Digital Marketing Archives - Page 3 of 5

Maximize Your PPC Ads ROI with Google Ads Performance Planner

Abhinav Bhalla / forecasting tool in Google Ads, internet marketing agency, paid marketing, Performance planner, ppc ads / Digital Marketing

While Google Ads is one of the most convenient ways to drive traffic to your website, you should take the time to develop an effective advertising strategy to maximize your ad spending.

Optimizing your Google ads and website can result in a higher ROI. Although the procedures for achieving this goal are complex, some techniques can assist you in taking advantage of Google Ads campaigns and adequately assessing the results. The Performance Planner is a forecasting tool in Google Ads that allows you to plan your advertising budget and see how changes to your campaigns affect key performance metrics and overall performance. Using Google’s Performance Planner tool, advertisers can get up to 43 percent more conversions. In addition, you can use this tool to forecast your campaign’s monthly and quarterly performance. You can also get recommendations to help campaigns perform better for the same budget.

Google Ads Performance Planner

Google Ads Performance Planner is a forecasting tool that allows you to forecast how changes and budget adjustments will affect your key metrics and ad performance. This tool assists you in identifying appropriate spending amounts and determining how to maximize your budget most effectively.

The Performance Planner assists advertisers in optimizing campaigns by recommending an ideal plan for spreading spend among campaigns in the plan in the most effective way.
The Performance Planner is simple and extremely useful, but it should be used with caution. Assume you are in charge of campaigns and have a monthly budget of $10,000 to distribute among 100 search campaigns. Google Ads Performance Planner will recommend how to best use your budget to maximize conversion rates and generate a higher overall return on investment (ROI).
Around 80% of businesses concentrate on Google Ads for PPC campaigns. Google Ads Performance Planner saves you from jeopardizing your PPC performance by showing you potential outcomes before publishing your desired changes. It shows you how the changes affect your Google Ads budget and your PPC ROI. Finally, it makes it easier to experiment with campaign settings and see what results you get.
It enables you to predict outcomes before implementing changes. With the first point, running a Google Ads campaign frequently entails experimenting with new strategies to maximize your budget.

What is ROI?

ROI is the return on investment that your company receives from marketing initiatives. It is the ratio of your net profit to your costs.

The ROI calculation is as follows:

ROI = Net Profit / Total Investment multiplied by 100

This key performance indicator (KPI) is critical in advertising because it tells us the true impact of our advertising efforts.

The main goal of any campaign is to maximize leads and conversions, ensuring a positive return on investment. The sheer number of settings, metrics, and options available in Google Ads can be overwhelming initially, leaving some marketers paralyzed by choice. However, if you wish to get the best ROI possible, you must embrace Google Ads’ many significant assets and tools – you cannot simply dip your toes in and hope for the best.

How can Google Ads Performance Planner help you?

Performance Planner is an important tool that enables you to plan your advertising budget and assess how changes to campaigns affect vital metrics and overall performance. It can help you in achieving the following-

Create a strategy to see financial projections for your campaigns.
Examine the projected monthly and quarterly performance of your campaigns.
Examine your forecast by modifying various campaign settings to see how these changes will affect future performance.
Gain access to campaign forecasts.
Implement the modifications specified in your plan as soon as possible.
Get recommendations to help your campaigns perform better for the same amount of money.
Test with different campaign settings to see what happens.
Recognize opportunities during seasonal periods.

The Function of a Google Ads Performance Planner

Every day, Google deals with unfathomable amounts of data. When you search for something on Google Search, information about your search is incorporated into Google’s considerations, metrics, and insights. It can then be transformed into useful information for marketers and advertisers. Everyone wants their campaign to be a huge success. A performance planner aids this goal. Once every 24 hours, Performance Planner provides an update on relevant ad auctions from the previous 7-10 days, taking into account trends in Google Search, Google Display, and other Google platforms. After running multiple simulations, Performance Planner can tell you how your campaign should change in light of current trends. It employs machine learning to ensure that your forecasts are accurate. We live in a time when everything changes quickly, so instead of planning a month or a quarter, plan a week. This way, you don’t risk something drastically changing in search trends and your campaign performing poorly.

Why Should Your Company Use the Performance Planner?

Google Ads Performance Planner is one of many excellent tools available on the world’s most famous advertising platform.

