What Goes into Creating Optimal Content and Customer Experience

optimal content

Creating the optimal customer experience requires optimal content.

On the internet, standing out poses a daunting challenge, and at the same time, the best opportunity for creativity and bringing some attention to your site. Adding the extra “POW” to your content will pique a customer’s’ curiosity, build their interest, and over the course of a few transactions, earn their loyalty.

This is achieved through web content that goes far beyond ordinary but without all of the sensory overload. Each aspect of your site should have its own purpose—from the background to the logo to the informative blog. Every part is a solid brick in the foundation of your establishment’s site.

Here are some possible “add-ons” to consider to make your site stand out:

– Demo/explainer videos
– Client testimonials
– A page for reviews
– Informational text that actually informs—as opposed to simply luring the client
– Interactive questionnaire
– Easy-to-follow graphics
– A healthy combination and balance of “all-the-above”
– The compelling story of your business began and most importantly, where it’s going

And don’t forget a user-friendly “contact us” page or even an option for a live Chat with a knowledgeable representative from your company. You’re only limited by your own imagination.

So the time has come to set that staff meeting and do a plus/delta on your site’s current features. What’s working and drawing in an audience, and what’s not working? What is the purpose of each and every feature of your site? What are some viable changes that can be made? Who is your target audience? How can you make your site not only engaging but also user-friendly?

As you can tell, some guidance from an experienced marketing consultant should come in handy. You are the experts in your product or service; so allow some room for the marketing experts to help.

Essential Questions to ask about Customer Experience

User experience with your site can make or break your business. Think about it. A slow interface, a shopping cart that’s difficult to navigate, or even one small glitch can drive traffic away and steer potential customers toward the next result that showed up on the list of search results. So how do you keep this from happening?

Working with a knowledgeable and experienced team of designers and developers can make quite a difference in creating the best customer experience possible. When searching for such a team, you might need to keep a few ideas in mind such as

– Can they reduce my site’s loading time?
– Can they create engaging content that includes images?
– Can they strike a balance between SEO and treating my audience like “real people”?
– Can they build a user-friendly check-out?
– Can they build a user-friendly customer service Chat and/or Email page?

Thus, looking at these many aspects related to a customer’s experience is as vital to us as it is to you. Helping your business to thrive is our ultimate goal and mission. By joining forces with your team, we can assist you in improving the customer’s experience.

What if you’re just barely getting started? We can build on that foundation as well. Either way, we’ll explore several options, analyze data, and minimize as much trial-and-error as possible to get your site running as quickly and smoothly as possible.

So don’t worry about a design that’s full of bells and whistles as opposed to substantial, engaging content and usability. Your clients are the bosses, and we’ll consider both their needs and your expectations of what makes a great, user-friendly site. Therefore, there’ll be no more worries about dead links or useless features. Would you like to find out more about what we can design 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.

 

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

virtual storefront

Do you need a virtual storefront?

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.

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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9 Ways to Improve Your Web Design

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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The Importance of Customer Lifetime Value

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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Reputation Marketing and How It Can Affect Your Business

positive reputation

Creating and maintaining a positive reputation for your business is vital.

And it’s an important aspect in creating a loyal customer base while building your brand.

No major successful or popular brand started out and became successful with a negative reputation. In fact, the reputation of a business has been proven to have a significant influence on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and trust.

Customer retention is something that the majority of big and successful companies thrive on. Customers that are happy are more likely to be return customers who spend more money, and in turn, tell their friends and family about their experience.

Having a reputation marketing strategy in place should be the first thing your company focuses on when building your reputation.

More and more businesses are encouraging their customers to go online and post reviews about their experiences. There are many big review sites out there and the data you get from them can be invaluable to your reputation marketing campaign.

Managing these review sites builds trust and authority for your brand and shows your transparency and accountability. Getting feedback about your business and your brand provides you with valuable insights on where your business is falling short, and how you can improve. Even good feedback can be improved on.

Believe it or not, there are many companies that have failed due to having a bad reputation, and either not knowing, or not doing anything about it until it was too late.

On the other hand, it’s worth mentioning that companies with a good reputation financially outperformed companies with bad reputations in every way.

With a good reputation marketing strategy in hand, your business will benefit from higher brand equity, exponential growth, and a flood of loyal customers with increased customer lifetime value worth 10 times as much as their first purchase.

Don’t wait. Take control of your reputation marketing strategy today, and get started building your businesses trust, brand, and reputation 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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Search Engine Optimization: Are You Gaining as Much as You’re Putting In?

seo campaigns

Are you getting a return on investment (ROI) on your search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns?

You’re not alone if you’re not sure how to answer that question. Indeed, 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is their biggest marketing challenge according to HubSpot.

But measuring the ROI of your SEO efforts is possible, and we’re here to help you do just that.

Here are 3 things that need to be in place in order to calculate ROI:

1. The right attribution model. Attribution models are the basis for allocating credit to each marketing channel. There is no right or wrong attribution model. Each one is different and comes with its own strengths. We’ll help you find the model that’s the best fit for your business.

2. Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You may already have these tools in place for your website(s), and if so, that’s a great start. GSC is a key SEO tool for capturing and understanding website metrics. And the data from Google Analytics (GA) or a comparable website analytics package is crucial for understanding ROI.

