January 2018 - NextJSjointviews

10 Best Online Advertising Strategies for Marketers

Posted on January 30, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

About 10 million people visit the Great Wall of China every year.

Don’t you desire a traffic figure for your website that sounds as appealing as this?

No worries, we got this! All you need to do is tweak your marketing algorithm and follow the right strategy.

It can be overwhelming to choose from the myriad of schemes available, especially for beginners.

Moreover small businesses and startups need to be practical about advertising campaigns and spend wisely. What they need is a cost effective and functional campaigning strategy at the same time.

Let’s have a look at 10 most effective online advertising strategies that gave the most successful marketers a head start.

1. Target your audience

This strategy is the foundation to fabricate an effective brand image. If you do not target a specific audience for your product, you are utilizing resources in vain.

Many businesses miss on this important aspect of campaigning.

Based on your existing customer profile you can target audience with similar psychographics and convert more leads to prospects and then to customers.

Be it online or offline, make sure the presentation and visuals of your brand intrigue your customers.

2. Personal Branding

As digital marketers, do we even have to think twice before saying Neil Patel and how he channelized his popularity to build a multi-million dollar empire?

That is how amazingly this technique works. Branding yourself helps you leverage your personality to gain trust and credibility.

The way you present yourself determines if or not people will want to buy from you. As it’s easy to predict your viewpoints once they see you and listen to you.

Boring as it might seem in fiction, predictability is all what people want in real life.

3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The technical structure of your site determines the search position ranking of your website.

This structure is fabricated by SEO to bring your website under the lens of the search engine.

It is a form of paid online advertising which is achieved through optimization of the content on the website. It helps generate more targeted traffic.

4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

Pay per click ads is the inorganic mode, used to drive traffic to a website. As an advertiser you pay the publisher when the ad is clicked by a user. PPC basically means the amount spent to get a click on the ad.

The advertiser bids on the keywords specific to the target audience. Bidding implies the amount he is willing to pay the advertising service for a click.

5. Native Ads

These kind of paid ads are embedded onto the website in a way that they blend in with its visuals and functioning. Hence, the name native ads.

If you sponsor your content on a website, you must keep up with the consistency of the native user experience.

According to figures reported by sharethrough, consumers looked at native ads 2% more than editorial content and spent the same number of seconds viewing.

They provide a decent experience as they do not interrupt website usability. Strategists may find it more appealing than video ads.

Furthermore, native ads can bag you more prospects owing to the use of click bait headlines.

6. Social Media Marketing

Social media is the heart of the marketing system. You have the scope of pumping your content through various channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram depending on the brand personality and the target audience.

This method might not get you quick results but has the maximum potential for a long sustaining brand image. Not to mention, your content is your trump card here. It is important that you give your audience a delightful experience.

This method helps gain visibility and drives brand equity. Given the reach of social media, you can build inbound traffic using your syndicates.

7. Email Marketing

For this one to work, you need a strong follower’s base.

Mind you! Email marketing can be tedious but has potential for ROI.

Keep content easy on the eyes and brand at the top of the mind.

Poor content quality will not leave you without your targets marking you as spam.

Target your purchase lead list or those in the current customer database.

Email marketing increases trustworthiness and enhances the chance of repeat business. It psychologically moulds the customer to believe that you value the relationship with them causing them to stay loyal and be your verbal advocates.

8. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a kind of outsourcing program which emerged as a result of market complexity.

This is a performance based strategy whose success lies in the efforts of the affiliate. The affiliate gets the website visitors and buyers in return for a reward.

The merchant, network, publisher and the customer make up the core of the affiliate system.

9. Big Data

You may run as many ads online but if they are not seen by the right people, it is not a bang for the buck.

You might have come across ads for products you just viewed on an e-commerce website popping up on a different website you visit. Ever wondered why?

This is the result of up-front research of marketers and their inorganic marketing strategy put together.

They make sure their ads are viewed by the target audience with the aid of big data.

Big data is only a high-standard way of addressing a database containing relevant information, gathered from various sources in abundance.

Advertisers use the big data information to run online advertisements on screens of the audience of their interest.

For example,

They will use marketing data from different sources to determine the youth visiting a particular website are also interested in music instruments. They will run music instruments on sale ads micro-targeting that group.

10. Text Link Ads

This is basically hyperlinked text on a website or a blog. It works well in monetizing a website. When visitors click the link, you as an advertiser have to pay the publisher of the blog or website.

The pay is in accordance with the pay-per –click method.

The popularity of the blogger or the website on which you link these ads plays a crucial role.

In addition, these ads improve the search engine ranking of your content.

Conclusion

Each of the above strategy mutually compliments the benefits of the other. For optimizing your marketing process it would be best to glean them all tactfully.

