Tag: marketing

How to Double Your Website Traffic Using Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a buzz phrase these days. It helps marketers reach more target audience effectively. It is not only a time saver but also helps to grow businesses significantly. The credit goes to the recent advancements in technology.

Marketing automation can be a powerful lead generator if you apply the proper strategy on the right platform. On average, 49% of businesses are using marketing automation and more than 55% of B2B companies have already adopted automation technologies. In this article, we will learn how marketing automation invariably leads to increased web traffic, leads, and sales.

Say you have your landing pages ready to convert visitors into customers but you are not ranking in organic search nor in the paid traffic sources. If you want to increase the volume of web traffic for your site, check the following key points on how marketing automation can help make that happen.

Sounds cool, Right! However, what exactly is marketing automation, how it helps you and your business, and how hard is it to master? Let’s get started to know.

What is Marketing Automation?

In simple words, the use of software to automate the manual business activities in the marketing and sales is marketing automation. It is a new concept emerged from the developments in the last decade, paving path for new strategies every day. When marketing strategies implement correctly, automating a campaign can produce impressive results. For example, it is becoming increasingly common to automate email campaigns.

Marketing automation software brought a revolution in the digital marketing environment. Most businesses employ automation in email marketing, lead generating, and software integrations with auxiliary systems such as CRM, mobile, and social media. These activities drive up sales productivity and reduce marketing overhead. All actions are automatically triggered and executed through marketing automation software that nurtures leads and conversion paths. The automation has made marketing faster and efficient than ever before.

Goals of marketing automation:

Just like any other marketing technique, marketing automation gained acceptance in the online market. It attracts organizations with certain business goals like generating qualified sales leads, converting qualified leads into profitable customers, and increasing the lifetime value of your customers through better customer engagement. The ultimate goal of marketing automation depends on marketing efforts.

Automation is firmly connected to various aspects of digital marketing programs such as your website, landing pages, and email campaigns. Check the number of strategies you can implement to help optimize your website for higher conversion rates:

  • Optimize your website for conversions: Marketing automation helps to increase the number of visitors to your website. It makes sure that your website has what it takes to convince a visitor into profitable actions.
  • Ensure fast page loads: A slow page can be a major turn off and drive the visitors away from your site. So check your page load times regularly to make sure they’re quick.

Once your website is optimized, funnel up your marketing automation software to attract more visitors and convert them to valuable customers.

Check the workflow for marketing automation software:

How to incorporate marketing automation into your strategy?

  1. Personalize your emails:

Email personalization effective only if you implement the right marketing strategies:

Prioritize the subject line. This is the first impression which recipients read. Make it well documented and address the recipients by their name, which can make a big difference. You can use automation to send welcome emails to subscribers, or send newsletters adding a discount on their next purchase.

Let’s say a client comes to your website and makes a purchase. If you get their email address, you can send a thank you email and discounts for future purchases.

You need to leverage data such as demographics, past purchases, and online behavior of customers to offer the right products and services. The automated emails help in reminding the customers of the items still in their cart, or products they have watched but are in low stock currently.

Reminders can also be sent out about various upcoming activities or special sales on different products. Send offers based on recipient locations. Limit your personalization mail two or three times, or else it might annoy your recipients.

Use dynamic content that is relevant to the customers’ interests.

Segment your Mailing List: Segmentation helps in choosing the right audience with the right email. According to a report, the segmented email campaigns have 14.32% higher open rates. You can segment your audience by demographics like age, gender, and location. You can check the customer’s email history, activities, behavior to send them relevant offers. Segment the users by purchase amounts and you can up-sell and cross-sell based on the opportunities.

  1. Social Media:

Like email marketing, social media is a way to contact customers automatically across platforms.

There are several automation tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, Crowdfire, etc. available online to send out the same or multiple messages, and even ads across all the social media channels simultaneously.

These automated messages can also be programmed to send birthday messages, thank you notes after purchase, or suggested info to check out after they like your page.

Provide interaction and enhance customer service: The social marketing software also ‘like’ the posts from your fans, invite friends to like or share pages and events, or comment on posts mentioning your brand.

For example, Domino’s Pizza does this on Facebook. It lets the dissatisfied customers solve their complaints and by giving them an opportunity to contact the customer support directly on the issue.

