One of the most important factors in running a successful sales or service company comes down to proving to your customers or clients that you provide the best options possible for them. One of the best ways to do this is by gathering and sharing a large collection of positive customer reviews and testimonials. This augments your business reputation management efforts in ways that are much more effective than anything you can do on your own.
Consumers are much more likely to purchase a product or interact with a business if someone they trust recommends it. This creates social proof for your brand. This makes directories and social media and the entire friends and followers dynamic so important for digital marketing success. However, in order to reap the benefits, you first need to attract testimonials and reviews.
How to Get More Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Two main methods exist to get more positive reviews sent to you, posted on social media, and added on popular review sites like Google MyBusiness and Yelp. First, you can impress people so much with your exceptional products, essential services, and wonderful customer service that they are eager to spend their time writing up a five-star review everywhere possible. In order to succeed with any business, this is the type of thing you should strive for continuously.
The other way to encourage testimonials takes a more direct route. You can simply ask for them. Remember that it is absolutely not a good idea to incentivized reviews in any way. Do not hire someone to create fake ones or bribe people with discounts or freebies in order to leave you glowing reviews. If you want to succeed for the long-term without risk of penalization from search engines or the general public, keep things completely aboveboard and positive. A simple “Please leave a review if you were happy with your service” or similar phrase may increase your collection.
Some techniques that encourage people to post more positive reviews and testimonials include:
Asking for them directly but not excessively
Providing multiple platforms and options
Engage more personally with customers to build relationships
Show appreciation for customers who do leave reviews
Always ask for permission to use testimonials
Offer incentives wisely – never for positive reviews only
Business Reputation Management Tasks Off-site
In order to facilitate customer testimonials, step off your own website and social media pages and get involved with the biggest review sites online. Claim your pages and make sure that your customers know they have options. Many of these are dependent on what type of business you run and your target audience. Others, like Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn, offer more general possibilities and a higher potential as most people are on these sites as well.
While asking for reviews and directing people to these sites can help, you cannot control everything about the testimonials you get. This is where active business reputation management comes into play. In order to stay on top of your brand mentions online, track them and respond professionally and with excellent customer service skills if you get a negative review. Of course, it helps to encourage more positivity if you engage with satisfied customers as well.
Use Reviews and Testimonials On-site Effectively
Always ask for permission to post reviews or testimonials on your website. If you have ever purchased the product or service online, you have seen positive attributed reviews next to the particular item, on the front page below the fold, in a sidebar, or filling up an entire testimonial page of their own. You have perhaps come across re-posted reviews on a company’s social media feeds, as well.
From a company’s point of view, the ability to use these things in a controlled manner definitely boosts the entire customer experience. Not only do you get more content, which is highly effective at attracting interest from future potential customers and clients, you also get an automatic boost to trust and value. As mentioned above, people are much more likely to make a purchase somewhere recommended to them. Even a picture, name, and testimonial from someone they do not know can help push them over the edge from consideration to pulling out their wallet.
The Power of Brand Advocates and Fans for Digital Marketing
People who take the time to leave reviews become brand advocates and fans. In the entire world of digital marketing, and even before the Internet existed, one of the most powerful lead generation and conversion methods comes from word of mouth advertising. This comes directly from consumers instead of the brand itself, which automatically gives it more credence. It is one of the things that make social media the hottest platform for marketing today.
Getting and using customer reviews and testimonials represents one of the most powerful aspects of digital marketing that can help propel a brand from obscurity to household name status. Business reputation management represents a relatively complex problem for companies who do not follow all the best practices that consumers expect from them. Even those who strive to offer the best products and services and use exceptional customer service methods can end up with a bad review sometimes. While interacting positively with the dissatisfied individual and attempting to transform the negativity into something more useful matters, the best way to improve your audience’s overall impression is to encourage and share more positive reviews and testimonials. After all, the success of any company depends primarily on how the public views it.
MLT Group recently donated design work to help market a theater production from the Rochester Repertory Theater. As active members of the Rochester arts and business communities, we love pitching in to support local art!
Check out one of the posters we designed for the show Wandaleria:
Wandaleriais about the homebody Wanda who one day answers the door to find her prison pen pal, Rocky. The director describes it as a comic-drama, a “working-class, female-focused riff on the Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” See it this fall in Rochester, MN!
Search engine optimization (SEO) remains a top focus of digital marketers across industries and niches. Understanding the basics of keyphrase research and usage, proper tagging, link building, and other on-site and inbound marketing techniques matters for ongoing success. However, leaving your efforts to chance can leave them incomplete or ineffective. If you want to ensure improved traffic, acquisition, and conversion numbers, a technical SEO audit makes sense.
What Is Technical SEO?
When Internet business owners and online marketers think about optimizing their site and its content for the search engines, they usually consider the types of things listed above: keywords, links, etc. However, these only represent part of the picture when it comes to ensuring higher placements on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Technical SEO has to do with website ranking factors that make it possible for Google and other search engines’ bots to find, crawl, and index all of the pages effectively. It is about creating accurate code, ensuring fast load times, improving site security, and optimizing everything from design to database access.
For people without high degrees of technical knowledge, these types of things seem much more difficult and misunderstood than non-technical SEO practices like creating keyword-appropriate blog posts or creating a social media link strategy. However, options exist to make the process simpler. First, you can hire a professional team to take care of these things for you. Also, you can follow the steps below to get started on your own.
Why Perform a Technical SEO Audit and When Should You Do It?
The simple answer to the first part of this question focuses on the fact that badly operating or performing websites do not rank high in search engines. Things like slow load time, security issues, and errors indicate that the website is poor quality and Google should not recommend it to the people searching for information, products, or anything else. From a business owner’s standpoint, a technical SEO audit increases the chance of improving traffic flow, impressing site visitors, and ultimately snagging new customers or clients.
With all of these benefits, you may think technical investigations of your website’s optimization should be done as frequently as possible. Of course, no one has time to do this every day. Also, the search engine algorithms do not significantly change that frequently. Although some set up a monthly optimization check, most audit their sites every six months. If you make massive changes to the website or are aware of a Google algorithm update, do one sooner rather than waiting for a particular date.
Five Steps to an Effective Technical SEO Audit
Now that you understand why and when perform an audit that focuses on the technical side of things, follow these steps to set your site up for SEO success.
1 – Find All the Technical Errors
More than anything else, actual errors on your website will cause more problems with technical SEO than most other things listed below. These errors stop the search engine bots from accessing and crawling all the pages on your website. While crawl errors can cause considerable problems, understanding exactly what they are matters more if you want to fix them. Check for these common errors on your site:
broken links
404 “page not found” errors
messy page URLs
There are free link-checking services that can scan your site and identify broken links. Use them!
When writing the URLs for pages, you want to ensure they’re concise and include the keyword for the page. Doing this helps both readers and search engines understand what the page is about.
Here are some examples:
Here’s a “messy” URL. This is the full title of the linked page, and full titles normally don’t make for good URLs. The keyphrase is at the end, and there are many filler words like “the” and “what” that can easily be removed.
Here’s that same page but with a concise URL. It starts with the target keyphrase and also includes a unique aspect of the page being linked.
2 – Check All Security Features
People and search engines prefer security when browsing, communicating, or shopping online. Although many factors go into overall safety when it comes to constructing a website, one of the most important for SEO purposes is the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) with security built in. If you do not have an HTTPS in front of your website URL, you may put people in jeopardy and end up penalized by Google and other search engines. As more consumers gain knowledge about security issues, they are much more likely to abandon a site if they do not see that S.
Without an SSL certificate, modern browsers will warn users about unsecured connections. You don’t want this on the mind of anyone visiting your site!
3 – Test Website Load Time
Google’s PageSpeed Insights test allows you to understand not only how quickly your website loads for search bots and users, but also gives specific information about what is causing the hang ups. In this world of ubiquitous high-speed Internet access and short attention spans, things need to load in three seconds or less to capture attention. A technical SEO audit must include an examination of how fast your content, navigation, and interactive elements appear on each page.
When it comes to maximizing search engine placements, speed matters. It influences things like bounce rate and stickiness. For a competitive edge over similar websites and content pages, you want all of these numbers to be as good as possible.
