Tag: marketing

How To Improve Your Webdesign In 9 Steps

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web design improvement

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 10 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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Managing Your Online Reputation With Google Alerts

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Google Alerts can help preserve your online reputation.

Promoting your brand, along with its good reputation, on social media and other platforms is important. However, things can get a bit complicated when you have to deal with bad reviews.

First, keep a good reputation by being honest, transparent, setting clear expectations for your customer, and by being in business because you genuinely want to help people around you. It goes without saying that shady practices are a no-no.

Second, you have to prevent any dissatisfaction by a customer from escalating by addressing every complaint you get. It has to be fixed at this level immediately while the customer is still trying to reach out to you. Because once they have felt frustrated and think they have to warn others about your practice, things can get messy.

Nonetheless, you have to set your radar for negative reviews. One good way to do this is to set up Google alerts for your brand terms and name.

What else can you do to safeguard your brand?

  • Claim your brand name
  • Build a consistent identity

Whether your brand is your name itself, your business name or your product name, you need to make sure that no one else can misrepresent you online by owning a piece of your brand. Make sure that you own domain names and usernames associated with your brand.

Build a consistent identity on major channels:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Quora

Publish content regularly:

The content you publish will define and reinforce who you are, what you stand for, and what your business is all about. This will make up the values associated with your brand. Anything inconsistent with these values will not be immediately convincing to your customers who know you.

Let me know if you need more information. We’d be glad to help.

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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Benefits Of Online Advertising Over Traditional Advertising

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benefits of online advertising over traditional advertising

The benefits of online advertising are many.

There are several benefits to doing online advertising over the traditional model. One benefit is the cost between the two. Traditional advertising, such as billboards or television spots (commercials) can be very expensive, even 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.

If you would like to learn more about setting up a successful online advertising campaign, then contact us, and we’ll help you get started today.

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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4 Warning Signs That You Need To Redesign Your Website

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Time for a website redesign!

At Agapi Marketing & Consulting Ltd., we want to make sure your business looks great online.

Our experts have compiled a list of 4 warning signs that your website might need a total redesign.

1. Your site takes more than 3 seconds to load

If your site takes longer than two seconds to load, you can not expect people to sit around and wait for the content to show up. According to a survey from Akamai, 49-percent of consumers expect a site to load in two seconds or less. Testing the speed of your website is easy. Open your website on multiple devices such as phones, tablets, and desktop computers to check the speed.

2. Some of the features or content do not display properly

Check your website regularly to make sure logos, photos, and outside links are working properly.

3. Your site is difficult to view and navigate on mobile

Check to make sure your website is usable on a wide range of mobile devices. The last thing you want is to lose a potential customer because your website is not responsive.

4. You’re Not Seeing Any Business Results.

Is your website bringing in leads and sales? If not, then it is definitely time to consider a redesign.

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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Boost Your Website’s Conversion Rate With These 15 Strategies

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Is a low website conversion rate getting in the way of your business’s success?

Here are 15 of our tips to optimize your conversion rate:

1. Find your value proposition. What is it that makes you different from your competitors? Why are you the best choice? Whatever it is, make it central.

2. Have a clear headline. Your headline is the first thing your customers will see on your landing page. Make sure it’s easy to understand and gets your point across.

3. Feature your phone number prominently. Make it easy to find and use a big font to let them know you are accessible.

4. Add a video. A 2-3 min video that explains benefits and features or shows your product in action will capture the attention of your site visitors.

5. Get rid of those cheesy stock photos. Stock photos may be high quality, but they look fake, damaging your credibility.

6. Reduce required form fields. Don’t make your customers put in any more information than the bare minimum of what you need to know. The less work they have to do, the more likely they are to do it.

7. Put your Call-to-Action (CTA) above the fold. Your site visitors should be able to see it without scrolling down.

8. Use a CTA button instead of a link. Text links can be hard to spot. Using a button makes your CTA stand out.

9. Use a contrasting color for your CTA button. Make your CTA button even more visible by choosing a color that contrasts with the rest of your website’s color scheme.

10. Utilize your CTA button’s text. Instead of a plain old “submit,” use your button text to tell your visitors what to expect after they click that button with text like “get started!”

11. Create urgency. Limited-time incentives give your customers a reason to take action now.

12. Display “real” testimonials. Show that your testimonials aren’t fake by using full names and pictures.

13. Display your award badges. Show off any honors you’ve gotten to add wow factor.

14. Add trust badges. Boast about the great reviews you’ve gotten on sites like Yelp, Facebook, or the Better Business Bureau.

15. Add a live chat feature. Live chat support adds value.

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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Say Hello to the Future. Get a Virtual Storefront And Be Open 24/7.

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What does it mean to have a virtual storefront?

The information age can be great. 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? We can help.

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.

Feeling overwhelmed? We’re here to help!

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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8 Questions You Should Be Asking to Win More Customers

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winning more customers

Winning more customers can be as easy as answering these questions.

Wouldn’t you like to know how what your customers are thinking? How are they going to act? Well, you can! You just need to track how your current customers are interacting with your business.

You or someone on your team needs to be continually answering the following questions in order to get to know your potential customers.

How many customers are you getting every month?

Even in the craziness of running your business, you need to make sure you have a way to keep track of all of your customers that you are serving. You also need to make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page and using the same system for tracking.

How many of them are coming from your website?

You need to be asking how your customers found out about you and keeping track of customers that are coming from your site.

Are they coming from your SEO efforts? Social Media? PPC?

You or someone on your team need to be monitoring how users are finding your website to learn what is working for you and what can be tweaked.

What percentage of your visitors are converting?

Track how many people who are coming to your site are actually becoming customers.

How high is your bounce rate?

Monitor the percentage of people visiting who are just viewing one page of your site and then navigating away.

Which pages are most visited?

Take note of the pages that users are going to the most often and see if they are the pages that will lead them into making conversions.

Which pages do they spend most of their time on?

You should study the pages that users are spending a lot of time looking at and see how you can make other pages interesting to your potential customers.

What’s the winning conversion path?

Find out what path the customers are taking to make conversions and make sure that your site is designed around making that path as easy as possible.

Make sure someone on your team is answering these questions often so you can optimize your website design to get a greater number of conversions.

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 Optimize Your Business Website for the Best User Experience

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memorable user experience

You want to provide a memorable user experience, right?

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? Contact us now for 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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Are you using Facebook to promote your business?

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Did you know that Facebook is a great place to promote your business?

A Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner revealed that Facebook is the most popular channel used by 94% of the survey respondents.

Twitter follows with 68%, LinkedIn at 56%, and Instagram at 54%.

72% of B2C marketers project an increased Facebook usage more than their B2B counterparts at 63%.

Are you actively promoting your business on Facebook?

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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Ensure You Have A Clear Digital Marketing Plan

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clear digital marketing plan

Are you marketing without a plan?

That’s a recipe for disaster.

How much time do you spend with technology every day?

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.

So 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.

Ready to create your digital marketing strategy? We can help you shine!

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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