Track engagement and notify the users if a post goes live:

You can also integrate the marketing automation software with your CRM to track activities and campaigns. When you post a new blog on your site, the software sends a tweet or message on your social media platforms.

  1. Inspiring content: Newsletters

As the drip campaigns help in increasing the prospects of landing on your website, endorsing great content can help bringing users back to your website. 

The relevant, informative, and genuine content on your website will attract visitors, keep them there, and encourage them to go deeper into your site. You can also send your content in infographics, educational videos, and entertaining posts through newsletters sent monthly or quarterly to opt-ins from your database.

  1. Optimize the Landing Pages:

Automation tools easily create new landing pages and forms for your website. This is done by copying an effective landing page and creating a duplicate of it with new demographics, keywords, etc.

You can connect specific campaigns and search keywords to your landing pages to increase conversion. The marketing automation tool makes sure to connect analytics tools and email marketing to track and monitor visitors.

You can also automate your landing page through a messenger window or small pop-up that allows the visitors to contact directly.

The automated software can also be programmed to offer answers to common problems raised by customers that may have with the products or website through a tech bot.

Measure the success of your marketing automation strategies:

Measuring performance is crucial as it helps you to find out different strategies and weak spots to improve. The way you measure the marketing automation performance must be aligned with your goals.

You can measure the performance based on the following goals:

Lead generation, sales, and customer retention. The top metrics help you to check if you are on the right track based on the targeted goals.

You can also measure the Ad Campaign Effectiveness of your website. The tools like IFTT and Zapier helps in tracking the leads from Facebook Ads. When a person subscribes or clicks on your Ad, the contact information is automatically stored. By keeping track of this information, you can find out the most effective target audience. You can use this to improve on Ads targeting and keywords later.

A/B Tests on different channels with an automation software will evaluate how certain aspects of your campaign can be enhanced to get maximum engagement.

Conclusion:

With the right objectives and key strategies, you can easily increase your website conversions and grow your business with marketing automation doing away from the manual processes.

7 Prediction on Future of Digital Marketing

There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future of digital marketing when things are transforming so quickly. However, digital marketing will continue its unpredictable evolution and marketers have to keep up with the pace to reach out to more customers in the future.  Let’s know some key facts and figures for marketers to become equipped for the future of depicting digital marketing predictions.

  1. Google’s AMP Initiative:

Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) has become a discoverer in the history of the digital marketing segment. It is a web component framework developed by Google to provide a user-first format for web content. With this initiative, Google aims at improving the loading time of website pages in mobiles and other devices. This website publishing technology will also enhance user-friendliness and would focus on the experience of users.

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The AMP program is helping marketers and SEO professionals in boosting SEO campaigns for their mobile sites. Moreover, the web developers are also giving more time in making websites mobile responsive for better user appearance. The AMP initiative has set a target to re-invent the SEO techniques and online marketing in the future.

  1. Mobile Marketing:

Most of the SEO professionals are strategizing their ways to promote brands through mobile. Starting from SEO marketing to PPC campaign services, marketers prefer mobile marketing because browsing remains an easy experience through mobile devices.

Digital Ads are optimized for the mobile medium. The Video Ads are also targeted for the right audience through their personal devices. Activities in mobile can actually give the publishers and the advertisers an understanding of what activities drive Ad performances and their value to the users.

  1. Voice Search:

The future of voice-driven search queries is quite promising. Voice commerce sales are expected to reach $40bn by 2022 in the USA.

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Voice is going to be a major player in the marketing sphere in the future. The digital assistants will integrate with various tools and will become a mandatory part of every marketing strategy. AIs like Alexa and Google Assistant have a ways to go yet.

People use digital assistance for better convenience and ease of use. For example, people can order from their nearest store by simply sitting at their homes. Rather than going somewhere, they will just say, “Hey Alexa, Order some Avocado and Pomegranate”. If an online store sells these fruits and integrates with voice, this can help drive traffic to their site and increase sales.

Thus, optimize your content for voice search. Indeed, it’s a new way to search as well as promote the brands at one go.

  1. Geo-targeted Ads will become more popular:

Geo-targeted Ads are increasing in popularity nowadays. According to Balihoo, Geo-targeted Ad revenue will represent 45% of all mobile Ad revenues by 2021. This is mainly because people want Ads customized to their locations.