4 – Analyze Content and Keywords
Although both on and off-site content marketing and keyword research usually focus on non-technical SEO, they also represent a large part of every website from a technical standpoint. Make sure you focus on individual keyword phrases for different pages of your site to prevent keyword cannibalization. Keyword cannibalization is when you have multiple pages targeting the same keyword—it’s like competing against yourself.
You want to compete with other businesses, not yourself. Avoid duplicate content that can confuse the search engines and make them view all your pages as less focused and thus less important. Likewise, perform investigations to ensure that all of your metadata and descriptions are unique and powerful.
5 – Check for Mobile Friendliness
Google and other search engines reward mobile-friendly websites. The internet is becoming increasingly driven by mobile devices, so you need to ensure that your site looks great and is functional on the smaller screens. Tools like Google’s Mobile Test allow you to see how the layout, graphics, and content work on different devices.
A technical SEO audit done every six months or so ensures that your website is operating effectively for the two main audiences you need to target: your human readers and the bots that index your site.
Unlike traditional optimization methods, technical SEO creates the architecture and atmosphere that all of the content, keywords, and links exist within. Both aspects of your optimization strategy are essential for ongoing Internet business success.
Free Website Audit
Staying on top of your technical SEO is essential to maintaining your search result rankings. MLT Group provides regular SEO maintenance to many clients. Checking and redirecting links, monitoring loading speed, even updating old content—we do what it takes to keep your site running on a solid foundation for great SEO results.
Contact us today for a free site audit from our SEO professionals!
Social media marketing becomes more competitive every day, with almost countless individuals, businesses, and other organizations taking their messages to digital platforms. It’s noisy. It’s messy. It’s relentless. And while data science and analytics paint better and better pictures of our work, social media marketing can still feel like a crapshoot.
Times like these, we can find help in the fundamentals. I’m not talking organic vs. inorganic engagement or reputation management 101.
I’m talking basic principles of persuasion. I’m talking about the Romans, ancient Romans. Togas and legions. Those ones.
They, too, had their communication problems, and like any good writer or speaker, they stole ideas from others (the Greeks) and added a few pieces of their own. Rome’s most celebrated speaker and writer, Cicero, came up with what he called “the five canons of rhetoric,” that is, the five key ingredients to the process of persuasive communication:
Invention
Arrangement
Style
Delivery
Memory
These ancient canons of rhetoric can help us create, frame, and manage social media marketing strategies that are consistent yet flexible, persuasive but not pushy. No kidding. Here’s how, canon by canon.
Invention
“Invention” here means the creation of ideas, topics, and messages. Ancient communicators devoted much of their time to figuring out methods of invention.
What are you going to say? Who are you going to say it to? What does your audience believe in and feel? What about your company, brand, and product is unique and worth building stories about?
Explore these questions and much more to strategize your social media messaging. Don’t keep these core messages fixed forever, but have clear ideas and purposes when you do implement the messaging. Think before you speak.
Arrangement
“Arrangement” for Cicero and his fellow Romans meant the structure of the speech: the introduction, body, conclusion, and so on.
Strictly speaking, we can apply this canon of rhetoric to the individual messages we create. Is there a piece of the post that attracts the eye, a piece that first engages the reader, a piece that calls the reader to action? These are some basic building blocks of many social media posts.
But we can also apply the Arrangement canon more broadly:
How do you organize your messaging so that posts build upon each other? When does it make sense to cross-post between Facebook and LinkedIn, and when does it not?
Create posts that work with each other to build a coherent, compelling story about you. Build an overarching narrative to draw your audiences in and keep them around. (See why a clear Invention process is so important now? As we’ll see, these canons of rhetoric work with each other.)
Style
Style is more straightforward. It’s the tone. The feel. When Cicero spoke before a jury—he was a hugely successful lawyer—he had to make a stylistic call: sarcastic invective or stern Roman Citizen? Appeal to the gods, or appeal to the Senate and People of Rome?
Tone on social media is difficult, to say the very least. Strike the wrong tone and your brand could be dead in the water. Strike the right one and your brand could catch fire (the good kind). As soon as your business has a Twitter account, you’ve got the tiger by the tail. Speak well and keep it happy.
Your best education here is the real-world successes and spectacular failures of other brands on social media. See what audiences genuinely respond to.
Some companies like Wendy’s have made a success of being snarky on Twitter. Arby’s has decided to use food art, memes, anime, and video games references to sell roast beef.
This post (also cross-posted to Instagram) makes a video game reference. It still features Arby’s product, but its emphasis is on engaging and entertaining their target audiences on these platforms (younger folks, to say the least).
On the other hand, during the viral #Laurel vs. #Yanny debate, the U.S. Air Force decided to introduce the unique sound that its A-10 Warthog makes while firing 4000 rounds/minute in Afghanistan.
Yeah, that didn’t really jive with the vibe of the whole thing, and the post was soon removed.
Delivery
Delivery regards the performance itself. Another great Roman rhetorician, Quintilian, went to great lengths describing how the speaker’s toga should be handled during their speech. (Keep it neat at first; then, near your exciting conclusion, let the toga become disheveled to eloquently reflect your exertion.)
Now, no kidding, delivery is more complex—but just as important.
In social media marketing, delivery means deciding which messages should be pushed at what times and on which platforms. LinkedIn for B2B, Instagram and Facebook for B2C, and so on. Your chosen medium and target audience have a very close relation. “Medium is the message” and all that.
Delivery also means incorporating multiple media into your messaging. Mix up the medium you use to communicate. Company photos and other images, gifs, memes, infographics, good old-fashioned text, videos—a healthy social media strategy should rely on multiple channels to deliver messaging.
Finally, timing is a critical to delivery. The ancient Greeks had a great word for this: Kairos. It’s a word for time that expresses “the appropriate time” rather than, say, clock time.
Be sure to post regularly to maintain audiences and engagement. Consider having a regular series of posts that you deliver at consistent times every week or month, like the classic whiteboard Friday from Moz. Post an announcement when your company completes an exciting project. (Remember: “exciting” is defined by your audience and industry.)
In addition to scheduled deliveries, remain flexible enough to respond to any relevant current events and trends. Doing so can be enormously helpful, making your social media strategy more organic, and organic engagement is almost always better. Just wade carefully. Watch that tone!
Memory
And finally, we arrive at Memory. For Cicero, this was simply remembering what he had to say. He and many other speakers over the centuries have had many mnemonic devices to remember their speeches accurately.
For social media marketing, Memory is the part that drives us a little crazy, makes us a little paranoid at night.
Memory is the structure we build to ensure that all our good ideas and plans actually get implemented. It’s the “management” part of social media management.
You have to keep a handle on your Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram—each of which has the potential for great reach and engagement, each of which has the potential for a digital faceplant. You might as well be juggling career-ending katanas.
Thankfully, we have tools to manage our social media presence across different platforms. Hootsuite. Buffer. Sprout. Myriad others. Each has its advantages. Research them. Determine which is best for your business and audiences. Use one, lest your campaign sputter out and join the littering remains of countless social media initiatives on the internet.
Social Media Marketing with the Five Canons
The art of rhetoric, i.e. the art of persuasion, is very old. Above anything else, rhetoric experts have always emphasized the adaptability and dynamism of effective persuasion. These Five Canons blend with each other and are most definitely not a Step 1, Step 2 process.
If you never come back to Invention, your strategy will fail. If you never adapt your tone for the situation, your strategy will fail. Think on your feet. Never stop reading the room. Have a plan, but be willing to throw it out. Social media marketing is a crapshoot. Knowing some rhetoric will help. Smart speakers and writers have been discussing how to best persuade audiences for millennia. Don’t leave all that learning on the table when you sign into Facebook.
Effective search engine optimization (SEO) for your manufacturing marketing needs a craftsman’s approach: methodical, deft, patient.
The target audiences of SEO are always people, not algorithms, as some people think at first blush. You provide real value to your audiences, and the search engine will recognize that and reward your website with a higher relative ranking.
The problem:
People make slippery targets. There’s no way to precision manufacture persuasive messaging like you can gaskets. There’s a reason Aristotle called persuasion a craft rather than a science.
