Tag: marketing strategy

9 Ways to Improve Your Web Design

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web design

What makes an effective web design?

Is it the visual elements, or is it the functionality?

Truth be told it is a combination of both. As Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Websites with great usability and function tend to perform better on Google than those just with beautiful design. We want to show you 9 ways to improve your existing website to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck.

Purpose and Function

An exceptional website has a clear purpose, and the function is evident and intuitive. The design of every element and how they come together as a whole should be derived from the purpose and function of the website.

Communication and Interaction

Internet users want information quickly. To ensure you are providing lightning-fast information, you should be clear and concise, using headlines, and subtitles to provide valuable information. Links to the email address or contact form, live chat, and feedback form should also be easily accessible.

Intuitive Navigation

Navigation is a core element in which your website is built upon. The navigation should make sense to your visitors whatever path they wish to take. Navigating from point A to C based on the customer’s journey should flow smoothly without any barriers or friction. Ensure your customers can find the information they are looking for within 3 clicks or less.

Design Consistency

Each design element should match throughout the entire website. This means your headlines, colors, and so forth should all have the same look and feel. Take the time to plan out every detail to ensure your message is consistent throughout.

F-Pattern design & Grid-Based Layout

Ensure your page elements are arranged in a way that is natural for the eye. Studies have shown that people view pages in an “F” shaped pattern. Arrange your content based on a grid to create content that is both aligned and balanced.

Typography and Readability

The text is one of the most vital elements to a website, providing users with necessary information, and providing content for SEO. Create visually engaging type by using attractive and readable typefaces.

Color palette and imagery

Use a well thought out color pallet to enhance your user’s experience. Use contrasting colors for the background and text, while implementing vibrant colors for buttons and headlines to draw the user’s attention.

Mobile-friendliness

The number of devices that users are viewing websites from has increased dramatically over the past few years. Ensure your website is built with a responsive layout.

Loading speed

Take the time to ensure your website is loading at lightning speed. User’s hate when it takes more than just a few seconds to load a page.

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 Ways To Use Reviews as Marketing Content!

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using reviews

If you are struggling with coming up with content for your marketing, then look no further!

Your reviews can be a source of inspiration. Using your reviews as marketing content can help promote your reputation, which in turn helps you to gain the trust and loyalty of your customers.

We know you are busy so we compiled a list of tips you can begin using:

1. Write a backstory of a review to showcase your values, feature an employee, and to appreciate the customer.

Gain the trust of your target audience by showcasing your values, featuring employees and appreciating the customer.

2. Create a storyline around a sequence of reviews and publish it as an article

Storytelling is a great way to get the attention of potential customers. Formulate stories that are relatable and attracting to your target audience. Leave your audience wanting more of your company.

3. Create videos based on your reviews

Create short videos thanking your customers for their positive reviews.

4. Post your positive reviews on your website

Feature your positive reviews on the front page of your website.

5. Post your positive reviews on social media

Post your positive reviews on social media for everyone to see.

Want to learn more? 

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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The Importance of Customer Lifetime Value

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The Importance of Customer Lifetime Value

Want to know about Customer Lifetime Value?

When starting a business, it’s easy to overlook some of the more important details once you start getting a customer base. Most businesses rely on getting as many customers as they can as inexpensively as they can. This may have been the way to do things in the past, but now things have changed.

So what is Customer Lifetime Value? CLV is something that all big businesses focus on because of its importance. It is the measure of dollars coming in from a customer over the entire relationship with that customer to the business. However, since you cannot speculate how long each customer you have will stay loyal to you, you look at it over a certain period of time. Once you start doing this, the data you collect can show you some fascinating things.

One of the things you might find is where your marketing efforts fell short compared to one customer over others. The other thing measuring Customer Lifetime Value can do is help you refine your marketing strategy so that you are targeting the right customers.

There are many benefits that come from analyzing Customer Lifetime Value including maximizing your return on marketing campaigns, helping to identify and reward those customers who are loyal, and managing your customer relationship as a monetary investment instead of counting them as a number.

Huge industry leaders in eCommerce are outperforming all the rest because of their focus on retaining customers. Some eCommerce giants are reporting 60-80% retention rates while others are reporting only a 20% rate!