Do share your experiences if you found the information helpful. If you feel we have missed out on some important strategies, please feel free to share in the comments.

How to Optimize Your AdWords Campaign Performance

Posted on January 27, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Small businesses or medium scale businesses, AdWords can help you a lot in the way of generating leads for your business. Google has made it so easy that it takes only a few minutes to get started with AdWords.

On the other hand, it requires a great effort to manage business through it. Some people manage their own AdWord campaign while others outsource to companies who can take care of their business campaign.

AdWords can be a boon to your business if used correctly. Wondering whether you are using it correctly or not? Don’t worry! We have it covered for you. If you can take care of the following steps, then it’s hassle free to manage your AdWords campaign performance.

1. Keyword Research

Keywords are the building blocks of your campaign. The keywords you choose have a great impact on your AdWords campaign performance.

As an initial step, make a list of suitable keywords that you think is suitable for your business industry. If you are done with that, you can make use of Google’s free tool named AdWords Keyword Planner. Submit the keywords that you have in hand into it and it will generate a detailed list of similar keywords.

Along with that, AdWords Keyword Planner will give a detailed information on how often those keywords are searched on the internet and also number of competitors who are targeting on the specific keywords.

Carefully, select which all are relevant keywords and discard the irrelevant ones. Periodically, analyze which keywords are giving high generated conversions and which are not.

You can set a filter based on keyword conversion rate and can find out the well performing ones. Based on that, you can increase bids for those keywords and decrease bids for non performing keywords.

2. Assign similar keywords for campaigns and ads

Rather than dumping all your keywords list into AdWords bucket, assign similar keywords for campaigns and ads. For example, healthcare management, healthcare service and healthcare clinics should fall under same ad group and healthcare software should be under another ad group. Like this, if you segment your keywords wisely you will be easily able to analyze the data later.

3. Analyze Search Term Report for New Keywords and Negative Keywords

When you are doing a campaign, it’s crucial to regularly check search term report for newly searched keyword and negative keywords.

How to find out Negative Keywords?

If you are opting for Broad match or Phrase match targeting, there are chances that your ad might trigger queries that are irrelevant for you. If you don’t wish to show ads for such queries, you can mark it as negative keyword. Same applies for your campaigns also.

Finding out and filtering negative keywords will make sure that your ads are seen by right people only and will trigger subsequent queries that are relevant for your business.

How to find out new Keywords?

Search Term Report will also allow you to find out new search terms which have generated conversions. You can add these as new keywords into your campaign/ads. As said before, analyzing the search term report, adding new keyword and eliminating negative keywords, you can control your ad efficiently and generate more conversions.

4. Include ad text related to keywords in an ad group

Don’t forget to add at least a text exactly related to the topic of the ad group. This will in turn help your ad to achieve quality score and also allows customers to easily land into your ad.

5. Make Use of Ad Extensions

Navigating people who click on your campaign/ads to another pages that similar topics can help you to achieve better Quality Score. Make sure that you add links of only similar topic pages; otherwise, visitors will lose interest in the topic and may exit the page.

6. Exact Match Targeting or Broad Match Targeting?

For small businesses which are new to AdWords, Exact Match Targeting is a good choice as it will show ads only when someone searches with exact phrase/keyword that you have included in your campaign. It will give full control over their ads/campaign and prevent them to waste money on irrelevant keywords.

Once you get an idea of how your keywords are performing, you can try your hands on Broad Match Targeting which can be of more useful and also can optimize your campaign performance.

7. Make Bid Adjustments on different device platforms

One of the effective ways to optimize AdWords campaign is by measuring its performance on three device platforms such as computer, tablets and mobile. You can make bid adjustments based on the data received.

Periodically, check the performance of your AdWords campaigns and ad groups on these three device platforms.

For example, if you spend more money on computer bids without analyzing the trend but you get more conversions from mobile bids, you need to decrease the computer bids.

Always keep on check that your budget doesn’t runs out on device platforms. If managed correctly, these device platforms can make a huge difference in optimizing campaign performance.

8. Use Geographic Location Targeting

Setting geographic target in AdWords is an excellent way if you are planning to provide services inside a particular geographic location. Google allows its user to set location targets for each ad/campaign where you can adjust your bids for various locations.

Make sure to increase bids on location that works perfectly for you and get conversions. On the other hand, decrease the bids on locations that don’t give you conversions.

9. Set timings with Ad Schedule Bid Adjustments

Like geographic location targeting, Google also allows you to set ad schedule for each of your campaign. You can set bid adjustments for various hours of the day/days of a week which works well for you.

While optimizing the campaign, make sure to increase bids on hours and days that works well for you and decrease bids for areas where you spend money but doesn’t get conversions.

