Tag: building your business

8 Reasons To Use Google Analytics for Your Website

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reasons to use google analytics

Here’s 8 reasons to use Google analytics!

As business owners, we must ensure that our marketing efforts are worthwhile.

We need to make sure that our website’s design and structure is at optimal levels to maximize our marketing campaigns.

Having someone on your team that can analyze your website traffic data will help ensure that your efforts are worth every little bit of time and money you spend on marketing.

Installing Google Analytics makes acquiring this information easier than ever. Understanding this information will help you strategize and improve your marketing efforts.

Here are 8 simple ways to use Google Analytics to advance your business to next level:

1. Identify the Sources of Your Traffic

Use analytics to track the traffic on your website. This will help you understand what sources send the most traffic to your business.

2. Determine the Path that Leads to Conversions

Determine what pages are driving conversions for your business. Conversions could be making a sale, the download of a white paper, a filled out contact form on your website or one of many other actions that positively impact your business.

The quality of your traffic relies on if you’re bringing the right buyer personas to your website who are genuinely interested in your company’s offerings.

3. Understand Which Relevant Keywords Drive Traffic

Analytics informs you how your business is ranking for key search queries.

Ranking highly for the most important long-tail keyword phrases related to your business can drive quality visitors to your website on a regular basis, which is why marketing around these search phrases is essential for your business.

4. Understand Time on Site

Start by understanding how engaged your visitors are by using the engagement report to better understand their time on site.

The reason why this is so important is that the longer someone is on your website, the more likely they’ll perform an action with your business whether that’s a download, completing a transaction, etc.

5. View Multi-Channel Funnels to Locate Understand a Visitor’s Path

The multi-channel funnels report in Google Analytics is one of the most important to monitor. It provides an overview of the most common paths to conversions. Take a look at which funnels are driving the most activity for your business and try to spur more movement across these channels.

6. Know Which Device Users Drive Results

Improve the quality of your ongoing traffic by analyzing and catering to where your traffic is coming from –desktop, mobile or tablet devices.

7. New vs. Returning Visitors

This report is important to monitor regularly to see if your existing audience is continually returning to your website, while also informing your business of your audience growth over time as seen through new visitors.

Ideally, there should be a healthy balance of both new visitors and returning visitors to inform the quality of your website.

8. Manage Your Backlinks

This can help your business understand what websites are linking to your site, which is a major factor that Google and the other search engines take into consideration when ranking your website and driving traffic to your business.

Your backlink profile is a crucial factor to help ensure that only quality websites are linking to your business and that you’re building trust with your customers and the search engines.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Online Advertising Benefits vs. Traditional Advertising

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online or traditional advertising

What’s better? Online or traditional adverting?

There are many benefits to doing online advertising over the traditional model. One of those is the cost between the two. Traditional advertising, such as billboards or television spots (commercials) can cost quite a bit of money for a single 30-second spot.

Online advertising uses a platform where you are charged by how many times an ad is clicked. This is called Pay-per-click or ‘PPC’ advertising. It’s not nearly as expensive with an average cost per click of 0.60 cents.

With online advertising, you’re getting instant traffic. You could run traditional advertising and online advertising in a race side by side, and you’ll get online customers a lot quicker than traditional.

However, the biggest benefit is that with online advertising is that you can get detailed data on everyone that sees your ads.

You can also split test ads for the same cost, find out who interacted with your ads, where they were from, which ad they liked better, and what converts and what doesn’t. You can then optimize your ads with the data you collected.

Let’s say you ran an ad and 100 people clicked it, but no one bought anything, then you would know there is a problem somewhere and be able to fix it and optimize each ad.

Once you spend money on a television ad, that’s it. No way to optimize it. Having control over your online ads such as when they are shown, and how much money you are spending is crucial for success, while not breaking the bank on ads that aren’t converting.

But running a successful online advertising campaign can be tricky. It takes some knowledge and learning how to setup everything properly to run highly successful campaigns.

There is a lot of competition, and you need every bit of experience you can get on your side.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Making Your Business Stand Out from the Crowd

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stand out with reputation marketing

How do you make your business stand out from the crowd online?

SEO is a great marketing tool. Social Media is a great marketing tool as well. You have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. at your disposal.

Many businesses fill their feeds with discussions about how reliable and celebrated their products or services are. Many have the persuasive copy needed to convince people to buy from them.

All of these tactics are good. Nonetheless, self-promotion alone is not enough to make yourself known to your target market. This is where Reputation Marketing comes into play.