Do you want to learn more about CLV?

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 Make Your Business Stand Out from the Crowd

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reputation management

Want to stand out from the crowd? Reputation management can help.

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!

At Agapi Marketing & Consulting Ltd. we want to help you ensure that you are delivering the best version of your business to the customer!

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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Keep Your Business’ Remarkable Reputation Online and Get More Customers

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positive online reputation

You do your best to give your customers great service, but does everyone else know that?

Keeping up your business’ good reputation online is just as important as its credibility offline.

Here’s some things you can do to make sure the first thing customers see when they look up your business is a business worth visiting:

  • Make sure your business is listed – Whether it be on niche review sites like Angie’s List, CitySearch, or MerchantCircle, make sure your business is listed on easily accessible and popular review sites to make sure that your satisfied customers have a place to leave great reviews. Don’t miss out on a 5-star review just because your business wasn’t listed!
  • Ask for positive reviews – If you know you have satisfied customers on your hands point them to ways they can express that satisfaction. So earn those stars and raving reviews. Collect them and make sure that they’re published!
  • Google your business regularly – Do a regular google search of your business to get a sense of what customers see when they look you up. Do positive reviews show up first? Or does that one bad review from years ago dominate the results? Make sure to regularly keep up with your online reputation so you can quickly and effectively address any reviews that could potentially hurt your business.

Want to learn more about how to maintain your positive online reputation?

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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Is Your Business Website Fully Optimized for the User Experience?

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website ux

If your company or business website hasn’t been updated, or there are no plans to update it, you should change that strategy.

User behavior is continuously evolving, and one of the most significant changes is that more people are using their smartphone devices every day.

If you have ever used your phone to browse websites online, you may have noticed that some websites are nearly impossible to read or navigate. The reason for this is because most websites are built from a perspective that someone on a computer will visit the site. The way users access a website has already changed drastically.

But design evolution isn’t only about having your website viewable on a mobile device. User optimization encompasses a lot of different factors. Some changes that have happened over the past couple of years include websites having fewer menu options, getting rid of the menu grid or ‘hamburger’ as it’s come to be known, getting rid of bad stock images, and moving the website to a more minimalistic design.

The majority of these changes came from designers and developers constantly redesigning and changing UX (user experience) elements to see how those new designs and changes worked. Big companies such as IKEA have moved to a more minimal design with fewer menu options making it easier for their visitors to quickly find what they need. But this optimization shouldn’t end there.

The future will likely bring more design trends making it easier for visitors to get what they are looking for quickly. After all, a good user experience drives conversions.

Want us to take a look at your website to see if it’s optimized for a great user experience no matter what device your visitors are using? We can do an evaluation and get your website fully optimized.

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 Drive More Foot Traffic to Your Local Business with an Online Presence

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foot traffic

There are many things you can do to get more foot traffic to your door.

One of the things that’s surprising is that many local physical businesses don’t have, or don’t think they need, local SEO such as getting listed on major local business listings.

Not having some type of online presence is a big mistake for companies. Take into consideration that more people are closely connected to their mobile devices more than ever.

People use their smartphones to do everything from ordering pizza, to finding out who has the best price on the car part they suddenly need. And while this is just a small example, you may or may not be surprised that many people go online to check to see if a business has what they need, what the prices are, if they are currently open.

They do these things before deciding to drop by a store!

There are many things that a local physical business can start doing besides having a website online so that they can be found easily by new prospective customers. Getting yourself listed on Google My Business is free, and the page is likely to get indexed very quickly since it is Google.

The next best thing to do is get listed on local directories and review sites. Many people are using these sites to check business reviews and will be able to find your business quickly.

Some other things that you want to be sure to do are building links from local news sources, establishing partnerships with other businesses and of course, utilizing search engine optimization using locally targeted keywords which very well could be easy to rank for.

If all this sounds great to you, and you need more information on how to get started, then know that we can help you get your business in the important places that matter most and help increase your foot traffic.

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.

Digital Advertising Pays Off: How to Find the Platform that Works Best for You?

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online advertising platform

Confused about which online advertising platform is best for you?