3. Marketing automation and CRM. These tools supplement website analytics data by providing data on individual buyers. This helps you ascertain the lifetime value of individual customers, which in turn help you determine the lifetime value of a particular marketing channel.

At Agapi Marketing & Consulting Ltd., we understand that business owners like you don’t have the time to do all of this. We can help you get these important tracking tools in place.

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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12 Ways to Promote Your Business in 140 Characters or Less

twitter

How many characters does it take to promote your business on Twitter?

Actually, in 2017 Twitter doubled the number of characters to 280, so now you can have twice as much fun.

Over 2 billion people in the world are connected through social media, with 20% of the world’s internet users having an active Twitter account.

Twitter is a great platform to boost your business, and we are equipped with the knowledge and resources to help you reach your customers this way.

Here are 12 ways to get started in promoting your business today!

1. Implement Cards
You want every tweet to be unique and attractive, Twitter cards are a great way to do this!

2. Build Your Followers
If your  followers are engaged and well targeted, increasing their number can benefit your business.

3. Identify Influencers and Engage with Them
When you engage with influencers — you’re creating the opportunity to gain more followers, more engagement, and more traffic to your website.

4. Use Lists to Manage Your Contacts
As you follow and connect with higher numbers of people, you need to organize them by categories.

5. Use Twitter Ads to Grow Your Email List
Use Twitter ads for lead generation by directing them to sign-up to your email list.

6. Use the Right Hashtags
Be careful with the hashtags you choose. It may seem that cramming as many as possible is the way to go, but studies show that posts with 1 – 2 hashtags have higher engagement than those with 3 or more.

7. Research Your Competitors’ Audiences
Find out who your competitors are interacting with.

8. Monitor Twitter for Keyword Mentions
Use tools that let users set up search columns so any mention of a particular word or phrase is immediately highlighted.

9. Setup UTM Tracking
UTM tracking adds additional info to links you share in order to track where people clicked on them and what happened after they clicked.

10. Use Your Pinned Tweet
Twitter allows you to pin one tweet at the top of your timeline. When anybody looks at their profile, they see that tweet first.

11. Use Great Headlines
Create clever headlines that stand out.

12. Use Twitter Analytics to Analyze and Optimize
Twitter Analytics let you see how many views and how much engagement your tweets get.

Want to learn more? Let us help you optimize your Twitter!

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 Need to Be Asking to Win More Customers

website design

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.
  • By what percent 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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5-Minute Website Workshop

website review

Time for a website review.

Your website is a vital piece of your business, and we want you to have the most traffic possible going through it every day.

That’s why we put together these “Must-Haves” that you need to be checking on a regular basis in order to ensure you are gaining the most customers possible.

While working through this list we suggest pulling your website up next to this window so that you can properly analyze your site.

First, we will take a look at whether or not the website is correctly designed.

Your website…

  • Must be user-friendly
  • Must set a clear path for customers to make a purchase
  • Must have trust signals
  • Name of the Business Owner
  • Address, Phone
  • Must have security
  • Use HTTPS or Secure Sockets Layer
  • Must have customer support contact information

Now let’s take a look at the answers that the customer is looking for when they get to your website. No matter what point the customer is in the buying process, they are going to have questions and concerns.

You need to have the answers to these questions readily available to them or they will quickly move on to another site that does.

  • Why should they buy from you?
  • What benefits your product/service will give to them?
  • What Features does it offer?
  • What are the technical details and specifications?
  • Where are the guides and tutorials?
  • Do you have any testimonials from real customers?

These are all things that you need to have on your website to ensure the steady flow of customers coming through your site. Even addressing one or two issues that you noticed while reviewing this list can have a major impact on the number of customers you see moving through your website.

If you need help redesigning your site, or creating a new one, contact us.

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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Beat Bigger Brands and Boom your Business

local business

Are you a Small Local Business?

Being small doesn’t matter when you are offering bigger value and personalized services. What you need is to become more visible online to people looking for what you provide.

What are the advantages of being a small, local business that will enable you to compete with bigger businesses?

Here’s a short list:

Technology Tools

In no other time has technology made it easier for us to do business, communicate, promote, and expand our businesses on such a far-reaching scale. The Web, SEO, Social Media Marketing allow us to market our businesses in the same way bigger brands do.

Flexibility with Changing Conditions

Small business owners have way more flexibility to make immediate and necessary changes that are essential to dealing with changing local market conditions. Most often than not, observation, analyses, and recommendations go through many levels bureaucracy before decisions are made at the top. Execution suffers the same delays going down to personnel on the ground.

Personalized Customer Service

You have the opportunity to deliver personalized, unexpected and exceptional customer service.

How does it feel when you are served by the owner of a restaurant you often dine at, and get asked if the food is good and what can they do to improve their menu?

There is something very warm and fuzzy feeling about local interactions for both owners and customers.

Access to Digital Marketing Expertise

There are no longer barriers to access digital marketing expertise when you can hire an expert by the hour to oversee your marketing strategy and activities.

Contact us if you want to seize the opportunities digital marketing can bring to reclaim your domination in your own territory.

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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