Here are the three basic steps to craft a worthwhile SEO strategy for your manufacturing marketing strategy:
Keyword Research
Content Creation
Backlinking and Citations
Below you’ll find how these abstractions can be applied in manufacturing marketing.
Although you simply must know the technical foundations of SEO, always remember to think about people before you think about algorithms and analytics.
The sales cycle in manufacturing is long. Decision-making is deliberate and rational. Smart SEO will attract visitors and, along with your other marketing, help nurture leads into conversions.
Keyword Research for Manufacturing Marketing
Keyword research is the process of analyzing your audiences, your own company, and your search-result competitors. At the end, you should produce a document that lays out the keywords most worth investing your time and resources into.
Do it right, your website will rank highly for keywords relevant to your business’s services. That means higher quality leads.
Long-Tail Keywords
Develop a keyword strategy that targets what SEO experts call “long-tail” keywords. Long-tail keywords are longer keywords that are more specific queries, e.g. “motorcycle helmet” vs. “bluetooth motorcycle helmet.” “Bluetooth motorcycle helmet” receives considerably less search traffic, but someone searching for it has a better idea of what they want and so is likely further along the sales lifecycle.
Long-tail keywords receive less traffic, but they convert customers more effectively because the person using a specific keyword has a specific purpose in mind. These keywords are also easier to rank higher in search engine results because there’s typically less competition.
Let’s take an example relevant to manufacturing:
“CNC machining” vs “CNC machining services” vs “5 axis cnc machining”
Using a keyword analysis tool like those from ahrefs, we can see the search volume for each of these keyphrases:
Search volume is monthly, e.g. 6600 searches nationwide/month for “cnc machining.” “KD” is keyword difficulty, a metric created by ahrefs to estimate how difficult it is to rank highly for the keyphrase. “Clicks” refers to how many of the clicks on results users performed for the given keyphrase.
Think about the people behind these searches:
Anyone from a first-year engineering student to a fan of How It’s Made, could be searching for “CNC machining.”
Someone who’s searching more specifically for “cnc machining services” or “5 axis cnc machining” is more likely to actually be searching for the service. That makes these phrases efficient targets for search optimization.
If your company can provide 5 axis CNC machining services, then ensure that keyphrase is a part of your keyword strategy.
Research long-tail keywords that are relevant for your services, and use them on your site’s metadata, in your website content, and in any other content (like blogs) you publish.
Competitor Analysis
While you figure out which keywords will best represent and drive traffic to your services, you also need to analyze your competitors for which keywords they rank highly with.
Ranking is always competitive. There’s not an abstract quality you must reach to rank high in search results; you just have to do better than the people ahead of you.
You want to see what they’re doing to rank well. If the top-ranking pages are mostly pages with 1000+ word content with images, links, or other elements, then you know you’ll need in-depth content to have a shot at ranking up with them.
Looking at your competitors’ high-ranking pages will inform how your team approaches content creation to beat them. Which brings us to…
Content Creation
Once you have a solid keyword strategy, you need content to execute it. If you’re serious about SEO for your company, you need to make quality, keyword-optimized content the backbone.
Competitor research also helps determine the kind of content you create. You need to put out better stuff than the high-ranking competitors.
Say your company does precision machining parts here in Minnesota. Check out the top 10 results for “precision machining.”
Results are based on our Rochester location, so you’ll see different results depending on your location.
Read through each of the competing pages to see what kind of content they have to help rank this high. What’s the word count? How do they organize their information? What keywords are being used in titles, headings, content?
Content That Helps You Rank
Remember to keep your audiences at the forefront of manufacturing marketing strategy at all times. The smart use of keywords will attract searchers, but the job of good SEO doesn’t stop there.
The content on your site must keep your visitors engaged and satisfy whatever purpose they had for visiting in the first place. Google’s eternal quest is to track user satisfaction with their search results, so if you optimize a page for “5 axis cnc machining,” it better have the substance to back it up!
When your visitor comes to your website through a search result and sticks around for a while, we call that “the long click.” Google loves the long click because that (more likely) means the user is satisfied with their search and result. That means Google wants to keep your site around, and higher, in their results for that search.
Consistent content creation also matters for optimization purposes. The more you add useful content to your site, the more you signal your website’s credibility and authority. It can also provide more entryways to your website.
For example, if your website has a well-written post about “thermoforming vs injection molding,” you can rank highly for that phrase and pull in that traffic to your site – generating more leads for customers who are earlier in the sales lifecycle and trying to decide which service to choose.
There’s much more to know about content creation for manufacturers, but we’ll cover that in a future post and stick strictly to the aspects of content that relate to optimization here. (This post will be updated when the new post on content drops.)
High-quality content creation is essential for manufacturers—it takes a lot of time and resources to switch suppliers, so you need to make persuasive arguments.
To sum it up for SEO’d content: satisfy user intent!
Backlinks and Citations
A Brief Explanation and Example
Backlinks and citations refer to other websites referring to your website and your company. It could be a link to a page of your website (a “backlink”) or name-dropping your company (a “citation”).
Other sites linking to your site lends your site more authority. Essentially, a backlink is another site stating its confidence in your site.
Backlinks are essential to building your site’s authority in Google’s eyes.
Here’s an example from one of our clients:
Northland Fastening was featured in a commercial by North American Banking Company. North American Banking Company also included a write-up on their website about their long relationship.
When you pursue backlinks from other sites—and yes, you should invest time doing outreach if you’re serious about SEO—it’s best to get links from high-authority, credible sites who aren’t competing for the same keywords.
Some backlinks come from directory sites. For example, if you’re an industrial supplier, you’re going to want a listing and a link from www.thomasnet.com, a longtime name in the industrial marketplace and a website with good authority.
You also leverage high-quality content to get backlinks and references to your site. This veers into content marketing, which can’t be reasonably covered in this post.
Essentially, you want to create high-quality content about your business, your services, your industries, your people. Create informative content to become an authoritative, trusted. Publish content about your people and your teams to humanize your company.
After posting on your website, your best content must also be shared in appropriate platforms for different audiences. It’s easiest to share on social media—and you should do so—but it’s not guaranteed to drive traffic to your site.
You can do some outreach to relevant organizations and people in the industry. For example, if your company has expertise in plastics manufacturing, you could reach out to https://www.plasticstoday.com/, a “community for plastics professionals.”
Their website has a domain authority of 60, which would make them a great domain to get a link from.
You also want to do competitor research again. Use a link analysis tool (like from www.moz.com) to see where your keyword competitors get their best, most authoritative backlinks. Try outreach to get backlinks from the same and similar sources. If you have the right purposes and right content, classic sources of high-quality backlinks are news and education websites.
SEO for Manufacturers
Effective search engine optimization will boost your manufacturing marketing and increase quality leads. This post has focused on keyword research for content creation and distribution. However, there are other critical factors to SEO, like your site’s metadata and other more technical aspects.
It takes time and effort to build and maintain a working SEO campaign, and the information above is just the basic starting point.
To do it well, your team needs skills in research, analysis, writing, and (some) coding. SEO needs a craftsman’s approach. It’s unique for each business, and it takes a set of specialty skills; don’t count on a quick-and-dirty approach to get sustainable results.
If you’re looking for a team who’s got the skills, tools, and time to develop and maintain an SEO strategy, learn more about MLT Group or get in touch with us today. Contact us and we’ll get a site audit to you in 48 hours or less.
That takes time and resources to do right, and that’s why you should be thinking about 2020 now. We’re bringing you this series on content development to help you get started.
Our experience in search engine optimization, website development, and content strategies informs these guides to get your online marketing up to speed. We’re not holding back on the secret ingredient to make content marketing work for you. After all, sharing useful content is what makes for the best SEO!
But if you want help with getting started, figuring out where your content strategy stands, or managing your content marketing, send us a message.
Content Development: The Basics
“Content” is the information and stories that you distribute on your website and everywhere else (yes, even offline).
Don’t think about it like standard advertising, where you pitch your product or service. Content supports your lead and customer during every point of the sales life cycle. Content is NOT simply a fancy-looking, SEO’d sales pitch!