You can use it to make a detailed plan that will guide your decision-making, allowing you to manage your budget and account more efficiently and effectively to deliver the desired results. Google Performance Planner is an excellent tool for getting more out of your ad campaigns. Customer habits, behaviors, and schedules are changing faster than ever before.

Because of this evolution, advertisers must devise new strategies to meet consumers’ shifting demands. As a result, Google Ads has introduced a Performance Planner tool, which focuses on ad spend planning.

Advantages of Google Ads Performance Planner

Google Ads Performance Planner assists you in making the most of your advertising budget

One of the main benefits of Google Ads Performance Planner is that it can assist you in making the most of your budget. Of course, if you spend money on Google Ad campaigns, you want to get the most bang for your buck while also getting a good ROI. You can use this tool to maximize your budget and get the most out of every dollar. Performance Planner shows you how much adjusting your campaigns will cost you and whether the extra expense is worthwhile in the long run. In addition, this tool can help you determine whether you need to increase your budget and how increasing your budget affects the amount of money you receive from your campaigns.

Google Ads Performance Planner creates seasonality adjustments

Seasonal lows and highs have an impact on many businesses. Google now takes this into account in its forecasts. Any date range you select for estimates will account for seasonality. In addition, Google’s predictions will be based on previous years’ search queries in similar periods, geographic locations, categories, and year-over-year growth. For example, if you make a forecast in December, the holiday shopping season will be considered if it affects your business. The performance planner predicts the results if we use optimal bids and average daily budgets for all campaigns in our account to maximize the number of conversions for any future spending scenario using Google’s seasonality data and insights.

Google Ads Performance Planner investigates new opportunities in a changing market

Keeping up with changes in customer demand in a volatile market is especially difficult. Google Ads Performance Planner equips personalized and real-time guidance to adjust to these changes. In addition, it can assist you in discovering new opportunities for your campaigns. Finally, a Performance Planner assists you in making the most of your resources. It can help you plan your ad spend, manage budgets across campaigns, and understand seasonal highs and lows. In addition, it simulates related ad auctions to provide you with an estimate of your campaigns’ performance and recommendations to help campaigns perform better for the same spend.

Google Ads Performance Planner assists you in forecasting campaign performance

Knowing how changes will affect your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns is one of the most challenging aspects of running a PPC campaign. When running PPC campaigns, you frequently test new keywords or targeting to see if there are better ways to maximize your budget. However, if you implement the changes, you risk negatively impacting your company’s ad performance. However, you can forecast campaign outcomes with this tool before making changes.

Furthermore, this tool allows you to investigate the outcomes as you change campaign settings to maximize results. As a result, you know how campaign changes will affect your budget and return on investment (ROI) before implementing them. It gives you an advantage in your campaign, allowing you to make actionable decisions to improve your ad performance.

Google Ads Performance Planner assists in growth in a short time

Growth is the critical metric that determines a startup’s future. Unfortunately, early-stage startups with limited resources rely on explosive growth in a short period. Because of the startup culture, everyone is frequently forced to use analytical, affordable, creative, and innovative methods to increase their ROI exponentially. Google Ads Performance Planner assists brands in attracting and retaining customers by updating their products regularly. In addition, you can use it to solicit customer feedback so that you always know if you’re on the right track. At the same time, you can market your product to ensure continued growth and track the results. The Performance Planner can assist you in comparing results to previous periods and planning to increase campaign ROI.

Google Ads Performance Planner aids in obtaining the best ROI on your google ads budget

Google Ads Planner ensures that your budget is spent on campaign adjustments that result in the best PPC ROI. It accomplishes this by displaying how much tweaking your campaigns will cost you and whether any additional investment will result in better returns. It also suggests increasing your budget and demonstrates how doing so can optimize your PPC campaigns. Overall, Performance Planner allows you to set the best Google Ads budget for your PPC campaigns to maximize your investment and capture new growth opportunities.

