digital marketing agency Archives

February 28,2020

Top 6 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

The number of mistakes that can be made in marketing (especially online marketing) is endless. This blog post will focus on some of the biggest marketing mistakes that you’ll want to avoid at all costs. Some of these mistakes can be applied to any kind of online marketing; others relate to common and specific methods (like email marketing), and so they deserve mention on this list.

Just knowing about all of these mistakes should put you in a great position as an online marketer. Here are the top 6 online marketing mistakes recommended by Salt Rank that you can’t afford to make.

1. Not Having a USP

A USP is a unique selling proposition. This is what sets you apart from your competition. Ideally, it should be just one statement, and in that statement, you explain the benefits of your product for your target audience.

The key is that these benefits should be unique to your product only, thus giving you the edge over your competition. Here are some questions to ask to help create your USP:

Can your product solve a problem that no other competitor has solved yet?

Does your product offer superior quality at an unbeatable price?

Does your product or service offer customers a specific lifestyle?

Does your product incorporate materials and resources in a better way? For example, is your product more eco-friendly than the competition?

The competition is fierce online. Your target audience is being bombarded with several different marketing messages, and without a USP, your message is likely to be lost.

USP is critical in every aspect of your marketing. Before implementing any kind of new online marketing strategy, you should think about how your USP can fit into it. That way, prospects will know why they need your product so that they will become customers.

2. Using Black Hat Tactics

This kind of clickbait is all too common: “Rank in the top 10 of Google, guaranteed!” Even though this is an obvious scam to anyone who has a clue about SEO, marketers, and business owners who desperately want to get traffic to their website might be willing to take them up on this offer. And after all, who doesn’t love a quick fix?

However, be wary. While our web design services company is reputable, many other companies aren’t, and will promise instant results.

The companies that aren’t outright lying about achieving instant results (and many of them do) might be able to do it for you using “black hat” techniques. Black hat strategies are implemented to “trick” a search engine into giving your website a rank that it doesn’t deserve for specific keywords.

By taking them up on this offer, you might experience a short burst of new traffic, but you’ll be playing a dangerous game. Google invests a ton of money for catching cheaters, and the penalties for cheating are not small either. If you get penalized by Google (or worse – outright banned), you’ll find that this is extremely hard to fix and will also permanently damage your website’s reputation and marketing efforts.

Have we convinced you yet? Avoid black hat SEO at all costs and stick to “white hat” SEO strategies to help your website rank higher. Doing it the right way will take more time and cost more money, but it’s a safe bet for long term success.

3. Ignoring the 80/20 Rule

You’ve almost certainly heard of this rule before. 80% of your success comes from 20% of your efforts. But have you ever thought about how that principle can apply to your marketing efforts?

In the context of marketing, this rule means that 80% of your success will be the result of providing value to your target audience, and 20% of it will be the result of your promotional materials. This balance will ensure that your customers are engaged and ready to buy when the time comes.

If you flip that balance around, though, you’ll repel potential customers instead of attracting them. Remember, forming long term relationships with customers is critical in online marketing.

4. Trying to Market to Everyone

This is perhaps the biggest rookie marketing mistake, but this mistake goes even further.

Too many companies mistakenly focus too much on the total number of visitors instead of analyzing the types of visitors they’re attracting. Consequently, these companies double down on their efforts to attract more visitors and end up wasting money because not enough of these visitors convert into customers.

Instead, you should focus on marketing to a niche. That way, you can attract the right kind of visitors. You’ll know who the right kinds of visitors are once you create your company’s Buyer Personas. These personas should be based on your most high-value customers.

5. Focusing Your Email Marketing on Promotional Efforts

Once upon a time, email marketing was only used for promotion and advertising. However, any professional email marketer these days realizes that engaging with and building trust with prospects is essential for getting customers, as well as retaining previous customers.

Not following this advice can severely harm your online business. Not only will you turn off your subscribers and potential customers (remember the 80/20 rule), but you can also get spam complaints.

6. Neglecting Repeat Customers

Neglecting existing customers in the pursuit of new ones is a common marketing error. However, it’s not one that you should make. Consider the fact that it’s 5 times more expensive to market to new customers than it is to existing ones, on average.