Anyone in the marketing game can tell you that online ads can boost your business’ visibility. But if you’re new to online advertising, you might be wondering which platform is right for you and your business? And, where should you start?

One strategy is to start with the heavy hitters. Google AdWords is the top dog in search advertising with 79.79% of the global desktop search engine market share, according to Net Market Share.

Another powerful option is social media advertising. Based on recent lead generation and conversion studies on social media advertising, Facebook is best if your business is B2C: business to end-consumers. As a bonus, there are over 2 billion monthly active Facebook users worldwide, so the odds of finding new customers through targeted ad campaigns are very good.

For the business to business type (B2B), LinkedIn is your best bet. As you may already know as a LinkedIn user, this platform has 500 million users across 200 countries, according to Fortune.

If you’ve already explored these options, don’t worry! There are many more to choose from, each with their own strengths. In addition to Facebook and LinkedIn, social media marketing options (which get your business in front of their impressive user bases) include Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat.

Search advertising platforms get your business priority placements whenever someone makes a search. While Google AdWords is the leader in search advertising, Bing Ads is also a strong option. The widely used pricing model in search advertising is CPC (cost-per-click), where you only pay when your ad gets clicked.

The third main type of platform is display advertising.

There are many options and variables to consider. Feeling overwhelmed? We can help you navigate the options!

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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Your Small Business Can’t Afford to Make these Online Advertising Mistakes

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online advertising mistakes

Don’t make these online advertising mistakes.

Are you new to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) digital advertising campaigns? Or, maybe the time and money you’ve invested in your PPC campaigns haven’t been paying off?

At Agapi Marketing & Consulting Ltd., we are familiar with hundreds of successful PPC campaigns. Take our advice: Here are the top 5 PPC campaign mistakes we see all the time that you and your business should avoid at all costs:

Launching a Campaign Without a Clear Strategy

It’s impossible to measure success without defining clear goals. Ask yourself these two questions: What is your primary goal for this campaign? Who is your target market to reach that goal? Then set up an action plan of specific tasks that will help you reach success.

Taking a “Do-it-all” Approach

As you may already know, PPC marketing is much more complex than it seems. You need to make sure that you have access to a digital marketing consultant.

Effective campaigns address the 3 basic types of PPC traffic separately: search traffic, display traffic, and social traffic. Delivering different ad experiences to each type of traffic increases your odds of success.

Failure to Identify a Realistic Budget

Think of your first few campaigns as tests. They may not be profitable, because you don’t know what will work and what won’t. Your budget shouldn’t be too low or too high. Your budget should be enough to test your campaign for future optimization.

Having Unrealistic Expectations

You may expect to see immediate results from your PPC ad campaign, especially if your website is optimized for SEO. Be patient for the first few weeks of your new campaign.

Not Testing Your Conversion Funnel

Make sure everything is working correctly by using test users. Have them experiment, use the site to perform tasks, and don’t forget to have them test the site from a variety of devices!

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.

Is Your Business Anti-Social? Putting the ‘Social’ Back into Social Media Marketing

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social

Time to get social!

If you’re among the business owners who are posting and sharing content through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, then you’re off to a good start.

But if you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, chances are that’s because your social media isn’t actually very social. Posting and sharing content just isn’t enough!

However, how do you put the ‘social’ back in social media and take your social media marketing game to the next level? By creating opportunities for your customers to get involved in the conversation and get to know you and your brand.

1. Post conversational status messages.

This will humanize your brand. Remind people that your business is run by individuals who care about their products and their customers, not by some faceless corporate machine. Allow your customers to connect with you on a human level.

2. Post videos of yourself talking to your target customers.

As a business owner, showing your face builds trust and, again, humanizes your brand.

3. Ask questions. Hear their story.

Ask about their needs and get feedback on your products or services. The exchange will benefit both you and your customers. You’ll be helping your customers feel like they are a valued part of your business, and as a business owner, you will gain valuable insight about your target customers.

4. Respond to comments.

Being social means engaging in a two-way conversation. When your customers reach out to you, make them feel heard and keep them engaged by responding thoughtfully to their comments.

Do these things, and your business will not only have gone social, but it will start taking off.

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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