The digital Ad is served based on the user’s location. The most successful geo-targeted ads’ messages are customized for the user at their location. Geo-targeted Ads use both search engine queries and exiting audience data provided by an Ad network to target the audience. The geo-targeted Ads might also be used to target people for different products based on the climate in their regions.

Geo-targeted Ads will help customers save on shipping. This will reduce the cart abandon rates due to the expensive shipping charges. Moreover, these Ads will also help in reducing the tax rate discounts.

  1. Interactive Content is Essential:

According to Criteo, users spend an average of 2.5 seconds reading any given piece of content on a desktop.

Content will become more vital. The usual format of written content like blog posts and guest posts will become less common. Most users like the colorful, dynamic, creative, and interactive content. Interactive content produces two times more conversions than regular content.

Content will get more intelligent as many natural language processing software helps people what content their target audience is viewing. This will also measure the parameters to improve conversion rates and search engine optimization.

The interactive content will effectively go forward to draw the attention of viewers more easily than static content. The content on landing pages, funnels, websites, ads, etc. will be colorful and will have images that are literally moving. The dynamic HTML will become the most common language for creating images and infographics in the near future.

Virtual Reality (VR) will also grow into a very common form of interactive content. For example, quizzes, knowledge tests, and interactive videos will have a great impact on virtual reality.

Content marketing will become content selling in the future. According to a report, 93% of the most successful B2B content marketers reported that their organization is extremely committed to content marketing. Many marketers are changing their approach to create their marketing collaterals. They have a strategic approach to content creation and align it with the customer journey. Thus, the content marketing approach will have a direct impact on sales.

  1. The Rise of Artificial Intelligence:

AI is no longer a buzzword for marketers nowadays. AI technologies will have a huge impact on digital marketing in the near future. According to Gartner, AI features will be in every new software product by 2020.

Know ‘How AI & Machine Learning influence the growth of Digital Marketing’. (Give a link to the previous blogpost)

  1. New Trends in Social Media:

Out of 3.7 billion Internet users globally, 2.7 billion users use social media. Combining big data into the whole matrix, social media will become even more robust, and even more attractive platforms in digital marketing. The integrated approach of social media marketing includes personalization, segmentation, and optimization that helps to bring more engagement.

The growing demand for mobile has quickly made the social networks more involved with the audience. Move over Facebook and Twitter, the other leading social channel will be Instagram. With the rise of Instagram shopping and artificial intelligence lenses, Instagram is splashing the digital marketing scenario. These upgrades on Instagram will provide a higher engagement rate between brands and consumers. The engagement rates on this platform are quite higher than other social networks.

Final Thoughts:

The increased popularity of technology in marketing automation will create a blend of marketing and sales. In the future, we can witness a closer collaboration between sales and marketing teams. As more companies have a significant ROI in digital marketing spend, the investment will increase steadily. The market will ultimately grow due to increased investment in digital advertising.

Here, you have it the 7 digital marketing trends that will dominate in the near future. Use these tips to future proof your company in the digital marketing landscape. What trends do you think will govern 2020? Let us know in the comment section.

8 Content Marketing Strategies to Improve Your Search Traffic

Have you ever wondered, what is the driving force behind the success of any website with good search traffic? It’s content marketing.

Content marketing can change the face of any website when done right. Social networks and SEO strategies completely rely on content marketing for ranking higher up on the search engines. The 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report found that 71% of the users claimed that they consumed blog content during their purchase process.

Here in this article, we are going to discuss eight best content marketing tips that will help you to boost your traffic. However, before that let’s have a brief idea about content marketing.

What is Content marketing?

You can find several fancy definitions for content marketing on the internet. To be precise, content marketing is the method of creating and publishing content in order to increase website traffic, create brand awareness, and distribute value through content to specific audiences. Content marketing is not just SEO but also helps in a lot of other aspects-

  • Attracting the customers
  • Generating leads or increase sales
  • Engaging the online community of users
  • Expanding the customer base

Take a moment and think what the internet would offer without content on the channels like websites, apps, email, or even social networks, etc. Content marketing is the medium of communication with a purpose. You can create, publish, and distribute content by defining your marketing objectives. There are numerous advantages of content marketing, SEO improvement is just one of them.

Let’s discuss some useful ways to improve your website traffic with content marking. 

What are the content strategies to follow for improving your search traffic?

The power of content marketing caters to bringing new customers, educating users, driving revenue, and building a powerful brand identity for any business. Organizations have been following content plans, but these effective content development strategies only help when combined with better marketing plans. Let’s have a look!

