of opening a digital marketing plan? Here are 6 benefits of Digital Marketing:

Digital Marketing Connects you with Online Customers

Gone are the days when people explore pages and pages for information. 80% of consumers now utilize internet for better and handy access of information. Business owners can achieve targeted customers and connect to them easily with online marketing.

Save Money with Online Marketing

Companies with very limited resources can generate desirable outcomes with minimum expense. It’s significant for any small business owner to lay down reasonable goals. But, keep in mind that the more attempts you make to attract social followers, the better your results would be.

Higher Conversion Rates Possible through Digital Marketing

Digital marketing opens the doorway to success by helping you reach out to more targeted customers. It enables to converse directly with the customers. Choose at least three social media sites and start discussing with them. Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are good options to start with. You can get suggestions from customers and execute them in a way that giant companies can’t.

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Enable Real-Time Customer Service

Online marketing offers great impact on the success of your business by providing a one to one chat with customers. Business owners instantly get to know customer response and experience can increase sales through personalised offers. It also helps in maintaining and creating new, contented, customers.

Generate Higher Revenues

Usage of minimal cost and greater savings helps to reap the benefits of generating higher revenues. Big companies may be capable of spending a great deal on multimedia but your profit as a small business is having an individual touch to your endeavours. This moreover enables an opportunity to locate yourself as part of your community.

Digital Marketing Keeps You at Par with Competitors

With persistent transformations and fast-paced competition, how do you make sure your small business remains at par with already established ones? Being unique is the key here. Exceptional service quality and products permit you to position yourself along with bigger marketing giants.

So, do you think there are other benefits? If you do, please share with us in the comment section.

Effective Social Media Marketing Tricks for 2015

Any digital marketer will know the importance of Social Media Marketing, be it for promoting their brand or for increasing sales. Social media is a vast medium which is constantly changing. So, as a marketer, unless you stay up-to-date with the current social media marketing trends, you might not be able to make any significant difference. With hordes of businesses flocking the social media market, you have to use every trick up your sleeve to get that edge. To make your job easy, we give you some effective social media marketing strategies that will improve your online presence.

  • Relook & Revamp Your Social Media Profiles: You might already have created your social media profiles or might be working on profiles that someone set for you. But, that doesn’t mean you should not go back and review the profiles. There are umpteen reasons to do that. Polish your profiles – personalize them. Social networks often keep updating their features to improve user experience. You should also do the same. Keep checking for updates and take advantage of the latest features introduced. Update your profile with the latest photos. Professional background graphics or images make a huge difference.
  • Don’t Shy Away From Multimedia: They say “A picture is worth a thousand words” and rightly so. Give your customer the inside perspective of the product or service you sell. Use professional pictures and videos of the products extensively, so that the customer gets the look and feel of the product. This will make the customers come back to your profile everytime they want any details of the product. Don’t just stick to images or videos about your businesses. Customers like to relate to the brand. So, go ahead and highlight your corporate events that you participated or some in-house events that occurred.
  • Invest in Integrated Social Media Strategy: To achieve optimal results, it is essential to integrate your social activities. So, devise a strategy that is flexible and that will meet the ever-changing needs of social media. Make a calendar with all the upcoming events or any other promotion that you plan to do. Use social share buttons wherever possible to make your content shareable.
  • Personalize Your Approach: Each of your media post relating to your business can be plain boring. Social media is the platform where people come to communicate and engage with others. You have to understand that audience needs to be felt included, and the best way to do that is to personalize your approach. Humour is a great way to reach out to your audience. Conduct simple polls, post on your clients pages to publicly thank them for their business, ask questions based on the current topics and most important of all, respond. Don’t let it be one sided, respond to the tweets and posts of others. Comment, like, retweet, say a simple Thank You for their comments or apologize for some error that occurred.
  • Work on Social Login: Registering on websites can be an annoying process and most often will dissuade the customer from doing so. People think twice before adding a new username and password to their already long list. You have to adapt the simpler method to improve your website visitors’ experience and to improve your registration conversions. And the best way to do it is through social logins. Give your customers the choice to login using their social media profiles. This way you are minimizing the registration process, while getting the chance to import their photographs, personal details and their addresses.Another advantage is that you will be reducing spam as well.
  • Be Punctual: To get the maximum results, timeliness is a crucial factor. Respond timely; don’t wait for hours to respond. Craft your message around the most happening issue on social media. If you take your own sweet time to respond, you’ll lose out on the chance of having your message heard. Timely response, matched with a crafty slogan and a hard-hitting image will give you the right boost.