Why is it easier to market for existing customers? Because your marketing funnel for existing buyers will be smaller than for newer buyers since they’ve already bought from you before.

Try to split your marketing efforts 50/50 into retaining repeat customers as you do for acquiring new ones.

Conclusion

No matter how well you plan things out, marketing mistakes will still happen. If you experience sub-optimal results from your marketing, don’t dismiss them outright – instead, reflect on what could have gone wrong. Continuous improvement is the name of the game. If you’re struggling with marketing, try to understand the needs of your customers better. You might see things start to turn around!

February 20,2020

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7 Reasons to Get Involved With eCommerce

Whether you have a lot of money to invest or you only have a small budget, eCommerce can be a potential opportunity for you. Even if you’re just a beginner, there are many online tools and resources out there that can help you. A digital marketing firm such as Salt Rank can provide a solution..

Here are 7 reasons why you might want to consider starting an eCommerce business.

1. Worldwide eCommerce Growth Is Expected to Go Up

2018 and 2019 saw huge growth in eCommerce worldwide and in the US. When choosing a segment of the eCommerce market to focus on, start by looking at the trends. Move into a growing market whenever possible. The numbers show that eCommerce is a valid possibility for new and existing entrepreneurs.

2. More Visibility and a Global Reach

With brick and mortar businesses, location is key. This saying is true because of the huge difference that a good location can make in obtaining sales. When it comes to eCommerce, your domain name is your storefront, and it can be seen by a global audience. That is the possibility offered by eCommerce. You only need one storefront, not several, to be seen by people worldwide.

In fact, in this new global economy, we see a phenomenon that hasn’t been noticed before– the pop up shop. It’s where someone carries nothing more than a few of their products, a tablet, and a card reader for taking orders. They meet their customers in person, and they don’t have to worry about violating any laws or regulations while operating their “store.” This way they can also be in several high visibility places at once (parks, prominent street corners, subway stations, etc.).

The above is only made possible by new and emerging technologies. Speaking of which…

3. Evolving Technology

Technology continues to innovate and improve on the eCommerce front, with new apps and payment systems emerging regularly. There’s also Blockchain technology, which can allow you to secure even more different types of payments.

Focusing on technology in the business world is likely the best way to reach success with an online business today. Thankfully the cost of many essential aspects of a business (video conferencing, collaboration tools, etc.) is going down, which makes it easier to conduct business internationally as well. Paying for flights to meet customers is no longer a requirement, nor do you even have to leave your home. Improvements in technology make it all possible to run everything from your personal computer.

4. User-Friendly Seller Platforms are Available

It’s relatively simple to get started in eCommerce. However, the hard part and where many people fail is in getting set up with a product (we’ll discuss that more below). The set up is easier now than it ever was. That doesn’t mean it’s a complete walk in the park or free, but nevertheless, there are many low-cost eCommerce tools that are available: marketing automation, SEO tools, user-friendly selling platforms, etc.

As we said, the hardest part of setting up an eCommerce business is the product aspect. What are you going to sell? The advice commonly given is that you should choose a product you’re passionate about – something that you’ve used yourself and can recommend to others. That passion will also be helpful in creating relationships with distributors or with someone who can be your product source. And finally, that passion will help motivate you to keep going as you build your business. The motivation to help others by recommending them a product you’ve happily used can be quite effective for some people who lack the motivation to succeed.

5. eCommerce is Going Mainstream

Eighty percent of people online have made an online purchase. That number is expected to grow. To succeed as an eCommerce business, you must create trust and credibility in your business. Some ways you can do this include

· making your website attractive and easy to navigate

· creating helpful and valuable content for your customers

· showing customer testimonials

You must keep faith that if you commit to improving trust between your business and your customers, eventually, you’ll have a loyal following of people.

While eCommerce is becoming more and more mainstream, trust is still a key part of running a successful eCommerce business. Also, many people are still cautious shoppers and highly value their privacy and security.