There is a variety of goals for content marketing, ranging from building brand awareness to keeping satisfied customers engaged.
What’s most important is this:
Keep your audiences at the forefront of your content. Write and design for your audience. Provide them with real value. Do not simply create content that extols your brand or product and expect it to be effective.
That said, we’ll kick off this series with the basics: the kinds of content you should be thinking about.
What Kinds of Content Should I Create?
From plain old writing to graphical, video, and audio content, different media have different strengths. A smart content strategy makes the most out of each medium and doesn’t waste time with the media irrelevant to the business and target audiences.
Cover of The Medium Is the Massage, a classic study of media from 1967. (The title’s typo is deliberate.)
Written Content
Historically speaking, writing sits on top of the list of most commonly created content on the internet. Engaging and optimized writing is still essential and will be for a long time. Every website has text, most have blog posts, and the right words spread quickly on social media. It is not enough to just type up some random thoughts and call it a day, however.
As the most popular blogs show online marketers, it takes a unique focus, regular creation, and clever marketing to attract the type of attention you need to profit.
No matter what type of written content you include on or off your website, each piece needs the following:
Purpose – It has to mean something to the people you want to read it.
Keywords – No stuffing, just well-researched and intelligent usage.
Value – Give the audience something that actually useful.
Easy structure – If people can’t access it on their phones or read it easily, you lose.
Brand story – Every piece of content must align with your business’s identity.
Integration – No blog post is an island. Use internal and external links to add value.
These six things do not matter to written content alone. If you do not add value, accessibility, and integration to all the content you create, you miss out on a lot of marketing power.
Graphical Content
While a standard stock photo added to a blog post does augment its value by catching more eyes, it hardly represents an effective content marketing strategy that will grow your business.
No one will share stock on their Instagram account. Taking your own photos of events, brand-specific things, and people associated with whatever you offer is far more likely to drive genuine engagement.
When it comes to graphic content for marketing, infographics top the list. They share data in an attractive, attention-grabbing, and understandable way. They are also easy to share, which helps your content go viral… or at least get more clicks than expected.
People are visual creatures, for the most part, so it makes sense to engage your site visitors and targeted consumers with attractive, colorful displays. It’s the same concept of a retail store putting up a big red “SALE” sign, except with a lot more meaning.
Auditory Content
When you go out to the shops or commute to work on public transportation, how many people do you see with earbuds in?
While most may be listening to music, podcast popularity has exploded over the past year. In the digital marketing world, 2019 could be called “Year of the Podcasts.”
Apple’s most popular podcasts showcase great examples of how any brand can use this content type to expand their reach to new markets and cement their place in the minds of existing audience members.
How do you make a podcast that has the opportunity for success?
Get the right equipment. You don’t have to spend a lot, but a dollar store microphone won’t work.
Understand what your audience wants and needs. Ask them.
Organize what you’re going to say for 15-30 minutes. Make sure you know what you’re talking about.
Engage with interesting guests to spice things up.
Stay on schedule. People are more likely to come back if they can count on you.
Video Content
Combine graphics, audio, and written content, and you have one of the most powerful forms of digital content marketing in existence: video. High-quality video production can bring your business to life on the web, and video content will only become more and more prevalent as our digital economy moves into the 2020s.
According to a 2018 survey, 68% of surveyed consumers reported that they most prefer to learn about new products or services through short videos.
Videos explaining your products and services will lead to better audience understanding and retention, and including footage of your offerings and people will increase the persuasive power of your video.
Don’t only imagine that we mean you have to create a YouTube channel and try to go viral. Though YouTube is the second most popular website, it’s not the right platform for every business and audience.
Each of these types of video can add power to your digital marketing:
Educational Video: They can be used to educate your audience about your products and services, teach them a new way to use your product, or inform them about news applicable to your industry. Remember: give your audience real value! Educational and how-to videos can be excellent for this.
Industrial Video: Industrial videos offer plenty of opportunities for stunning visuals: facilities, products, services, staff, and equipment can be shown in action, adding excitement and powerfully illustrating the benefits and professionalism of your business.
Event videography: Whether you’re putting on a conference, company party, or having speaker address an audience, events offer visual opportunities that can make for a great video. The resulting video production can be retained for training, used for promotion, or even streamed on social platforms.
Search Engine Optimization and Content Development
More than 1 trillion searches are entered on Google every year. You need to stand out.
If you follow the basic guidelines for content creation above, you are already ahead of the game. Most web pages or social media posts online never get any attention at all.
Do not allow your content to fade into obscurity. If you want organic search engine traffic, you need to grab one of those top spots on Google. How?
In order to get high ranks, create content that gives people what they actually want.
High traffic, low competition keywords – In marketing, this is often called “the tilt” – the keyphrases that sit at the sweet spot of search volume and competition. Use them appropriately in your content, with special attention to headings, image tags, and anchor text. Use other semantic terms, too. These are related naturally to the topic at hand. If your keyword is “dog training,” you will naturally talk about puppies, leashes, and treats, for example.
Authority content – Remember that you have to give your audience real value. Share new or unique information. Make it entertaining. Help them solve a problem or abolish a pain point they experience.
Do not ignore trends and timely information – Time-sensitive content gets the search engines (and people) interested. Align some of your content with trending topics.
Link responsibly – Internal linking from one post to another on your own site tells Google your content all focuses on similar things that people find valuable. Links from your site to high-authority ones shows that you include great information. Links from high-authority sites to yours are gold.
These days, creating content that search engines love follows much of the same methods that produces what people love, too. That is, after all, what Google and other search engines strive for.
Adding Value to Your Audience’s Lives
People want information. When they type “how do I train my dog?” into a search engine, they expect to get actionable tips that work. They want a solution to their problems. If their dog chews up the rug every time they are left alone for 30 minutes, the owner desperately needs a way to stop it. If your blog post or video delivers the ultimate answer to stop dog rug-chewing, that piece of content will get shared around the internet and attract a lot of other rug-deficient dog owners.
People want entertainment. The massive amount of people on the internet every day want more than answers to their questions. Internet is overtaking TV as the main form of entertainment for much of the world. Give people something to make them laugh, cry, or at least get interested in for a while.
People want a connection. Today, more than ever before, consumers expect to form a type of emotional bond with the brands they support and buy from. Even if you do not directly sell services or products, your brand is your online identity. Those who read, watch, or listen to your content want to feel like an important part of something bigger than themselves.
Smart Content Development for 2020
Keep an eye on our blog to learn more about the different aspects of content development from strategizing to management. You’ll get the prime info and tons of outside resources to set up your own content marketing strategy.
If you want to kickstart this process with an outside team who has the expertise and time to strategize, implement, and manage your content marketing, let us know! MLT Group’s content development team emphasizes personal relationships, easy communication, and smart strategy.
Contact MLT Group for a free audit of your website, and learn how we can work together to boost your digital marketing.
There’s no shortage of web development and digital marketing experts who will throw jargon and acronyms at you until you lose sight of what you’re actually buying from them. Do your CTAs produce a decent CTR? Or maybe you need to enhance the onsite SEO within your CMS to boost that CR? But—wait—don’t even think about adjusting your PPC campaign until you’ve synthesized your CPC data with your current understanding of your typical CLV.
In the extremely competitive digital marketing field, some try to stand out by dishing out the alphabet soup and convincing you it’s delicious.
It’s possible to cut the crap, talk common sense with a small business owner, and build a website that attracts, converts, and satisfies customers. That’s what good small business website design is all about. Launch a new website with MLT Group, and you’ll understand what you’re buying and how it works.
Continue reading for a guide—including three essential questions—on how to know what you’re buying when you invest in custom web design. Consider it a resource for when you’re thinking of working with someone to develop a new small business website design. You will find no jargon, no acronyms, no bull below—we promise.
Does the developer understand you, your brand, and your audience?
Knowing is half the battle, as a great sage once said. Any small business website design worth its salt begins with a robust discovery process. That means you sit down with the design team who will ask and learn about your business, brand, and audiences. This conversation informs how the designers, programmers, and writers will approach your website.