10. Remove or pause non-performing factors

Last but not least, if you want a sudden boost in your campaign performance, you need to remove everything which is not working. To achieve this, you need to check your account features one by one and remove/pause things that are not working for you. Also check on campaigns that you have invested large amount of money but have poor performance; then, pause on that campaign.

Confused whether AdWords will work or not for you?

Of course! It will work for you, regardless of the size of your business or location. If you can always keep an eye on the AdWords tool and periodically analyze it thoroughly keeping in mind of the above ten points, you can definitely succeed in this area.

If you have any questions, please revert to us.

Why Marketers Should Have a Content Plan for Social Media

Posted on January 26, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Do you have a social media strategy prepared?

Do you know what to tweet, share on Facebook and write as your blog posts?

If you answered a yes, great! You are on the right track. If you answered a no, you’re just like the others in the market.

Marketers understand the importance of social media but don’t generally know how successful their campaigns are. They don’t focus on the content and cannot figure out what must be posted when.

If you’re also sailing in the same boat, here are a few questions that you need to ask yourself:

Do I have my existing and prospective customers here with me?
Is my post of any benefit to the consumers?

There are some other questions to ask as well but if you didn’t have the right answers to the above questions, you need a content plan.

Let us go through some of the key reasons to understand why creating a content plan for social media is so important:

1. Gives you a direction

Writing, posting, sharing – these actions become redundant if you don’t have a content plan in place. You must have clearly defined goals along with pre-decided metrics for success. You must know how and where you need to communicate with your target audience and what is it that they are expecting from you. A content plan adds a sense of purpose to your business and at the same time gives you a blueprint for the journey to your final destination.

2. Have a better sense of the target audience’s needs

If you have a content plan, you will know how to target the right audience with the right services. In the absence of a plan, customer demand for online services can be incorrectly evaluated.

3. Develops Opportunities for Conversations

A content plan helps you measure the success of your conversations. You know what works and what doesn’t with your audience. Social media platforms help you engage with the end consumer and if you are doing correctly with an appropriate content plan, you will notice an increased social media ROI.

4. Helps with Integration

A social media content plan enables everyone in the team and organization to remain integrated. All employees know what communication must be made with the target audience and there are clearly defined goals for everything.

5. Scope of New Strategies

If you are aware of your content plan and its ROI in terms of the metrics you set, you have the option of tweaking it to make it work. Without a concrete plan, knowing what works and what doesn’t is challenging.

Social media changes regularly. This means that you must also change with it. However, this change must be planned according to the current strategy. You must adapt to the changes introduced by the different social media platforms.

6. Identify your Audience’s language

If you keep tweeting without a specific content plan, you would be talking about anything and everything without knowing what your audience is searching for. It is important that you have a well-defined voice and use it when you are sharing content.

7. Eliminate the Guess Work

Once your content plan is ready, you know where your efforts need to be invested. You know how your content functions and are not wasting any time finding what you need to post. Social media platforms are time sensitive and if you are ready in advance, you are ready to make the most of this marketing tool.

8. Increased traffic

Website traffic is an important KPI for every business organization. Well planned and well placed social media updates attract more engagement, thereby generating higher click-through rates and leads for conversions.

9. Better Engaged Visitors

There are options to buy followers and traffic on social media. However, with a solid content plan, you can engage with your target audience realistically. The quantity of followers, clicks, and traffic does matter but the quality must be your focus.

10. Improved Customer Retention

Your bounce rate will start to lessen if your social media campaigns are being executed effectively. This means that you are reaching out to the right audience with the right information, and they are appreciative of the content you are providing.

Remember, social media does not have any magic formula. You need to understand what works for your business and what does not and this can only be done by devising a social media strategy and content plan.

How AI Can Improve Your PPC Campaigns

Posted on January 25, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

If you have ever invested in Pay Per Click or PPC advertising in Google or Facebook, you know that it can take up lot of your time and concentration. Setting up big budget ad campaigns and continuous monitoring of performance and budget is a full time job in itself.

As you may know, many of repetitive tasks can now be done by machines without any human intervention. Marker’s tasks such as email sending, impression counting and conversion tracking have all been automated in the recent past. This is also true for PPC campaigns. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are already monitoring and fine-tuning paid ads.

In this blog we will discuss how AI is improving PPC campaigns and also look at what the future of PPC campaigns look like.

How can AI Improve your PPC Campaigns?

Dynamic ads

Marketers put in a lot of effort in writing the perfect ad copy for their target market. Wouldn’t it be great if the ad changed itself to suit the person viewing it? It’s not magic and many PPC platforms are already doing it.