6. The Little Guys are Getting Noticed

You might think that you can’t compete with huge giants like Amazon and eBay, but this isn’t always true anymore. If you choose the right product niche and sell good quality products, it’s still possible to run a successful business. The reason why is that there is more information out there than ever before about the different products and services that are being sold online. In other words, thanks to bloggers and social media, people are beginning to notice the “little guys.” This is all thanks to the internet. Now, the rest is just simple math – the more clicks you get from interested people, the more likely you are to get sales. This is a big deal especially for someone on a tight budget who is trying to get their business off the ground.

7. Content Marketing Can Bring More eCommerce Sales Long-Term

Reducing friction during the buying process is important for maximizing your sales potential. Abandoned shopping carts are a common occurrence in the eCommerce world. You’ll have to be committed to improving your marketing funnel.

Technology also comes to the rescue here with retargeting apps and tools (like CartHook) that can help bring back customers who get lost in the woods before they disappear forever.

Content marketing is also a method of maximizing sales in the long term. By creating relevant and valuable content for your online following, you can then have them opt-in as email subscribes. And once you have an email list, you can then notify them about sales, promos, and discounts that you’re planning to do.

April 24,2019

Google Algorithm March 2019 Update

Google just rolled out a new update in March and you may have seen your client’s rankings and search traffic take a drop. If you are looking for answers, then you have come to the right place. This is an opportunity for Digital Agency Kansas City to benefit. We will take you through the Florida 2 update and the steps you can take to rebuild your client’s traffic.
This update really touches on a few key things, authority, relevancy, and user experience. As a digital agency, there is room for you to improve your customer’s traffic and ranking on Google by taking note of these things.

This new update utilizes a link distance ranking algorithm that determines the activity between websites. Depending on this ranking, a website can be considered more ‘trustworthy’.
The purpose of this is so Google can determine whether a website is spammy. How do they determine this? By checking to see if the website has links to other spam websites or if a website links to a normal, useful website that users want to see.
That being said, links aren’t the final, determining factor in your business ranking. The more important reason to care about links is to build your relevancy and authority in a certain niche. If your link is surrounded by relevant keywords, then your website will be more relevant in the eyes of Google for those keywords.

What does this mean for your digital agency?

Build the right links from the right people. Links are all about quality and you should avoid artificial link building where you can and avoid linking to spammy websites. If you help your clients create content that is authoritative and solves a question or helps with further reading, then you will get organic backlinks from other useful websites.

Build your authority

Speaking of authority, you must balance authority with relevancy and your user’s expectations. Just because you have an expert write your blog post, doesn’t automatically mean you will rank well. Google will rank your pages based on users getting the answers that they expect! Your website may not have the best answer, but if it is the answer that users expect to see, or want to see, then your website will rank better than your competitions.
Make sure that all your posts have an author listed. Why? Because if you don’t have an author, it is impossible for Google to know if it was written by an IT expert or a high schooler. Google looking for authors with expertise in the subject you are writing on.

What does this mean for you?

Make sure that you are listening to your target audience and answering the questions that they have in your industry. For example, when people google ‘digital agency Kansas City’, make sure that you are answering the questions that people expect to be answered. This may mean you are writing about what to look for in an agency or a listing on the top trends that agencies are looking for in 2020.

As long as you answer the questions along the buyer’s journey, you will be rewarded for it. Most of your clients don’t know where to start, so this is a golden opportunity for you to delve deeper into your target markets mind by answering their ‘how-to’ questions through your content.

Focus on User Experience

The user experience encompasses many things like mobile first, removal of aggressive or misleading ads, and, like we motioned earlier, giving them what they expect to see.

Expectations

Make sure your clients are ANSWERING the questions that their users came to their website to see. Create content that doesn’t stray too far from the topic at hand. If there is additional information that supports the answer, make a different blog post about it and link to it.
You really must focus on the user experience and look at content as a public service and not a way to make money right away. Which brings us to the next subject: advertisements.

Advertisements

Google is taking a hard stance on aggressive, misleading advertising that ruins the under experience. If your client has low-quality ads all over their site, they will be penalized, and this is your opportunity to get them big traffic gains by addressing this issue.

Mobile First

With mobile-first indexing, make sure you are paying attention to your mobile site having the same content and links as your desktop site. Google is looking to see the mobile and desktop sites are congruent.

What About Click Through Rates?