A web development team that takes discovery seriously won’t just take this meeting and call it good. Discovery continues throughout the process as both the business owner and the development team think, work, and learn more about the project. Perhaps new research into likely site visitors will change the language used on the homepage. Maybe your business just won an award or earned some other recognition, and you’d like it emphasized on your website.
For this to work, open communication is vital! Both the development team and the business owner must be familiar with each other and maintain open communication. Good development teams will take the lead with progress updates, questions, and submissions for your review. They’ll prod you for feedback and explain their choices. Beware the jargon: if these conversations become bogged down in technical terms, you’ll begin to lose sight of where your money is going.
Will your site attract visitors?
Your money goes much further when your development team can build a site that attracts visitors who Google search for words related to your business. What’s the point of building build the most beautiful dream home if there are no roads to it?
How are these “roads” to your website built? Through detailed research into your audiences’ search patterns on the internet. Knowing how your audiences tend to use Google and other search engines should inform the design, building, and writing of your website. Once this research is completed, solid developers will send this research to you to ensure that it matches your business—and smart developers will ensure this research report is understandable. Without clear communication, misunderstandings early in the process will inevitably lead to delays in your new website’s time to market.
The header of the MLT Group “Digital Marketing Scorecard,” a quarterly report submitted to individual clients that clearly communicates their website’s performance, including traffic numbers, conversions, and recommendations. Clear communication makes a web development team more accountable for results.
Another related but distinct part of attracting visitors is the mobile design of your website. Your website simply must look good and be easy to use on mobile devices in 2019. Most people nowadays use their phones or tablets to search on the internet. Make sure you ask about your site’s mobile design. If you’re not getting a design specifically for mobile screens, run for the hills.
Does your website convert visitors to customers?
Savvy designers will compose a beautiful website, and smart researchers, developers, and writers will build the roads to it. Once your website attracts visitors, it must convert them to satisfied customers.
By far, the best thing you can do to ensure your website converts visitors is to use a custom design and build. A custom design accomplishes several things for your small business.
A custom design for your small business’s website will make your business appear more professional and credible.
Custom work will also ensure your website suits your brand and audience perfectly.
A custom website design makes your website easy to navigate for visitors. The navigation of your website—its menus, page arrangements, links, and so on—should be clear at a glance, and it should be tested to ensure ease of use.
Above are the desktop and mobile designs for Coyote Creek Gun & Archery, located in Rochester, MN. Each carries the same branding, but each design also guides the visitor’s navigation in a way that suits the platform: for example, large images and space on the desktop, and large buttons and a “call” button on the mobile.
If you want to make sales and move money, you need something custom for the job. Don’t rely on a preset theme to carry your business online.
In addition to custom design, compelling writing on your website will engage your site’s visitors to think and act. The writing for your website should be informative, adding real substance about your products, services, and brand. The writing should also be persuasive. Returning to the discovery process, a good writer working on your website will know the right levers to pull to make your audiences convert from visitors to customers. Whether that means appealing to emotions, logic, or your company’s great reputation, a writer working a custom job for your site will ensure your website makes a great argument to visitors.
Homepage for 12 for Health, a wellness program. The first text visible to a visitor is a strong call to action: “Go beyond traditional health programs.” A good web development team will write custom content for your site that includes strong language that speaks directly to your audience rather than simply saying how great your business is. (Though that’s important, too!)
Finally, a custom website will include the final steps your visitors need to become customers. That could be forms that they fill out (like “request a quote” or standard contact forms) and/or a cleanly designed eCommerce shop for them to purchase the product or service.
Know What You’re Buying
It’s easy to spend a lot of money on a small business website design and not really know what you’re getting. Digital marketing has plenty of jargon, acronyms, and snazzy terminology to hide behind. Digital marketing can be extremely powerful and grow your business, but you have to cut the crap when working with an outside development and marketing team. Remember and return to some of the fundamentals in this guide to ensure you really know what you’re buying when you’re spending money for small business website design.
If you want a small business website design partner that’s rabidly anti-jargon, practical, and results-oriented, learn more about MLT Group. Having built websites and implemented digital marketing plans for over two decades, we’ve seen trends come and go, acronyms rise and die, common sense terms turn to jargon. We keep up with the latest research and design trends, but we’re not going to pretend that showing off our expertise with jargon will help us or our clients succeed. We work for results.
Interested in a free audit and proposal? Contact us using the form below, and we’ll get back to you in two business days or less.
Even the newest online business owner can imagine that the more places their website URLs appear online, the better the chance they have of getting noticed. However, spreading links all over the web without a plan makes as much sense as dropping leaflets from an airplane to advertise a new restaurant. In order to get the right link in front of the right audience, you need to build a smart citation campaign.
After taking action on this plan and growing your collection of purposeful citations on the right platforms, you may enjoy one of the most magical parts of digital marketing in existence. Your web of influence will grow automatically when loyal customers or clients start talking about you online—creating “citations”—without much effort or additional investment on your part. So, how do you start on that path? Let’s explore the digital marketing power of citations.
What Is A Citation Anyway?
To put it simply, a citation is any mention of your business on the internet. They do not require direct links to your company website or other unique platform, although that always helps. Your listing on a high-level professional directory is a structured citation. A customer who posts “ABC Company is awesome!” on their Instagram page gives you an unstructured citation. Both provide great benefits for your overall marketing efforts.
The example below demonstrates an unstructured citation: a reference and link to MLT Group that wasn’t prompted and that appeared organically on the web.
Something called co-citation also exists. When two different websites or pages mention the same source, that mention is called a co-citation. This does not include direct links. So, if ABC Inc. and XYZ Ltd. both mention your company as their source for quality information, Google gets excited and assumes that your website must be quite valuable. You have very little control over this type of thing unless you engage in a targeted guest blogging strategy or similar. Provide top-quality content that people want to mention, and it will happen organically.
Citations are a part of that age-old search engine optimization practice of link building. It would not make much sense for you to mention your company name somewhere without attaching the website address unless, for some reason, it was not allowed and your brand just came up in conversation.
Proper NAP for Citations
When it comes to geo-specific businesses that have physical locations or service areas, local citations matter more. These require the exact same name, address, and phone number (NAP) each time they appear online if you want maximum benefits. While you cannot control a customer posting something incorrectly, your structured citation plan must start with a decision about the precise NAP you intend to use everywhere.
For an example of a structured citation, see MLT’s listing below in the local chamber of commerce directory. It accurately lists our NAP and is one of many places on the web that includes this information.
Google and other search engines want consistent information. If your business is listed under different names or at different addresses, it looks sketchy. Before you begin building local citations, seek out inconsistencies and mistakes and try to correct them.
What Citation Building Does for SEO
In Google’s constant quest to bring the most effective search results to its users, they constantly find new ways to weigh everything from keyword phrases to links to vague mentions of your business. Google commands about 90% of global searches, so focusing on what Google wants makes sense in the digital marketing arena. Many online business experts constantly provide new information about what, exactly, that is.
Throughout its history, SEO focus has flowed from keyword stuffing to crazed levels of content creation, to machine-gun link building, to something that makes a lot more sense for actual people. Structured citations on directories give people information about what companies offer the products and services they need. Unstructured online mentions build brand authority. After all, why would a random customer post about your business unless it mattered in some way?
Number, accuracy, and positioning of citations all affect search engine positioning in really common sense, user-friendly ways. The more your NAP appears, the more important your brand looks in the industry. Correct information always outranks messy, inaccurate mentions. Where the citations occur matters a lot, too. Link building on popular sites is obviously more effective than spamming your link on trash sites that no one ever looks at.
Local Optimized Marketing Specifically
According to recent statistics, 86% of consumers find local businesses online. If your company operates in a specific geographic area, local citations are one of the most powerful options for improved SEO and rankings. Accurate and consistent NAP show potential customers and clients who you are and how you do business.
Taking an active approach to building local citations prevents the potential penalties and confusion that leaving things to fate often brings. This includes company information positioning, dealing with inaccurate or unflattering mentions, and maintaining control over how your brand appears online.
Where Do You Want Citations Online?