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Google’s New CEO is India-born Sundar Pichai

Google co-founders—Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced Chennai-born Sundar Pichai as the new CEO of the search giant. Creating a new organisational structure, the co-founders are now heading a mother company called Alphabet.

The 43 year old Chennai native Sundar Pichai is a product of IIT Kharagpur. He had later went to Stanford and Wharton universities. He will be in charge of a slimmed down Google, which has been rechristened as Google Minus.

Pichai had joined Google in 2004. He worked on Chrome and Android, both of which have made amazing progress.

 “very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations…I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation—continuing to stretch boundaries…”.  Wrote Larry Page in a letter to investors on 10 August.

Regarding the restructuring of Google, Page said in a blog "We've long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant,"  He further added "new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google."

Sundar Pichai joins an elite group of Indian-origin CEOs, including Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. There are at least half a dozen of them in Fortune 500 companies. Indra Nooyi at Pepsi, Ajit Banga at Mastercard, and Sanjay Mehrotra at SanDisk are among them. Also, Ajit Jain is strongly tipped to succeed Warren Buffett at the third ranked Berkshire Hathaway.

10 E-mail Marketing Hacks That Every Marketer Should Know

E-mail marketing plays a vital role in digital marketing campaigns these days. But most of their process lacks proper structure. So, they fail to achieve expected success with their campaigns. With 81 new mails reaching inboxes at an average, 84% of them being spam, you need something to make your mails stand out.

Before you can access your click-through rates, revenue generation or any other business growth metrics, your prospects need to open your e-mails. For this, your mails need to be special, the kind that generates curiosity in the reader’s mind. Here are some ways digital marketing companies can improve those e-mails and get great customer response and better revenue generation.

1. Create a Short, Intriguing Subject Line

The difference between your e-mails being opened or reaching the trash is the awesomeness of your subject line. Avoid those dumb, boring clichés and go for something that can generate curiosity, subconsciously forcing the reader to want to know more. Try to keep them as short as possible for better open rates, but not too short that the reader doesn’t understand what it is.

Don’t say more, but just enough to invoke curiosity. So are your subject lines really good to get you those valuable open rates?

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2. Make the message a personal one

Adding a personal touch to your e-mails can take you a long way. Using your client’s, company’s or the industry’s name in your subject line is good method of creating response. A person’s awareness heightens when hearing his/her name, which makes them feel unique and special. This will help your mails standout and that is good for business.

3. Resend E-mails

The client’s inbox may have thousands of mails and yours can easily be overlooked. So feel free to resend relevant content to those clients in case they have missed the first one. This second chance is often appreciated by the clients and you can drastically improve your overall open rate.

4. Being Provocative Can Help

Tests by A/B and Promise Media have found that subject lines with a little personality and flavour can help you get the attention that you desire from your mails. This includes controversy and humour, which are far better than most ordinary topics. But remember there is a fine line between being provocative and being offensive, so choose wisely.

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5. Know What Your Audience Wants

Create emails in a way that the readers want it. According to Science of Emails 2014 64% of the readers preferred HTML based emails rather that plain text. Studying more about the audiences you want to focus on will help you a lot. It was found that 63% of the people between age group of 18-29 use automatic email filters in their inboxes. So, choose your candidates accordingly.

6. Timing is of Utmost Importance

When to send an email is as important as to whom you send the email. People go through mails during business hours and commuting hours rather than over lunch or dinner time. Moreover be aware of the time zones and cultural tendencies in relation to time.