Practical Tips To Use Google Ads Performance Planner

Compare campaign performance across campaigns or accounts with similar goals and objectives.
Remember that the predictions are only estimates based on auction data, seasonality, and recent campaign history. As a result, the actual levels of performance may differ.
Check that you have enough data to make accurate forecasts. Your campaigns will be ineligible without the data.
If your campaign has been deleted or uses shared budgets, it will not be eligible. It also loses eligibility if it hasn’t been running for at least seven days after being changed or if it doesn’t use a manual CPC (cost-per-click), enhanced CPC, or target CPA (cost per acquisition) bid strategy.
Don’t plan too far ahead. The data is more accurate the closer your forecasted period is to the current date.
Remember that the forecasts are only estimates based on auction data, seasonality, and previous campaign history. Actual levels of performance may differ.

Final Words

Google Ads Performance Planner is a valuable tool that can assist you or your pay-per-click consultant in identifying growth opportunities and improving your search engine optimization (SEO) performance. You can use it to generate a detailed forecast, better manage your ad spend and account, and, ultimately, achieve your desired PPC ROI. Google Ads Performance Planner is an excellent tool for predicting how changes to your ad will affect its performance. However, if you are still unsure about using this tool, let the experts at Encaptechno assist you. Our PPC Ads in an internet marketing agency work hard to follow all best practices. We use the best tools available to make the most strategic decisions for our clients’ budgets and deliver exceptional results.

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Digital Marketingforecasting tool in Google Ads, internet marketing agency, paid marketing, Performance planner, ppc ads

Rising Customer Engagement Trends in the Market

Abhishek Sharma / customer engagement, customer engagement strategy, customer relationship, seamless customer experience, targeted marketing strategy / CRM Services, Digital Marketing, Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementation

Customer engagement has been an important concept in the market for quite some time now. However, when we come to really think about customer engagement, we also begin to understand why it has become important. The thing is that engaging with customers helps in adding value to the customer journey and also provides them with a personalised experience.

Designing a customer engagement strategy empowers a person to build a strong connection with customers and also allows interaction on the channels that are important. This is how you can gain an idea of how important it is to create an effective customer engagement strategy.

For so many years, businesses have only been focused on gaining market share and getting profit from it. However, the pandemic has pretty much changed everything. Consumer preferences have changed drastically now, and the way these preferences interact with businesses has changed as well.

The great consumer shift tried to impose a new shopping experience since Covid-19 started. This opened up many new opportunities for businesses to access new customers and also provide a delightful customer experience all through the buyer journey.

In this blog, we will see what customer engagement is and what is its importance?

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement can be simply defined as the means by which an organisation creates a relationship with a wide customer base for the purpose of fostering brand loyalty and awareness. This can be easily accomplished by marketing campaigns, new content created for and posted to websites and outreach via social media and wearable devices among other methods.

Even though there can be many variations to this definition, the premise pretty much remains the same. A company aims to foster a positive relationship with the customers with an aim to promote the brand, generate more sales, and offer an amazing experience on a personal level.

Importance of Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is easily one of the most important aspects of a successful organisation. A customer who is engaged with a specific company is capable of generating more revenue than a customer who feels less connected to a company. Hence, customer engagement strategy means more profit for the company and almost everyone who runs a business wants that.

In case a company does not have a plan for improving customer engagement, you can miss out on a lot of money and opportunities to interact with valuable customers and even potential ones. Building a relationship with customers does not just make more, but it also helps in establishing trust and loyalty with the customers. Having customers who trust a business keeps them around for a long time while making them repeat customers.

Even the connection between customer engagement and customer loyalty is pretty profound. Someone who is a loyal customer is likely to show more loyalty by repeatedly purchasing from a company, spreading the word about a business by social sharing, and referring to other people like friends and family.

A present customer spreading the word to other people is perhaps an important tool in a company’s arsenal. Communicating with customers in a positive way encourages them to go out of their way for promote a business socially and by word of mouth. This communication helps in controlling what other people are saying about you all across the internet.

1. Insight Centric Customer Engagement

Data, personalization, and artificial intelligence have allowed marketing technology platforms to offer campaign analytics in times such as these. The insight led customer engagement platforms to allow marketers to mark the important moments in the journey of a buyer while charting a seamless customer experience.

The collaboration between marketing and insights helps both sides of the partnership make much better decisions while devising stronger and more customer-focused campaigns that drive businesses.

Data can be used for personalising the campaigns which is an essential step for customer engagement. A strategy such as this leaves almost no room for trial and error methodologies while leading to focused, and data-backed marketing campaigns.

2. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has added more of a personal touch to customer engagement trends and processes. In the past, marketers used to collect large amounts of consumer behaviour centric data.

However, the dearth of any tools for data analytics also meant the brands could not leverage data completely for strategy and decision making. At present, marketers have easy access to AI-based advanced tools in which the primary value is brought by the speed at which large sets of data can be analysed and used for generating predictive insights.

Focusing on how AI has lent a much more human-centric approach. Improved data analysis has offered the world an insight into the needs of customers who either lost their jobs or felt the need to upskill during the pandemic. With the adoption of advanced data-based marketing automation, brands have been able to offer content and discounts that speak to diverse customers while focusing on a targeted marketing strategy.

Moreover, AI has also minimised manual efforts while offering a human touch to customer interactions with the personalization of campaigns. With machine learning becoming more mature, it is likely that we will see more customer-facing marketing automation capabilities.

Hence, with AI-powered channels, brands can effectively analyse data and also deliver relevant content based on the stage of the buyer’s journey. AI-enabled chatbots provide constant assistance to users as and when it is required. These AI assistants prove to be excellent tools for offering customer support and engagement.

3. Personalised Content

Customised communication when backed with suitable data points helps the organisations to break through the chain of generic messages while standing out in today’s market which is pretty saturated. Doing this is an important step in treating all your customers as an individual and offering services that are relevant.

The reason for the popularity of brands has been a personalised experience that allows customers to place orders and pick them up in-store. Any marketing tactic that comes across as machine created and transactional does not prove successful in building customer loyalty and this is irrespective of how data is leveraged.

There must be a one size fits all approach that proves sufficient for attracting and even retaining customers. This is because this customer engagement strategy helps in offering the best customer experience and the greatest customer lifetime value.

Personalization has become an important investment with the economy recovering and consumers feeling safe to start spending again. All brands that personalise their approach to where and how they engage with customers can invest in paid media selectively. This helps in winning as a good share of sales makes its way back.

4. Single Interface

Another emerging trend in the market that is focused on customer engagement is easy access to all channels in just one place. A single interface is straightforward to allow any digital channel to be accessed easily and from one place.

With a single interface, a lot of time and money can be saved which also results in a hassle-free experience for the customers. In fact, the multi-channel approach helps in finding all touchpoints of the customer insights journey across all channels.

5. Cloud Platforms

The final goal of customer experience is always to create a satisfied consumer. There is no better way to get better customer satisfaction than by using cloud platforms.

The cloud does an excellent job of offering many benefits for businesses that are looking to improve their experience including an ability to personalise experiences, improve collaboration, offer better customer service, and undergo digital transformation. While this goes on, a business should also be able to offer user-friendly features that can keep the customers coming back for more.

Cloud platforms are perfect for managing customer engagement. They provide a safe and centralised location for customer management and interactions in just one place. This also makes it simple to track customer behaviour over time, find trends, and make better decisions about which products and services to offer customers.

It also helps in understanding how businesses are performing relative to competitors. Cloud platforms also make it simple to collect and analyse data while offering features that improve interactions and create better customer engagement. There are many solutions in the market and each of them has its own set of features.

6. Augmented Reality

Another rising trend when it comes to customer engagement is augmented reality. It has offered a way for retailers to translate in-store visits into digital experiences. Customers always want to understand, see, and experience a product before they purchase it.

Since augmented reality offers a seamless customer experience, most customers expect retailers to provide an AR experience. AR allows customers to browse 3D products from the comfort of their homes, try 3D products, gather information including reviews, pricing, and colour options, and use virtual trial rooms.

It should not come as a surprise that customers who use AR are more likely to purchase. In addition, AR provides retailers with the ability to overcome location barriers, and save costs on real estate, infrastructure, and other operational expenses while also boosting brand recognition and differentiating in the market.

7. Visual Engagement

Videos have proven to be a big winner for quite some time when it comes to a customer engagement strategy. Everything from team meetings to sales calls, everything has turned into video calls. In addition, more and more retail businesses have been able to make videos central to marketing strategies.

It is hard to argue when most millennials say they have purchased after seeing a video. Retailers are using many video types for engaging customers including explainer videos, promotional videos, testimonials, company culture videos, etc.