The more high-quality, on-topic, and positive citations you have online, the better. This answer makes sense from a logical point of view. The average consumer needs to first become aware of your brand through a mention or marketing, hear about it a few more times to build comfort and recognition, and then finally make a decision about doing business with you or not. It increases the chance of someone coming across your brand information and makes Google happy.
Structured citations such as regular business listings on directories create a type of extended platform that builds on your website and social media pages. Unstructured citations create something called social proof. People care more about what their friends – even relatively unknown social media friends – are doing than what businesses say about themselves. Even if you run the quaintest Mom-and-Pop shop, consumers will trust someone they know saying, “Hey, you should shop there” over you saying how great your bargains are. The Facebook “Like” button is a fundamental example of the social proof concept in action online.
A combination of every type of citation makes sense, although you have little control over where a person might mention your company on their own. For what you can control, however, focus on website authority as a guide.
Understanding Domain or Website Authority
Online marketing master site Moz developed the concept of domain authority to help business owners and strategists figure out how they rank and how they can improve it. Authority goes up, you rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Most of the determinations for this website or web page authority are a matter of common sense. Does the site itself rank high? Do a lot of people visit it? Does it have a high amount of positive citations itself?
Every website has a specific value based on a very complex system that ranks the power of link backs and other factors. To explain it in the most basic way possible, the value of the sites that your links are on matter an awful lot.
Platforms for Citation Power
Your company exists in a certain industry, and you should know the most popular websites and other pages that people go to for the niche-specific information. If not, start researching as this knowledge can form the foundation of your overall marketing strategy. Also, understand that social media matters more than static websites in this socially connected world. Video is hot, podcasts are rising quickly, and mobile apps outrank a lot of other online access types.
Where should you build citations? The simple answer to that question is “Wherever you can!” although you should definitely shy away from poor-quality, low-authority sites. With the goal of improving Google rankings, it makes sense to start with the internet giant itself.
Google My Business directory pages provide not only a SERP-friendly platform to claim your place on the internet but also helps you maintain accurate NAP. Claim your Google My Business page, fill out everything properly using keywords and eye-catching graphics that help build your brand, and consider using the integrated web 2.0 site for more benefits. Below is MLT Group’s Google My Business page in action. This information is often the first thing a potential site visitor sees, so make sure to get it right!
Next, focus on business citations for both global and local reach on associated directories and review sites. Other search engines like Bing and geo-focused sites like Yelp are musts. Double check your NAP and make sure you have no double listings. Also, get citations on specific platforms. If you want to market a physician’s office, make sure you show up on HealthGrades. If you run a travel agency, TripAdvisor is a must.
Local citations affect rankings considerably, too. Look for geo-specific directories, business collectives, state commerce lists, and even neighborhood social media groups. You already know not to spam your business name around randomly, but it would not hurt to become active in the community you wish to serve.
Remember that whenever someone mentions your company name or brand information, you get a citation with the power to improve your marketing automatically. You cannot really control where someone will bring it up, although you can suggest existing customers and clients leave reviews. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest work well. YouTube still provides a great option, too.
Track Everything: The Digital Marketing Mantra
If you fail to collect data and analyze it, your online marketing efforts of any kind are probably wasting time and money. Keeping track of your citations matters if you want to intelligently build your online presence and power. You need to ensure your NAP stays accurate, your links point in the right direction, and your mentions are providing benefits rather than detracting from your brand message.
Keeping Track of Citations
Various free trial and premium tools exist that search for your citations online. You could also just do comprehensive and specific Google searches for your company name, website URL, or any unique brand designations that people may use to mention your business. Track citations regularly so you know how your business stands in comparison to competitors.
Structured citations should pose no problems. These are the mentions you created yourself on top directories and review sites. They should not change after placing them. Just occasionally check them to ensure they’re still around and still 100% accurate.
Unstructured citations remain mostly outside your direct control. If someone posts something negative or on a low domain authority website, you cannot send them a message to remove it in most cases. Dealing with bad reviews is a matter for customer service actions, not citation building.
How Citation Data Helps You Succeed
Every piece of information you gather about your company’s reach and influence online matters. When you know the number and location of citations, you know where to focus your efforts. Do you need to extend your mentions to a new directory? Is your presence weak on a certain popular social media platform?
Things change all the time online. Competitors who manage their citations better can squeeze you out of the top-ranking results pages. Everything depends on comparative standing, after all. If a town has two plumbers, the one that stands out the most for the right reasons is going to get the bulk of the business. If your citations fail to engage and impress new consumers, growth stops.
The digital marketing world involves so many moving parts you have to wrangle in order to reach those coveted top Google positions and attract people with their wallets wide open. Citations come into play in all the strategies that have long benefited brands: content marketing, search engine optimization, boosting social proof, and direct advertising. Whether you place the mentions on purpose or conduct your business to inspire customers or clients to create beneficial citations for you, they play a considerable role in how the search engine algorithms and the buying public view your brand.
Start Building Your Citation Campaign Today
A strong citation campaign will build more roads to your website and help to generate leads and organic engagement. So, ready to boost your digital marketing power and grow your business? Contact MLT Group today for a free consultation and quote and learn how our digital marketing services can build a smart citation campaign for your business.
Have you been thinking about doing a website redesign?
If you have, there’s a lot to consider.
You have to think about budget.
You have to consider whether or not you’ll use a custom web designer or template solutions offered by companies like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace.
In the changing marketing landscape of 2019 and beyond, you’ll have to consider how a potential website redesign fits into your content marketing strategy.
If you go through with a redesign, you’ll want to focus on elements that affect your site performance, ability to build your brand, and keeping up with Google’s ever-changing standards.
In today’s guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know if you’re considering a website redesign. By the end, you’ll have enough information to make the best decision for your business.
How to Think About Your Website Redesign Investment
If you’re on the fence about whether or not to do a site redesign, you can break down the decision into two separate buckets:
Definitely need a redesign
Potentially need a redesign
We’ll walk through each option. Depending on your business, revenue, marketing budget, and more, you’ll be guided through either of these three paths.
Before diving into each, let’s talk about the idea of investing in your own business, especially in marketing and design.
There’s a right and wrong way to think about investing in your business.
The right way? Carefully make a decision with the right mindset. Yes, you need to take things like cost into account, but you should never make it the sole criteria for your decision. Failing to invest in marketing out of fear can leave a lot of opportunity and profit on the table.
The Hidden Cost of ‘Cheap’ Marketing
Nathan Gotch of Gotch SEO talks about this in his post about Why You Should Never Choose ‘Affordable SEO Services’:
I get it. You want to squeeze as much profit out of your business as you can. But there are some things in life that you never want to go “cheap” on.
SEO is one of those things.
First, cheap SEO will likely land you a penalty. So, even if the low-quality tactics work in the short-term, you will end up getting nailed later on. If your site gets penalized, you will have to hire another agency just to get the penalty removed. Once your site gets a penalty, it’s a long road to recovery. In fact, your previous traffic levels may never recover.
And these are only the visible costs.
You also have to take into account opportunity and time costs. If your site gets penalized, you will have wasted precious time and capital.
The same thinking applies to design.
No, you don’t need to necessarily shell out top dollar for a website redesign, but failing to invest enough in your website design can lead to unintended consequences down the road:
Having to redo your design for performance issues
A site design that doesn’t reflect the quality of your business
Failing to meet the tastes and standards of your target audience
Think of the people in your audience. Think of the impression a well-designed and high-function website would have on them vs. a slapped together design that lacks originality?
Appearances in design matter for both your customers and the performance standards Google uses to rank websites. If you can afford to make a solid investment and the decision makes sense for your business, make the smart choice that pays off in the long run.
Signs You Need a Website Redesign
There are some clear cut signs to take the next step for your website. These signs include things that can definitely hurt the performance of your business on Google or lower the quality of your brand.
If any of these signs ring true for you, it’s time to level-up your website.
Your Site Isn’t Mobile Optimized or Responsive
Imagine you’re looking for a product online using your phone.
It’s tough to navigate because the site doesn’t fit on your screen.
It loads slowly.
Since the website doesn’t work well on your screen and you’ve had tons of experience with sites that do, you’re not impressed with the quality of the business, so you click away.