You may be wondering why we aren’t talking about click through rates in regard to this update. Again, Google is here to please the end user and give them the information that they want, but click rates are not the metric to be looking for. A bounce back to the google search page is more about the algorithm not providing the right search result than the content on your page. That being said, if your content answers the search query you want to rank for, then you will be rewarded if the user stays in your site and the bounce rate is lower.

Bottom line

Digital Agencies in Kansas City can take advantage of this update by encouraging their clients to focus on quality content, superior user experience, fair advertising, attention to technical SEO. Make sure you encourage your clients to improve 100% of their issues instead of focusing on just links or ads.

To achieve 100% improvement, make sure you are helping them to meet the Google user’s expectations, avoiding spammy ads and links, and using credible sources that answer questions along the buying journey. Never frustrate your user even if that means removing low-quality advertisements from the website.

Always ask: Is my client meeting their users’ expectations? Are we answering the right questions? If you answer yes to these questions when the next update comes, you’ll be ready.

August 17,2018

Maximize Your Business Sale With An Effective PPC Campaign

PPC management is a complex process and involves in depth analyzing and superior skills. You must choose a reputed PPC company who specializes in delivering an effective PPC advertising and marketing campaign.

A meticulously planned PPC campaign optimized with conversion boosters will deliver targeted website traffic. A digital marketing agency employs experts who are creative and have proper knowledge and experience regarding pay per click strategies for augmenting business processes.

PPC (pay per click) campaigns help to derive targeted traffic to your website. One of the most effective ways to maximize efficiency and boost ROI is to optimize conversion rate (CVR) by testing innovative approaches without putting undue pressure on the budget.

Five techniques that will help you build more conversions and secure good results in 2018 and beyond.

Optimize keyword quality scores

Quality scores are often considered as one of the most important things which invariably lead to reduced costs and better ad positions.

The three main elements that determine QS are:

i) Ad relevance –Establish clearly how far the keyword is relevant to the ad copy. Create significant headlines; focus on the needs and sensitive points of your targeted audience.

ii) Landing page experience – Quality scores are basically dependent on the landing page experience and expected CTR. If the landing page experience is not good, your quality scores will be bad. People tend to click faster and convert faster on your landing page if it is explicitly and unambiguously designed. Dynamic text replacement (DTR) will provide some quick benefits and can improve quality score.

iii) Expected CTR (click-through rate) – PPC experts consider CTR as one of the most crucial factors when determining QS. Having more high-quality ads will generate more clicks and conversions as compared to ad groups with merely one.

2. Intellectual Re-Marketing

Customers who visit your landing pages are at various stages of their buying journey. Intelligent re-marketing is a unique way to connect and engage visitors to your website who may not have made an instant purchase. The main aim of re-marketing is to capture the interest of lost users as well as retain customers. Never serve the same messaging. Find innovative ways to add value up and down the funnel.

Tips for remarketing ads in order to capture the interest of lost leads:

i) Test different lead magnets: Different visitors respond to different types of media. Split-test your remarketing ads to offer an e-book and webinar.

ii)Name-drop influencers: Include popular influencers in your remarketing ads. This alliance builds up trust.

iii)Use dynamic targeting: Serve specific ads to different audience segments.

3. Utilize the innovative concept of machine learning

AI and machine learning brings the promise of higher-performing marketing at speed. This is an automated endeavor which also aids in budget management. With this you will be able to use more data than any human can handle in order to make quick adjustments in real time.

4. Test new ad extensions

It is important to capture as much SERP (search engine results page) as is possible. In order to do this, you can test different ad extensions on your top-performing campaigns.

Ad extensions are available in different forms, the most popular of which are:

i) Sitelink Extensions

ii) Callout Extensions

iii)Structured Snippets

iv)Location Extensions

Google provides additional extensions for ads that appear on the mobile devices. These are:

i) Message Extensions

ii) Call Extensions

5. Highly developed segmentation with in-market audiences

By using in-market audiences within your display ads targeting, you can easily target users according to their consumer behavior, as well as the content they have shown an interest in online. Thus, you can serve hyper-specific ads to customers who exhibit an interest. Ranging from persona segments to product categories, there are numerous options.

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