  1. Research and understand your audience:

Once you have a clear goal about what content to create or why you’re writing it, the next step is building out your content marketing strategy to understand who is going to read your content and whom you want to outreach.

You need to know your audience and the go-to resource for your topic. Analyze the following things while understanding your audience.

  • What resources already exist in the market?
  • What do they cover?
  • Can you create better content?

  1. Create and document content marketing plan:

After researching the market, you won’t just have to measure your content, but also uncover what your content needs to include to beat the competition. So, to implement a content marketing plan with a proper strategy, create a marketing plan. You can also tailor your content to suit your overall marketing strategy. Prepare a marketing guide about planning your digital marketing strategy. In short, document your content marketing strategy.

  1. Do proper keyword research and brainstorm content ideas:

The smartest content marketing tips doesn’t mean to simply publish and watch. You need to develop your content around keywords that your targeted audience is searching for.

Content marketing strategy helps you to reach people using your articles, blog posts, guides, e-books, guest posts, or other written content. The keywords used in the content will have a direct impact on the improvement of your search traffic.

Research and find relevant keywords and use them in the content. This will help to rank in the search engine result pages. The calculated approach of keywords will make a balance between SEO and content. Competitive keywords are also useful in a specific niche.

There are many tools to make keyword research more effective. Use Google’s Keyword Planner, a keyword analysis tool, to analyze the most popular keyword volume and competition. The Google keyword planner is a good place to start getting keyword ideas. Simply search a couple of keyword phrases into the planner and you’ll get the keyword ideas ready for you. To get some deeper keyword gems, search with your competitor’s keywords on your landing page and then start the search.

  1. Focus on high-quality links (Fix the broken links and disavow bad links from current content):

Link building is not submitting your site to directories or asking your webmasters to include a link to your site. Instead, marketers need to focus on building relationships and earning high-quality links through different methods.

  • Guest blogging on high-quality sites
  • Create amazing resources that attract social share and inbound links
  • Associate your content in a specific niche on popular sites (B2C)
  • Reach out to influential bloggers for better relationships

  1. Ensure social media as a vital component:

The usage of social media has been increasing at a rapid pace from the past decade. The social networks have seen remarkable growth worldwide. You need to make sure you have an active presence of popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. Try to get more followers on these platforms. Create encouraging posts for better engagement. Respond directly to your followers through comments or Direct Messaging. If someone follows your brand on social media, that doesn’t mean they visit your website. You need to post links to your social pages to drive traffic directly to your website.

  1. Optimize and update your current content:

Good quality and consistent content are not only good for your product and brand awareness but your SEO too! If you keep updating and optimizing your old content regularly, you would start seeing a substantial increase in organic traffic. Always try to publish relevant and consistent content to get good SEO.

Creating niche content can heavily target a particular subset of customers. You need to create extremely creative and detailed content to cover a broader niche. Identify specific niches in your industry and recognize the angles and prospects with your SEO optimized content.

  1. Produce video content:

Users want more videos from different brands. 87 % of marketers produce and publish an array of video content online. If done right, video content can increase your organic search traffic to a great level. There is also a scope to incorporate call-to-actions, as many consumers act on them after watching a video.

Your business should have a YouTube channel set up and you need to publish new videos regularly according to the customers’ needs.

Mostly the users prefer to watch a video about a product than reading about it. This is a top reason to implement videos in your content marketing strategies to increase website traffic. Try to add videos to your emails and social media pages as 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. You can also embed the video links to your blogs. This helps in generating new leads and increase your website traffic.

  1. Do Email marketing:

With various content marketing strategies in the market, it can be tempting for brands to skip the traditional approaches. However, email marketing can play a crucial role in the advertising foundation and remain the most profitable marketing tactic as compared to any modern marketing channel.

There are different ways for brands to leverage their email subscribers to drive more website traffic. You can encourage your email subscribers to share your content with their family and friends. This would help you to generate leads from new website visitors and from your current subscribers, too.

Conclusion:

Content is all about value. If your marketing strategy is no longer valuable to your audience, you need to rethink what you’re offering. They won’t help you to nurture leads or build trust in your brand. Hence, follow an updated business strategy that improves especially in sales, cost savings, and customer retention. Follow the above-mentioned content marketing strategies to generate website traffic and engagement; success will be yours.