Facebook Dynamic ads show different products to different users based on their interest and browsing history. Dynamic Search Ads in Google Adwords generates ads that match user search with the products available on your site. This means that you don’t have to worry about missing out keywords. Google uses AI to learn about your website and serves up exactly what users are searching.

Ad delivery Optimization

Delivery of your ad to the right people at the right time can make or break your PPC campaign. Facebook ad optimization shows your ad to the right people depending on your ad objective set. For example, if your objective is website traffic, Facebook will show your ad to people who are most likely to click on the link to your site.

Automated Bidding

Wondering what bid would land you top spot in Google search? Set your campaign to automated bidding and let machine learning do the guesswork for you. Google automated bidding adjusts your bid to achieve any of the below objectives chosen by you:

Increase Site Visits
Top spot in Search Engine Results
More visibility over other domains
Get more conversions

This is free and convenient tool offered by Google. However, it does not meet the flexibility of manual bidding. Consider a case where you would want to apply automated bidding only to a high conversion keyword and not the rest. Automated bidding will not allow you this flexibility.

In such a case you can go for AdWords scripts or AdWords API. These features let you make automated changes in your AdWords account. This requires JavaScript coding knowledge to play around. These features can be time-saving and very profitable if you have a tech-savvy team.

Discover audience

Application of AI doesn’t always have to be in the PPC platform. Applying AI and machine learning on user searches and customers converted can also give insights into management of your PPC campaign.

Consider the case of Arteric, which is into cutting edge technology for healthcare companies. Analysis of 250,000 searches for a pharmaceutical company revealed an unexpected opportunity in Spanish language search volume. AI is good at discovering new opportunities which a human would easily miss. In fact it is impossible for us to look for every permutation and combination of possibility. On the other hand, AI can easily skim through large amounts of data and pull out unexpected opportunities for your ads.

Uncover relevant keywords

AI can discover relevant keyword by the same method mentioned above. Data analysis of search terms reveals real-world conversational language in your industry. For example, analysis of search terms may reveal that people search for ‘ideas for Christmas Gifts’ instead of ‘buy Christmas Gifts’. This can help marketers in finding keywords with buyers’ intent and wasting money on non-performing keywords.

Pause low-performing ads

Not all ads in you campaign perform the same. Some ads get more conversion than others because of the keywords, ad copy and landing page. Pausing or deleting low performing ads not only saves ad money from being wasted, it also boost your ad quality score (Quality rating assigned by Google Adwords to your ad).

Monitoring ad performance to delete low performing ads is a repetitive and time consuming process. This can be automated by using Adwords Scripts and API integrations.

Future of PPC Campaigns

PPC campaigns are far from being fully automated. Some of the functions such as optimized display and bidding rules can be set with free automated tool. Others can be automated using Adwords API and Scripts. However most of the tasks require humans to make sense of the data and take decisions.

As technology progresses we will see machine learning take up more tasks. Who knows, we might soon see a time where you simply input your goal and budget and the Adwords AI takes care of the rest.

A Checklist to Optimize Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

Posted on January 19, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Facebook is the leading platform for Pay per Click (PPC) ads. The precision of targeting audience in Facebook is unmatched by any other platform in the history of marketing. Optimizing ads to get best returns has become easier with Facebook adding many new features for better returns on marketing spend.

However, the process itself has become complicated. There is a reason why pay per click advertising is now a profession within itself.

There are tools to optimize how your ad looks, where it is placed, when it is shown and who it is shown to. The acquisition of Instagram by Facebook has also led to integration of Instagram as an extended advertising platform.

Terms such as lookalike audience, Ad relevancy, bidding options can be confusing to many. Fast changes in Ad Manager and Facebook algorithm do not make things any simpler.

In this blog we will look at a checklist to optimize your Facebook Ad campaigns for maximum reach and higher conversions.

Optimize Ad Frequency

Ad frequency is the average number of times each user see your ad. Too little exposure or too much exposure to your ad can hurt your campaign performance.

Too little exposure means that your message will not get through. On the other hand, too much ad exposure will lead to ad fatigue where the audience mentally blocks out your ad or even reports it irrelevant.

Ad frequency of two to three times is recommended for most industries though your optimum frequency may differ. So how do you test your optimum ad frequency? Keep increasing your ad frequency until your Click Through Rates (CTR) and conversions are good. Beyond a point your ad clicks will start to drop and cost per click will start increasing. This means that you have crossed your optimum ad frequency and should keep it lower than this point.

You can manage and monitor ad frequency from Facebook Ads manager > Edit Ad Set. To automatically limit reach, go to Optimization and Pricing to choose daily unique reach option which limits your reach to once a day per user.