7. Use Active Verbs

Strong verbs can help convey action, excitement, and intrigue. Using active verbs in subject lines and if possible throughout email copy can excite your readers and engage their interest.

8. Use a Proofreader

You might think that your emails are perfect, but there is no harm in hiring an extra pair of eyes. This has proved to be an asset more often than not and makes your emails as perfect and error free as possible.

9. Emails Coordinated With Buyer-facing Messaging

Consistency in the experience across all your platforms is essential for getting satisfactory customers. This can be the message that you are trying to deliver through all your blogs, tweets, posts, emails, offers or sales calls.

10. Go Past Open and Click Rates

The executive team may not care about opens or clicks. For them revenue is what is important. Find ways to connect your email marketing campaigns with leads transferred to sales to deals closed and revenue earned. This can be good for both your company and your career.

Also Read: This is Why Marketers will love Facebook’s New Sign-Up Ads

Role of SEO in Brand Awareness

Establishing a brand is difficult, but creating brand awareness and retaining it is even more difficult. With websites popping in everyday, there is a lot of competition and it becomes necessary to hold your ground, or else you will end up being one of those one-day wonder websites. Brand recognition plays a vital role when it comes to ranking.  When people recognize your website by name and search your website for niche products, then you gain advantage in search engine rankings. Higher the search engine rankings, the more credible you are in the eyes of the customers.

So, how do you go about making your presence felt? The answer would be – SEO.  Yes! SEO is the right way to take your brand to the height of online success. The common notion about SEO is that it is just about ranking keywords. But no, it is also about making your website easy for both search engine bots and users to understand.

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So, what is it that makes SEO an important method of creating brand awareness? Search engine robots are very sophisticated; however they do not decipher and understand a webpage as humans do. SEO steps in and helps the search engines understand what the web page is all about. So, you can use SEO to your advantage and boost your brands’ worth. SEO practices have evolved over the years along with the continuous change to search algorithms from Google. You have to keep updating and constantly improvising your SEO practices based on the preferences of online users. Here are a few SEO tips that you can work on to improve your brands’ visibility on search engines.

1. Run an SEO Audit on Your Website: Errors like 404 pages, broken links, redirects or sitemap errors can make your website lose its credibility. Therefore it is imperative to conduct regular SEO audits to fix such errors that might affect search engine rankings. You can make use of tools like Google Webmaster or just do manual investigation on your website to enhance the user interface.

2. Minor Changes Make a Major Difference:  You have to constantly keep updating the information on your website, or else it might be deemed as outdated and old. For instance, the year on the copyright notice on your website footer might seem like an inconsequential thing. It appears in the footer of every single page of your website. And most often, many do not update the year in the copyright notice; which in turn lets search engines think that your site is old and out of date. So, the simplest of SEO change can make a huge difference.

3. Switch to Mobile-Friendly:  With more and more people relying on mobile devices for online experiences, it becomes imperative to take your website or blog mobile-friendly. If your website is friendly to mobile users, Google will indicate your site to be mobile-friendly in the search results, giving you an upper hand.

4. Focused Content: With the online market exploding with tons of information, you have to rise above the clutter to capture your customers’ interest. The best way to do this is to make your content credible. Reliable references or outbound links are a great way to give credibility to your content. When you are passing juicy links to relevant and ranking sites, you are indirectly giving signals to search engines that your site is relevant to them. This increases your SEO value.

5. Give Importance to Images: Engaging content doesn’t mean just text. Relevant and engaging images play a vital role too. Make sure any image you use on your webpage or blog page is complete with the right title tags, meta descriptions and ALT texts. Such relevant images will not only make your page interesting to view and read, but will also decrease the bounce rate.

6. Approach Keywords Differently: Instead of just being a robot and sticking to exact keyword matches, think of meaningful words that will still convey the same meaning. Use long-tail keywords; keywords that are geographical location oriented or those that describe the current period of time. These tactics will help you reach your target audiences with ease.

Read: Two Secret Ingredients for SEO Success