Reputation marketing is about building a positive online reputation, which allows you to use that stellar reputation to gain the trust of your target customers.

With reputation marketing, you now have more authentic content. Content that draws people’s attention to how reputable your business is!

As your customer is contemplating their next purchase, they go through a process to decide if they want to buy. Some of these stages include Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. For some, this process is instantaneous, and for some, it could take months. Your reputation and reviews can help them jump into action!

Use reputation marketing to validate your potential customer’s decision to buy from you!

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Get A Virtual Storefront. Open 24/7.

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be open 24-7

There’s a cost-effective way to be open 24/7!

The information age can be glorious. It gives customers nearly limitless information when trying to make a purchase decision, and it gives business owners like you new and exciting ways to reach those customers. It also makes it of the utmost importance to have a solidified and well-crafted website to make your case to potential customers.

Yes, your website is your virtual storefront. Open 24/7.

Not sure where to start? 

Your website needs to sell you and these six things are proven to do that in the most efficient way.

1. The way that your product or service navigation is organized must be primarily based on your potential customer’s needs, and not based on, say, alphabetization.

2. With featured products or services, you can quickly direct your customer to what they are most likely to need. If the weather is heating up, make sure you don’t feature coats. Make educated guesses to showcase what’s hot for each season.

3. A product or service catalog makes sure your customers know exactly what you offer. It allows them to search through and identify what aspects of your product or service that fit your needs.

4. For each product listing, make sure you identify the benefits, features and product specifications. By ensuring you answer all the customer’s questions, you help them arrive at the “yes!” more quickly.

5. FAQs are found on almost every website. Whether they’re questions about shipping times or your return policy, you want to make sure anything a customer may wonder about is clearly spelled out.

6. Testimonials take advantage of the fact that customers trust their peers more than almost anything else when it comes to buying a good or service. If you have happy customers, make sure you utilize that to sell yourself or your products to new clientele.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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5 Reasons You Need To Use Digital Marketing

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reasons for using digital marketing

Looking for reasons to use digital marketing?  Here are a few.

Customer behavior has changed. Now they go online to research and evaluate brands, products, and services. Your potential customers have gone digital, and so you need to as well.

1. Your prospective customers look online before buying!
Did you know that 81% conduct online research before buying? If your products and services cannot be found online, then you are missing out!

2. It works!
Thirty-three percent of mobile users have purchased from a different brand after seeing advertisements on their mobile devices. So if your website is not mobile-friendly, you’re losing 33% of buyers!

3. It levels the playing field.
If you are a small or medium-sized business, you can take on much larger competitors. To the online shopper, the size of a business is not that important online. If they see you as a business that provides better value, then that is all that matters.

4. It’s cost-effective. You do not have money to waste.
Wouldn’t it be great if every lead who viewed your product or service was a serious buyer looking to purchase? With digital marketing, all your potential customers are targeted and looking for your product or service. Google states a 2.8 times higher revenue growth for companies that use digital marketing techniques.

5. Track potential customers.
You can track customers from the first interaction. Imagine if you could follow your potential customers around and keep promoting your product. Digital marketing will do that for you.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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How To Build Trust with Reputation Marketing

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building trust online with reputation marketing

Using reputation marketing will build trust online.

You might not know that there are many places out there where people can leave reviews telling their experience with your business.

Some businesses choose not to get involved because it might be too much work. This can be a huge business mistake that you will want to fix right away.

In a recent online poll, it was found that 84% trusted online reviews as much as they would a recommendation from a friend or family member. That’s up 4% from last year showing that more people are looking at online reviews and that you need to have reputation management in place taking care of these reviews and making sure you are getting authentic reviews.

Most businesses are starting to see the importance of managing their online reviews, and even getting customers to leave them reviews. With that being said, it is very important not to have fake reviews for your company, intended or not. And it’s always a good idea to know all the popular review sites out there so you can manage any reviews that are being left.

You should never let a bad review go unchecked. This can show people that you don’t care, and are likely guilty as charged. And some businesses have been completely destroyed by bad reviews.

Don’t let this happen to your business.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Effective Social Media Marketing Needs Two-way Conversations

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social media is meant to be social

Social media is meant to be social!

Your social media marketing initiatives must be built on building a dialogue, where YOU speak and listen to your audience and responding to their wants and needs.

Get them to talk. Then so can you listen and respond.

Is your brand into monologues in social media?