Optimize Audience

Facebook’s ability to target audience right down to the micro level makes it so appealing to marketers. No other platform gets more specific than Facebook when it comes to choosing your audience. You must use full targeting features available to get maximum out of your campaign.

You can select your audience based on nationality, region, gender, interests, age and language. You can also input your ideal audience and create a lookalike audience.

Selecting custom audience show your ad to selected groups such as current customers, visitors to your site, or custom list of people you input. This allows you to integrate Facebook right into your conversion funnel. For example, with custom audience you can show relevant ads to customers who abandoned your shopping cart page.

A/B Testing

The success of your Facebook depends on many factors. Some of them are audience selected (age, country, interests, profession etc.), ad frequency, images, ad title, ad copy, call to action, color scheme. You can have many ads by varying each of these parameters. How do you know which ad copy will perform the best? The answer is simple – A/B testing.

A/B testing is a way to run different versions of same ad and measure which ad performs better. You may find out that a green colored call to action button performs better than blue. Or that a particular image results in increase in click-through rate.

Setting up A/B testing is easy. Go to your ad manager in Facebook and create different versions of the same ad. Do not change more than two parameters in the testing version as you will not know which change led to higher success. You can test both the version :

1. You can hide one version and start another or,

2. You can create two separate ads sets under one ad campaign. The new split testing features allows you to compare the results of ad sets within campaign.

Optimize for Ad Relevancy

Ad relevancy is a score of your campaign performance on the scale of 1 to 10. The score calculates how well your ad is performing with the set target audience. It is calculated based on factors such as:

Ad performance and engagement
Positive actions such as clicks, video watches, app installs
Negative feedback like someone clicking ‘hide this ad’

Many marketers suggest that a good ad relevancy score boosts your ad reach and lowers your costs. However, Facebook maintains that ad relevancy is just a measure of your performance and is not used in calculating ad reach or bidding price.

Whatever the case may be, ad relevancy is a good measure of your performance and should be optimized to maximize your ad success. Try the following to improve ad relevancy:

1. Narrow your target audience to make your messaging more focused

2. Improve your ad visuals

3. Create new ad to keep your audience interested. People grow fatigues of same ads again and again

4. Use split testing to learn what works best with your audience

Optimize Bidding

There are many ways to pay for your adverts in Facebook. Spends could be per click, conversion or impressions.

Facebook automatically recommends the best strategy and daily spend for optimum result as per chosen objective of your campaign. You can also manually control the bids and daily spends according to your budget.

Optimizing for bids is subject to your objectives and budget available. For starters, you can trust in Facebook’s automatic bidding to deliver best results.

Let’s brief it up

Setting up Facebook ad campaign can seem daunting at first. However with so many options to fine-tune your ad it is well worth the effort. The important thing is to monitor and keep making changes to get maximum out of your ad spend.

Remember, what works today may not work next month. User behavior and Facebook algorithms are ever-changing. Continuous learning and optimization will give you most out of this most profitable advertising platform.

5 Ways to Create a Business Blog for Your Target Audience

Posted on January 16, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Business blogs pull traffic and are central to your content marketing success. According to Hubspot, B2B companies that blog more than 11+ times a month attracted 3X times more traffic than those blogging once a month. The success of your best blogs only compounds over time and one successful blog can get you consistent leads for years to come.

The essential aim of creating business blogs is to grow your traffic and reach new markets. For this to happen, your blog must talk to the right market about what they are searching for. Here are five ways to help you create a business blog for your target audience.

1. Know Your Topic

It is essential that business blog writers are well versed with the products and services that you offer. A good blog gives people answers that they cannot find elsewhere and in the form that is easy to understand.

Research the content which is already available online. Study the statistics of the bigger blogs and try to break their monopoly over the audience. This can be done by giving more in-depth knowledge or presenting the same information in an easier form. In any case your blog will sound better if they are written by someone who is an expert in your industry.

Apart from knowing the company’s products it is important to know the branding and philosophy behind a business. This is because your blog is your voice online.
The most important skill to make a blog successful after understanding the topic is the ability to present it in a simple way.

2. Know Your Audience

Right marketing is all about finding the right market and fine-tuning your message to them. Before you start writing the blog always ask these four questions to yourself about the audience:

a. Who are they?
b. What do they need?
c. How much do they need?
d. When do they need it?

Firstly, who are they? This question should answer who your audience really is. Are they small business owners? Do they require information to grow their business? Are they big business owners and need solutions to organize their business?

What do they need? Will the topic you are writing about help them? The title of the blog should catch their attention. The audience should get an instant feeling of security after reading the blog title itself. They should feel “Yes, this blog is going to help me solve my problem.”

How much do they need? It is very important that you understand the main goal of your blog and provide the right amount of information. Avoid overwhelming the readers with too much information or too little information.