Many retailers also redefine the online shopping experience with the use of interactive shopping videos. These videos also empower consumers to instantly purchase a product directly from the content within a few clicks without leaving a video.

Another important area where visual engagement is seen is customer support and retailers do this by combining video chats and co-browsing. This is where agents see customer screens in real-time and guide them with forms, processes, transactions, and demos. For instance, retailers use co-browsing for e-commerce support for helping consumers find products that they want and reduce cart abandonment.

Conclusion

Zoho comes up with Zoho SalesIQ which helps in keeping up with the rising industry trends and taking your customer engagement strategy to another level. Moreover, Zoho also brings Zobot to the table which is an AI-powered chatbot used for screen sharing, voice calling, and chat routing.

Customers can have more than they need for proactively engaging with the brands if the brands use Zoho and the multiple features that it is capable of bringing to the forefront. At Encaptechno, we offer Zoho consultancy that can help your business meet the rising customer engagement trends in the market.

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CRM Services, Digital Marketing, Zoho CRM, Zoho Implementationcustomer engagement, customer engagement strategy, customer relationship, seamless customer experience, targeted marketing strategy

How Does Website Hosting Affect Your SEO Results?

Abhinav Bhalla / digital marketing strategies, SEO planning, SERP rankings, site performance, user experience, website hosting / Digital Marketing

Ever since a decade, every year has seen a wide rise in digitalization. Websites are becoming an important aspect of all businesses. Regardless of the industry or the size of the company, almost everyone wants their websites to be ranked on the first page of search engines with suitable SEO planning.

The websites that are listed on the second page of search engines or any other search engine are not so likely to receive any traffic. Hence, to make sure that a website gets listed on search results, companies must spend considerable resources in terms of money and time. This helps in improving the SERP rankings considerably.

In addition, there are many factors that affect the SEO planning of a website and addressing all of them takes a lot of time. More importantly, the SEO efforts lead to good results with consistent planning and implementation of digital marketing strategies.

One of the important factors that can immediately help the SEO results to be favourable is a smooth operating website. Users today want websites to be quick and reliable so the search engines are not going to show websites that are not. The thing that affects the speed, reliability factor and security of a website is called web hosting.

Let us look at what web hosting is and what is its relevance in SEO?

What is Web Hosting?

Website hosting is basically the storage space or the internet hosting where a website data is stored in the web servers and accessed by users using the internet. In essence, web hosting enables your website to be accessible for all users on the internet.

On the basis of your requirements, you can choose different web hosting. This hosting cost can vary on the basis of disk space, data transfer limitations, and many other factors as well.

Working of Web Hosting

Have you ever wondered about what happens in the backend of a computer system when you search any website? Basically, when you visit a website, the server request is sent through the internet from your computer. The request is further sent to the server where the website is being hosted.

The server responds to the user in return with the requested data and further displays it on the computer system as well. Using the internet, you are interacting with the webserver for fetching information. For all actions taken by you on the website, the data gets fetched from the hosting server and is displayed for you.

In case the server is slow or if it is taking some time to respond then the website may be loading slowly at your end. It is best to choose the server type on the basis of the traffic that you receive to your business website. The server response rate is a factor that is responsible for deciding the website loading speed on the user’s computer.

Three Types of SEO Hostings

There are three primary types of SEO hosting that are mentioned below:

1. Shared Hosting

In case you are beginning with one or smaller websites, a shared hosting plan can be suitable. It is basic and is geared towards small businesses. Just as the name suggests, shared hosting requires you to share resources with other customers which means the website performance will not be the quickest if you choose this.

In case those with other customers use many resources, it can affect how fast your site loads. Many plans claim to offer unlimited resources but they are not unlimited. Once you use too many resources, they will disrupt your speed to a crawl.

In case you are competing to get ranked for high competition keywords then speed and stability make a difference and shared hosting is not enough. In addition, shared hosting slows down things further if you have high levels of traffic. So shared hosting is the right option only when you are learning and testing but not for large scale SEO projects.

2. Virtual Private Server (VPS)

This is the next step in terms of performance and cost. Using a VPS, you are basically still sharing servers with other customers. The main difference is that you have some resources dedicated to your sites so that the website is not affected even when other customers are using many resources.