You move onto a website that loads quickly on your phone. You can tell the design was made for phones. The information you’re looking for is easy to find and shown in a professional way.
Which website are you more likely to buy from?
On top of the impression, you’re leaving on visitors, a site that isn’t mobile optimized leaves a bad taste in Google’s mouth.
When Google flat out tells you it’s doing something, take their word for it. We build all of our sites using responsive web design, meaning your site design looks great on any device. Ensuring a positive user experience for everyone means your site will perform better.
Your Website Is Just…Old
If you’ve had the same website design for more than five years, it’s almost certain you’re behind on either visitor preferences or search engine standards.
Old website designs miss the mark in many ways:
User experience – User experience (UX) has become a growing factor in not just design, but content marketing and SEO. Google continues to work on sites that do everything well, not just standard SEO techniques.
Preferences – Think about it. People use the internet now more than ever, especially on their devices. They see great looking websites every day, which means they expect quality businesses to have quality sites, period. Odds are, a site that’s half a decade old doesn’t exactly scream professionalism.
Brand – Has your business stayed the same in the past five years or has it grown? Shouldn’t you have a design that reflects the growth of your business and brand?
Often, we have clients who ‘know it’s time.’ If this is you, what are you waiting for?
Your Website Gets Traffic, But Not Enough Leads
Many experts say the average conversion rate for a website is anywhere from 2-5 percent.
This means if your website receives 1,000 visits per month, 20-50 people should either sign-up to your e-mail list, fill out a form on your website, or call your business directly.
If you’re not getting this type of conversion rate, there are a few potential reasons why:
Calls to action – If you don’t use the right calls to action with your site copy and design, e.g., using buttons instead of hyperlinks, you’re not making the next step for your users obvious enough
Lack or lead capture elements – A ‘sign up for our newsletter’ form tucked away in the sidebar of your page isn’t going to do a great job of collecting leafs
Confusing design – If your website doesn’t make the next step clear and easy to take by doing things like having a simple menu, using forms, and properly placing CTAs, people are going to leave your website instead of convert
Our design philosophy includes the idea that you should make it as easy as possible to take the next step. This makes for a better user experience and an overall increase on the metrics that matter to business owners.
Signs You Might Need a Website Redesign
There are times where a website redesign isn’t urgent, but could still make a positive difference for your business. In these cases, it’s important to weigh the benefits of moving forward.
Some possible reasons you might need a new website redesign are:
Rebranding your business
You bought a new business
You’re entering a new market
Let’s take a look at each scenario.
Rebranding Your Business
Often, businesses will rebrand because they’re looking for a fresh start.
Maybe you founded your company and website a while ago and you need your brand to speak to the current market.
Maybe you want to rebrand because you’ve seen competitors in your space updating their brands with design, content marketing, and more.
In any case, there are some important questions to ask yourself before going through a rebrand:
Ask yourself ‘why’ – Simply articulating the reason behind wanting to change your brand can bring out great insights you can use in the design process
What does your audience want? – In our guide on B2c marketing, we touched on the idea of having a deep understanding of your audience — where they hang out, why they buy, and who they trust in your industry, knowing the answers to these questions makes sure you create a new design with a brand that matches the needs of your audience
What direction is your industry moving in? – Almost all audiences are moving toward preferring a professional, up to date, responsive web design. Your industry may be trending toward more online inquiries as opposed to phone calls. Pay attention to the actions of your current customers and potential customers to see how design trends are affecting their behavior and act accordingly.
You Bought A New Business
When you buy a new business, you have the option of retaining their brand and marketing or changing it. If you’re looking to update a brand with a website redesign, here are some important items to consider:
Business philosophy – Often, if you buy a business, you’re betting on being able to improve the quality because you see a new direction for the company. If this is the case, a new website with a new company and updated information about the company leadership makes sense.
Reputation – Each business has a reputation that impacts how it performs in an industry. This ties into the point above. If you want to reshape the reputation of the business you bought, a redesign helps you establish a new presence under your leadership.
Name – Again, tying to the point above, if you’re looking to really change the identity of a business by changing the name, a web redesign may be a necessity.
You’re Entering a New Market
Maybe you’re adding products and services to your business to capture a new related market. You’ll definitely want to have a menu with pages and content that reflect the new market you’re trying to serve.
Often, a total website redesign can help you think holistically about the entirety of your new business, which can lead to many changes including design, content, and marketing strategy.
Entering a new market can mean hiring new employees, too. You’d want to update the employee information on your website and focus on design and copy that attracts the new employees you want if you’re still hiring.
Conclusion
A website redesign can help you move your business in the right direction. Working with a smart web design agency can mean the difference between a decent site and one with all the performance, style, and marketing techniques needed to move the needle for your brand and the bottom line at the same time.
Are you interested in taking the next step? If so, fill out the form below to get a free marketing proposal in 48 hours or less.
Does b2c marketing require a different skill set and strategy than b2b marketing?
Yes and no.
Marketing has foundations you should learn regardless of the type of business you run.
Once you master those, it’s important to learn the difference and nuance that comes with your niche.
Most business owners run into the same problem. They think too much, fail to make decisions, and treat marketing as an afterthought instead of the core of their business.
In this guide, we’ll break down the marketing foundations you need to know and the specifics for becoming a top business in your b2c marketing niche.
Marketing 101 – The Basics All Business Owners Need to Know
Often times, business owners focus on the wrong topics when it comes to marketing.
They focus on tactics and asks questions like:
“Should I do SEO?”
“Which social media channels should I be on?”
“Do I need to run PPC ads?”
Those tactics are secondary. First, you need to focus on the core pillars behind your marketing. After, the insights you gain from building those foundations will guide your decision making when it comes to the channels you want to use.
So what are some of these foundational elements of marketing?
Unique Selling Proposition
This is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. Often incorrectly. Having a USP isn’t about making a sexy mission statement. It’s about answering these two simple questions, famously pointed out by advertising legend David Ogilvy:
“What does the product do and who is it for?”
Seems like a simple question right?
It is simple, but if you never take the time to truly consider that answer, you won’t be able to create the right content, sell effectively, and convert casual browsers into buyers.
I’m guessing you want our answer to that question.
It’s simple.
We provide content marketing and SEO for business owners who want to grow their businesses.
Notice our USP had nothing to do with increasing traffic, specific tactics, or a super niche audience.
Not all marketing agencies look at their services as a tool for their customers to grow their businesses. All of them look at their services as a tool to grow their own businesses, however.
There’s a stark difference between vanity metrics and the type of content marketing that moves the needle for your business.
When it comes to your business, think of this answer deeply.
You could own a carpet cleaning company. So the answer to the first question is simple. You provide carpet cleaning services, but the who it’s for part of the equation varies.
Here are some examples:
Commercial businesses who need regular upkeep
Homeowners looking for an affordable solution instead of needing to replace their carpets
Commercial business and homeowners who take great pride in the appearance of their businesses or homes
And creating a USP doesn’t mean you can’t serve people who aren’t directly related to it, but it does mean your business has a focus that you can use in the marketing and sales process.
Audience Definition
If the answer to “Who is your target audience?” is anyone who will buy your product. You’re not on the right track.
Defining your audience needs to go above and beyond simple metrics like age demographics and yearly salary. Those are important, but defining your audience goes deeper.
Sales are about emotion, not logic. You need to understand how the people in your audience think — about themselves, about the industry your in, and about the transformation your product provides.
You need to know the hopes, fears, desires, and frustrations of your audience.
For our audience, we’re looking for people who see past the shiny aspects of marketing and understand its a tool for the growth and reputation of their business.
We know how many business owners are hesitant to invest in marketing because they haven’t found the right fit, but see the coming trends and realize they need digital marketing to stay competitive.
They want digital marketing to be like a salesperson and brand advocate for their company that draws leads in. They see that marketing and business growth can free up time and money to improve their product, hire more people, expand their offering, and build an industry dominating brand.
Business owners who only look at the bottom line and nothing else are not in our audience. The same goes for business owners who want fast results or see marketing as an expense rather than an investment.