When do they need it? At which stage of their business would they need assistance from your blog? If their business is at an initiating phase then how can you help them? Will the same blog be able to help people who have already set up their businesses?

After answering all these questions, make a buyer persona of your audience and write the blog as if you are conversing with them. You now know what, how, why, and when they want information, you just have to provide them with the right answers.

3. Organize the Blog

Organizing the blog includes many factors such as having a strong introduction, structuring the content, breaking the paragraphs after regular intervals, and making the blog look clean.

Using images and videos is a great way to hold attention of the audience. Statistics show that blogs with images get 94% more views compared to blogs with no images.

Remember to include all the necessary information in your blog. Do not shy away from long form blogs that get to the depths of topic. Long blogs with detailed explanation are in-fact doing better in SEO results nowadays.

4. Monitor and Update Your Blogs
This simply means that you should regularly keep track of what the audience wants. Which type of blogs does the audience prefer and how can you evolve your blog into that type. Regularly update your best performing blogs to keep them relevant.

You can even create a small feedback form that your audience can fill once they have read one of your blogs. This will help you create better blogs in the future and at the same time you would be creating a data base of your readers as well.

5. Online Presence
One of the most important steps in creating a successful blog is ensuring its visibility. Visibility is essential for any blog in order to reach its target audience.

In 2017, 66% of marketers reported using blogs in their social media content. This would help you get audience from all the platforms but more importantly you will easily be able to understand how your blog is performing. You will be able to see what people are sharing, liking, re-tweeting etc.

Final Thoughts

These are some ways for creating a successful business blog. Once you understand your audience and their needs, you are on the path of success with the help of your ideas. After all, content marketing is all about giving your customers what they want.

Now that you have the pointers to create a great blog, go ahead and start writing. One last tip would be to write consistently. The more you understand your audience and write for them, the better your blog will get.

How to Use Social Media Profiles to Get Quality Links

Posted on January 12, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Getting backlinks from social media platforms is critical for your SEO and inbound digital marketing strategy. Quality links to your site indirectly help in your search engine ranking while also giving you targeted traffic for your website. With over 60 popular and niche social networking platforms there is plenty of opportunity to get right visitors to your site. According to Econsultancy’s State of Search Marketing Report 82% of digital marketing agencies integrate social media in their SEO strategy.

Are You Getting Enough Backlinks from Social Media?

You can check traffic from social media platforms by using Google Analytics. Use Campaign URL builder to tag your links and measure them in Google Analytics.

If you are not getting good amount of leads from social media consider using following methods to get quality links.

Use Personal Profiles Too

All social networking platforms have an option to create a personal profile or a company profile. Personal profiles with pictures and names of real persons generate more engagement than brand profiles. This is because people want to connect with real people on social media sites. While brand pages are good for announcements and advertisements, real conversations happen with actual people.

This doesn’t mean you have to discontinue your brand profile/page. What’s important to note is that both brand and personal profile have their own advantages. For example, LinkedIn does not allow company profiles to start a conversation with others. That means you can only respond to queries and your reach is limited. However, LinkedIn company profile allows targeted sponsored posts and many other helpful features.

It is ideal to have personal profiles along with business profile. Be sure to have genuine profiles as fake profiles will damage your reputation. You can use employee profiles to do this.

Build Links in Your Profile

The next step is to build maximum links in your social media profile that point to your website. Without these links all the social following and engagement would be wasted. You can move people further in your marketing funnel by inserting links to lead pages in:

1) Profile Descriptions

2) About us section

3) Pinned posts in Facebook and LinkedIn

4) Video descriptions in Youtube

5) Instagram Stories

6) Photos and photo descriptions(Instagram only allows this for paid ads)

7) Social Media Posts

Add Value to Communities

Only conversations that are in context gain engagement on social media. Promoting your own services or page is not meaningful to anyone. Instead respond to what people and communities are talking about and add value to the conversation with your knowledge. This could be your take on the point raised or a link to related and informative blog. It could even be something entertaining like a funny meme.

People will naturally get curious about you once you start sharing knowledge on a regular basis. This is when they will click to check out your profile and what you do. Promoting your services before building trust and authority is poor strategy to get links from social media. So do not sneak a link to your blog in comments section just yet.

Meaningful Interactions

It’s easy to lose depth of communication in likes and comments. You have many friends on your Facebook, however it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them will value you equally. To have meaningful interaction is to build relations by helping others reach their goals too. Since you only have so much time to devote to each person you follow, you must choose a few influencers or users that you plan to build long term relation with (more on this in the next point).

Try to reach important users through other channels like email or phone to build stronger relation. Help them reach more followers through cross-promotion or turn their post into an infographic and offer to link it on their blog. Over the long term these relations will pay off by sending more links to your profile and site.