It should NOT be that way. You should take the time to listen and respond to your audience. A two-way conversation helps you connect your brand with potential and existing customers on a human level.

Conversations give your brand a personality attracting more potential customers.

Much like in real-world social interactions, a conversation on social media must be two-way. Don’t you agree?

Here are a few tips:

Ask questions. Be genuine about wanting to learn more about them.

  • Ask about their accomplishments
  • Ask about their challenges
  • Ask about their ideal customer
  • Ask how you could help them

When they respond:

  • Ask more questions
  • Answer their questions
  • Respond to comments
  • Give compliments
  • Acknowledge compliments
  • Address complaints

If you’re not doing this yet, don’t you think it’s worth a try?

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

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Why You Need A Clear Digital Marketing Plan

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you need a clear digital marketing plan

You need a clear digital marketing plan.  Here’s why.

How much time a day do you spend with technology? According to CNN, the average American spends 10 hours a day in front of some kind of screen. With eight hours of sleep time, that means that more than 60 percent of your waking hours are spent in front of a TV, phone, or computer.

What does that mean for your customers? The best way to reach them is by embracing digital marketing. Most businesses have some conglomeration of tactics to create an online presence, but without a clear strategy, your presence can turn into random pieces of digital mess that does not contribute to converting customers.

We can help prevent that and help utilize this tool to reach your bigger business goals. A holistic approach means you never have to worry about some tactics going astray.

Still not sure if a digital marketing plan is for you? Well, here’s the best words anyone can hear when talking about business expenditures.

A digital marketing plan for your company can help increase your return on investment. It does this by improving your visibility to potential customers and increasing your sales.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

How To Grow Your Business Through Storytelling

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connect with storytelling

Get the attention of your audience through unique and authentic storytelling!

“A story can cross the barriers of time – past, present, future – and allows us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others,” says Andrew Stanton, a filmmaker at Pixar.

Customers are looking for something that is unique and relatable to them and storytelling is an age-old method that allows businesses to relate to potential buyers.

Here are 3 elements of storytelling that can help turn the mundane into something of great appeal:

Emotion. Take your customer back to those times they will never forget with emotional appeals, such as sympathy, envy, or intrigue. Move them through from one emotional state to another as the narrative unfolds. This only intensifies their connection with your product and brand.

Authenticity. Be honest. Speak truth and life about the brand and the audience it is speaking to. This will grab their attention while also creating a reputation for your brand.

Relatability. Make a connection to your audience. Do your research on who you are targeting. Appeal to your audience through situations they have also experienced, and also challenges they have overcome.

Use these strategies to make a connection with your audience:
  • Make Your Story Centered around their Situation and Needs
  • Make People Feel a Part of the Story Experience
  • Listen & Create a Relevant Context
  • Showcase Your Values

Once you have made an effective connection, your message is absorbed deep in their hearts and minds.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Your Digital Marketing Strategy Needs To Be Aligned with your Business Goals

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digital marketing strategy alignment

What is your digital marketing strategy?

Nearly half of businesses (44%) don’t have a clearly defined marketing strategy. For firms that are active in digital marketing, nearly half do not have a defined digital plan or strategy (47%).

No wonder many small businesses are struggling to understand why their online marketing campaigns aren’t delivering an ROI.

Successful businesses that are running online marketing campaigns that impact their bottom line are NOT doing it merely because their competitors are doing it too, but because they have drawn a clear path to how online marketing can help achieve their business goals.

A Marketing Audit has to be performed for you if you have a digital marketing campaign currently running or had one in the past. The next step is to consult with an expert to identify your goals, budget, benchmarks, implementation plan, and targets — producing an online Marketing Blueprint in the process.

Can a building be constructed without a blueprint? Can a building stand without a foundation? No. These principles hold true for your marketing.

Here are some variables that will shape your Marketing Blueprint:
  • Marketing Audit
  • Business Goals
  • Budget
  • Benchmarks
  • Consulting Services
  • Strategy Recommendations
  • Marketing Services
  • Backup Plan
  • Targets

Your marketing needs a foundation to stand on — your business goals. You need a plan for your marketing with all of the parts working together to reach new heights in line with your goals.

Your goals could be a mix in any of these categories:
  • Brand Exposure
  • Social Media Engagement
  • Website Traffic
  • Sales Targets
  • Target ROI

If you are willing to spend $1,000 to $3,000 a month – or $12,000 to $36,000 a year – then it makes sense to invest in a Marketing Blueprint to ensure a spot-on marketing campaign.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

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