That comes across in our marketing in many ways:
We write insanely in-depth and informative articles
We don’t offer pre-packaged solutions that anyone can replicate
Our business model attracts people who spend time learning about marketing
Even if you’re in the b2c market, understanding your audience is just as important, if not more, because b2c businesses often have audiences with more choices and shrewder buying behavior due to a large number of products available in the space and social proof metrics to pay attention to like reviews.
This does mean using tactics like:
Creating customer avatars
Doing market and competitor research
Surveying current customers to find additional wants and needs
But these tactics are derived from the philosophy that you’re trying to deeply understand your audience instead of trying to sell to anyone who will buy.
Long-Term Thinking
Shortsightedness kills businesses in a variety of ways. Shortsighted business owners don’t invest enough in marketing. They can also invest too much in marketing because they believe marketing can help sell any product (marketing only helps sell good products).
If you’re going to become a master marketer or work with an agency to take care of your marketing for you, you should think in terms of years instead of weeks or months.
As Neil Patel explains in this video, the average time it takes to rank your pages on Google depend on a variety of factors:
In your case, unless you’re not willing to experiment and take time for your marketing strategies to work.
How B2C Marketing Works
We’re all B2C customers.
The easiest way to put yourself in your customers’ shoes is to think about how you buy products.
Do you buy products from random banner ads? Statistics says less than two percent of traffic goes to these type of advertisements.
You shop differently for different products. You don’t spend as much time mulling over which toothpaste you choose vs. which car you buy.
Often, you rely on word of mouth or reviews. More or less so depending on the type of product you buy.
Yes, you do make impulse purchases, but why? Often, an impulse purchase is for a product you’re already primed to want, quickly solves a problem or need that you have, uses great copy and messaging to persuade you to buy, and is in the right price range to justify the purchases.
It’s useful to go outside of yourself and think of the way you would look at products in your industry.
For a quick example, we’ll use carpet cleaning businesses again.
Carpet cleaning is more of a commodity product. It’s the type of product you’d search on Google and perhaps purchase services from relatively quickly. This insight would let you know that a tactic like SEO might work well for your business over the long run.
People might also buy your services based on your brand and reputation. This comes into play with local carpet cleaning companies and others niches like real estate where companies like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor have established named.
Insights like these let you know to focus on building your brand over the long-term to get more customers and build brand awareness on search engines.
This is an important step to take before you even dive into tactics — simply having the awareness and empathy to see your product in the eyes of your customers.
You’d be surprised how much of a blind spot this can be for many business owners, maybe even you.
You can want your business to succeed badly, but if you want it to succeed so badly you adopt a “build it and they will come” or “build a better mousetrap” mentality, you can miss out on great insights or take shortcut, both of which cost you the customers you want so bad in the first place.
All of these strategies are dependant on your business and niche, but here are some things to think about when it comes to putting together your b2c marketing campaign.
Stages of Awareness
How aware of your business does a potential customer need to be before they purchase?
What is the average time it will take to get them to know, like, and trust you?
What steps and techniques can you use to move them through the stages of awareness?
When we sit down with business owners, we focus on moving customers through the stages of awareness.
Often, we’ll begin with an SEO and content marketing campaign – writing blog posts, building backlinks and getting traffic to their websites to build awareness around their brand and communicate in a way that convinces people to trust their brand.
Attraction can work with different Mediums depending on the business. A business like an e-commerce business could have a much shorter awareness cycle and a strategy like paid advertisements might be the best fit.
You need a way to convert these visitors. Paid ads can be used to convert people into buyers or get them to sign onto your email list to educate and persuade them further. Either way, you need to be able to answer the question “How do I get the visitor to take the next step?”
The answer to that question leads to additional tactics like:
Calls to action
Whitepaper offers
Pop-ups
Landing pages
And more.
You have to focus on closing the sale by doing things like answering potential objections and reassuring your potential customer.
And immediately after the sale, you must ensure an excellent customer experience to avoid pitfalls like buyers remorse and refunds.
Let’s take a look at some of the channels, platforms, and strategies you can use to enhance your b2c marketing, move people through the stages of awareness, increase your brand equity, and get more sales at the same time.
SEO and Content Marketing
We’ve covered topics like SEO and content marketing in-depth in many of our articles. Let’s talk about how both work specifically for b2c marketing.
When you’re selling products to customers instead of other businesses, there’s one important word to remember when creating an SEO campaign. Intent.
The way you structure your campaign is based on the intent of the people who are interested as well as the stage of awareness they’re in.
B2c marketing strategies also change depending on the region you serve. Let’s take a look at a few different examples.
Local Service Businesses
Our fictional carpet cleaning business would be a great example of a local service business. Many local service businesses like carpet cleaning companies, restaurants, plumbers, etc have a much simple b2c marketing strategy for SEO.
For these types of businesses, your number one goal would be to rank for the key phrase [main service] in [city], e.g., carpet cleaning in Wichita, KS. If your business offers multiple services, you would want to create a unique page of content for each of those services and try to rank in your area as well.
The process would like something like this:
Create SEO optimized pages for each service
Create SEO optimized pages for each location you serve
Add an SEO optimized blog to your website to feature relevant and helpful content
Build citations for your business in relevant directories
Through techniques like blog outreach and guest posting, build backlinks to your website to increase authority
Get high-quality Google reviews from past customers
On your website, you’d create messaging based on factors like USP and solving the problems of your target audience.
Often, people coming to these types of businesses have the intent to buy or inquire. To move them through the stages of awareness, you’d use compelling website copy and calls to action to fill out a form or call your business.
Product Businesses
Product businesses use a different SEO strategy than service businesses.
In 2019, most product businesses use e-commerce and online shopping for sales.
If you run and e-commerce business, you have many different strategies you can use to grow your traffic and increase awareness for your site.
First, you want to make sure to optimize each product page on your website by:
Adding keywords to the title of products
Adding keywords to the description
Writing detailed product descriptions
Using keywords in headings, descriptions, alt tags, and all other meta data
You’d do the same thing for each category page on your website. Here’s an example from one of our clients who sells stud fasteners:
In addition to creating SEO optimized pages for each product page and category page on your website, you can create blog content related to the products on your website.
Visit our e-commerce marketing guide for an in-depth look at the process, as well as our other deep dive guides into content marketing and SEO:
Pay per click advertising on Google and Facebook work well for b2c businesses because potential customers have more buyer intent and take a shorter time to purchase than most b2b scenarios. Compare looking for a pair of sneakers with finding a new aerospace machining company to work with.
If you look at many b2c queries, especially for product businesses, you’ll see ads dominate the search engine results page (SERP):
When browsing Facebook, you’ll often notice ads for products you’re interested in:
The question is – how do you make these ads effective and how should you use them depending on the stages of awareness?
Attraction Facebook Ads
If customers aren’t aware of your company yet, you can use ads to attract them to learn more about you. A couple of strategies to find new people to reach are:
Using detailed interest targeting in ads
Creating audiences based on competitors in your niche
Creating audiences based on your current customers called lookalike audiences
Here’s an example from my feed:
I’ve never personally been to this website, but I do like form-fitting t-shirts and have been to similar clothing sites. This brand is doing a great job of attracting me to learn more because it speaks to the things I want in a shirt, e.g., “athletic fit.”
Conversion Facebook Ads
Some ads will attempt to move through further through the stages of awareness by getting you to act in a way that helps further the relationship, mainly signing up for your e-mail list.
Often, these type of ads try to:
Offer something valuable in exchange for your contact info
Sell the benefits of joining their list
Make the decision to sign up as easy as possible
Here’s an example of one of those ads from my feed:
Closing Ads
These types of ads are either for people who are well aware of the company or from companies who believe they can close the sale quickly.
For the former, this is often called a re-marketing ad. They know you’ve already interacted with their brand and they’re marketing to you again. There are some categories where it goes make sense to offer your product for sale via an ad right way, often a lower priced product with less friction to buy.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the many avenues you can choose for b2c marketing. It’s on you to choose the right strategy after understanding your customers first.
If you want to know exactly how to define your audience as well as how to sell to them, we can help. Just fill out the form below to get your free marketing proposal and competitive analysis in 48 hours or less:
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