Follow Right People

It’s important to be seen as industry authority if you want good quality links to your site. Your relationship and engagement with the right users is essential here.

Obviously your time is limited and this is the reason you must strategically choose the right people to interact with. Use tools such as Klout, Buzzsumo, FollowerWonk to find right influencers in your industry and monitor social media.

These tools also look at followers list to find an overlap between your and other industry influencer’s followers. This makes getting new followers and links more likely. Cross promotions and comment interactions with these influencers will benefit both of you in the end.

Join Niche Networks

There are lots of niche social networking sites apart from the big players such as Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter etc. Find out where your target audience is and start posting there. These niche sites typically have higher user engagements because of a stronger community. You will definitely find more success here if you strike the right chord.

For example, Imgur is a great platform to target geeky millennial men. Reddit has an active discussion on different topics (also called subreddits). Quora is another platform to build your authority and drive traffic through your links in answers.

Another advantage of these sites is that they have a transparent voting system which determines which posts, answers and comments are shown first. This makes it very easy to monitor content and know your user engagement.

Post Linkable Content

Some content has more potential to drive traffic to your pages. Links to quiz, comparison blog posts, interview with industry celebrities etc., are compelling invitation to your site. Be creative with content and use fresh features such as live videos, stories, online polls to drive traffic.

Your posts on social media platforms must be a preview into something interesting that drives users to click on it.

These are some of the ways leading content marketers are using to drive traffic from social media platforms. Do you use any of these and what has been your success with them? Let us know in the comments below.

6 Remarkable Ways to Build a Great SEO Team

Posted on January 11, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

A great SEO team is essential for successful digital marketing. Their job is to get more views on a webpage. This needs skills such as understanding audience behaviour, cracking the reader’s patterns and AI Algorithms.

A recent study shows that 93% of online experiences begin with search engines. This number should be good enough to encourage any business to hire and build a great SEO team. This blog will provide you some tips on how you can do that.

1. Hire a complete Team

The first step in building an SEO team is to hire the right people. This hiring has to be done by keeping the positions and work responsibilities in mind. The following experts are required to build a quality team:

Manager: Like every team in a company, SEO team also needs an effective manager. The manager must understand the roles of SEO employees in his team.

A varied experience in web development, content creation, social media marketing and other areas of digital marketing is beneficial as right SEO strategy requires knowledge of many areas of digital marketing. Your manager will also be responsible for making an SEO strategy so a strategic thinking will be an add on.

Data analyst: The job of a data analyst is to conduct research on keywords, studying the webpage traffic and giving meaningful insights after number crunching.

Web development: This is an important role in an SEO team as web developers have to take care of page loading time, internal navigation, and indexing. Their job can also require them to design the pages. Sometimes web developers are shared with other teams.

Content writer: To appear on search engines a blog/web page requires lots of content, it requires good content. Without good, creative and innovative content the web page will not show up in the top links of search engine.

Link building: SEO takes into consideration the quality of links pointing to your content to validate the authenticity of your content. Hence it is advised to designate this work to an expert who understands when and where the internal or external links should be provided. Sometimes this role is merged with a content writer’s role.

2. Keep them updated

Search engines keep on updating their crawling algorithms from time to time. Google is a search engine which keeps SEO experts on their toes. Some of their major updates include Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Hummingbird. These updates mainly depend on the development of Machine Learning. (ML).

To understand how to get more views on a page, SEO teams must be up-to-date with the ever changing algorithms. To ensure that your employees are on the same page as the latest SEO trends, your team must be continuously learning. In fact, research should be a part of their daily activity.

Good research brings good results. Information related to latest ML developments can be found on many websites and online journals as well. Some examples are: Moz, Search Engine Journal, and Google SEO Guidelines. Subscribing to journals and blogs can help the team in predicting the upcoming SEO trends.

3. Train employees

You may not be able to hire the best SEO specialist in the world. But nothing stops you from training them to achieve world class success in SEO. A good SEO team should comprise of employees who are ready to learn new things. SEO is all about understanding content and what the audience likes to read/watch.

Get them to read all about SEO and conduct SEO related workshops. You could even create courses to train the employees. Make sure your SEO team is working closely with market research to understand their target audience and what they want.

4. Encourage with Awards

Acknowledging the efforts of employees motivates them to work harder. It makes them believe that their efforts have a positive effect on the business and hence it boosts the self esteem of the employees.

Incentives can be provided on a quarterly basis in the form of bonus or it can be given yearly in the form of promotion or raise. Regular recognition of their quality work in the form of awards and titles also works to motivate your team.

5. Create a healthy environment

There is no doubt that a healthy workplace should be provided to employees of every department but the work of SEO operations requires focused attention and sometimes working for long hours. Data crunching, meeting content calendar deadlines and continuous learning can be stressful too.

Breaks for other activities such as games, debates, discussions, art, etc reduce stress as well as build stronger relations. The employees should have good relationship with one another as well. This way they can work as a team together. This would also make them open towards receiving others suggestions as well as giving them.

6. Interact with other SEO experts

Certain exclusive knowledge can be only learnt with experience. Not everything is found online. Make sure your team learns from those who have spent years in the industry. Encourage them to attend conferences, discussions and workshops about SEO operation.

In all these events employees will get tips from the experts, they will witness ideas in the process of being made and most of all these events will inspire them. Seminars are a great way of meeting other SEO teams in your industry and other big influential companies. You team will also pick up new strategies that help them to think out of their daily work.

Final Thoughts

For years businesses have focused on advertisement to attract more customers and in today’s internet age, appearing on the first page of search engines is the perfect advertisement. Try out these tips and prepare yourself to see your business grow.

90 Link Building Strategies to Use in 2018 [Infographic]

Posted on January 10, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Higher search engine rankings are based on the authority of webpages. As you probably know, quality links can increase your site’s authority as well as improves its SEO value. Link building helps you to increase the flow of high-quality links pointing to your website. It‘s a proven marketing strategy by many businesses for improving their brand awareness.

Google considers quality links to your site while ranking. Links indicate that whether your page is useful as a result. Search engines only want to show useful results to its users. So, all your SEO efforts for higher rankings are imperfect without link building strategies.

Do you want increase your domain authority through link building? Here is an infographic illustrating 90 linking building strategies that you can include in your SEO strategy in 2018.

How to Use Customer Reviews to Leverage Content Marketing

Posted on January 8, 2018 by NextJSjointviews

Word of mouth has always been important for businesses small or big. The word-of-mouth channel has even more reach because of the internet today. This is good news for businesses that deliver on their promise and take care of customer service.

It is common for users to search for a business and look up its reviews and ratings before making a purchase. E-commerce websites know that customer reviews of products greatly influence sales.

According to BrightLocal, 72% consumers say that positive reviews make a business more trustworthy.

Customer reviews obviously affect your online conversion. But is there a way to use them in your content marketing too?

Adding customer reviews in your content gives it authenticity and social proof. Customers are more likely to trust words of other customers. Here are ways to leverage your customer reviews for content marketing.

Social Media Posts

Social media is a place to connect with other people and get social. You can also share the experience of other customers instead of just posting your own blogs, ads and graphics. Thrive, a nutrition centre, posts their customer reviews on social media to gain confidence of other members in community. Seeing others successfully complete the program makes other readers more likely to give your product or service a serious thought.

You can also run a campaign to invite written or video testimonial for your business. LuluLemon, a Canadian athletic apparel retailer, encourages its customers to tag them in Instagram posts. Customers promoting your brand in their personal posts give a boost to your brand authenticity on social media.

Blog

There are many ways to use positive customer reviews in your blog posts.

You can display testimonial in your blog or on side panel on your blog page. This can be done by inserting relevant customer review in a highlighted box.

You can also request your most loyal customers to write a guest blog for you. This is especially good for a B2B company. A blog from a marketing head explaining how your system improves marketing ROI for them can do wonders for your conversion.

Case Studies

Case studies are a great way to use customer reviews for storytelling. Case studies can be a part of your presentation or content on your lead page. They also go well in e-books and email campaigns.

Case studies weave customers’ words into a relatable story. Pick a demographic that is closest to your target market and recount the problems that the customer had before. Like any good story, a case study must have a clearly defined character, struggles, solution to problem and a renewed life after the use of your product, service or advice.

Testimonial

A testimonial page to display all your customer reviews is great when you have accumulated many reviews. Alternatively, you can also display your testimonials in a scrollable carousel format on the home page of your website. Simple plugins like Slidervilla allow you to display your testimonials in a tasteful manner.

Email Campaigns

Emails are another place where you can use user generated content. Using customer reviews and ratings will make your promotional emails more compelling and actionable.

Shape FX uses this beautifully to drive their leads to a purchase.

Lead Page Content

Lead page is the most important page in content marketing. It converts visitors to leads and leads to customers in the sales funnel. An account from customers who have made this transition and happy with the result is a must have on your lead page.

You can also display your ratings earned on third party review sites such as Google seller rating, Yelp or other local business rating sites. Video testimonials and celebrity quotes do even better on lead pages.

Final Thoughts

Customer reviews can be used in many different ways in content marketing. They form the social proof that is needed to convert your leads into customers. Use them in different formats mentioned above to make your content more authentic and your brand more trustworthy.