The overall quality of a VPS can differ between hosts. You can compare the bandwidths and disk space available on each plan for getting an estimate of how much traffic the plan can support. The good thing about a VPS is that it is easy to scale up. Some hosts also offer auto-scaling up the resources to your sites if it is needed.

3. Dedicated Servers for SEO

A dedicated server is completely independent in nature. You have root access to it and you can put as many sites as you want on it. Make sure that the quality varies based on the kind of plan and host that you choose.

Unless you have many visitors in just a month, a dedicated server is mostly likely overkilling. However, if the budget is not an issue for you then this kind of server is the best choice for your SEO plan.

The dedicated servers for the SEO plan will make sure that you get the best results from your search engine optimization efforts. So you can consider buying this one if budget is not a problem.

Common Results of Website Hosting on SEO

1. Website Loading

The website loading time comes with the capability to affect the user experience directly. In case your website is not loading within two to three seconds, the users are likely to bounce off the website which is hampering your SEO planning.

It is possible to improve the website speed by reducing the media files or by compressing the images on your website. However, nothing can impact the speed of a website as web hosting possibly can.

Many times, it becomes difficult to reach the two seconds goal with the standard shared hosting. This means that you must consider Cloud Hosting or Virtual Private Serves for improving the loading speed of your website. A quickly loading website does not just delight the users but also has a significant impact on the SEO.

2. Server Downtime

Another important factor controlled by website hosting that ends up affecting your website’s SEO is server downtime. In case the website continues to suffer from frequent downtime then it is necessary to change your web hosting. Bad downtime is a sign that web hosting is not reliable.

The downtime does not just affect the website performance but it also affects the SEO. For instance, a potential customer enters a search enquiry that is suited for the products or services you offer, but the crawlers won’t find your websites because it is down. This leads to losing the customer and degrading the website’s SEO.

Frequency in downtime can also flag your website as unreliable and it leads to your website’s ranking being downgraded as well. Hence, it is important that you choose web hosting that is reliable and can also ensure uptime.

3. Location

This is one factor that was not so crucial a decade ago but today the location of web hosting servers can have a direct impact on SEO. With so many websites offering similar services, the search engines prioritise the website based on the location of a specific search question.

For instance, if a search query is made for a product in India, a website that is located in India is likely to be shown first. There is no doubt that this system has a prominent downside because users from other countries cannot find your website for the same keywords.

However, this also opens up many new avenues for your business as you can focus on a location and ensure that you’re getting ranked quickly. Moreover, the location of a server can also have an impact on the loading speed of the website.

When the distance between the users and server is more, the website takes a high time to load. For this reason, some hosting providers offer CDN or Content Delivery Networks that ensure that the website speed is not hampered regardless of the location.

4. Security

Other than the speed and reliability of the website, security is another factor that impacts the website’s SEO. Google and other prominent search engines are increasingly giving preferences to sites that are more secure. For instance, the websites with SSL certificates are an example of the extent to which a website is important for SEO planning.

The security features provided by website hosting service providers are necessary for ensuring the overall security of a website. One must choose hosting service providers with a good track record and the ability to offer the latest security features. In case the website is supposed to get hacked, it can have long term effects on search engine rankings.

5. Technical Support

Regardless of whether you have in house IT support or not, constantly available tech support offered by the website hosting provider is always required. In case the domain gets hijacked or the website goes down, you will need quickly available support.

A credible and hard-working team can offer all the support that you need to ensure that your website is running properly. A well operating website with no problems can have a lasting positive impact on SEO.

Conclusion

There is a significant amount of competition that prevails across all industries at the present time. In this scenario, a high rank on search engines should be a prime priority. There are many methods that can be used for boosting your SEO and most of them take time before showing any real impact.

That said, all businesses must do all that it takes to create a positive effect on SEO planning and implementation. This ensures better ranking and web authority. A better website hosting provider can be the first step for getting SEO friendly web hosting.

If you want any more suggestions on how to improve your SEO and which web hosting suits you the best, feel free to get in touch with our experts at Encaptechno.

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Digital Marketingdigital marketing strategies, SEO planning, SERP rankings, site performance, user experience, website hosting

A Detailed Guide to Marketing Automation

Abhishek Sharma / automating marketing activities, business approach, content marketing, lead generation processes, marketing automation, marketing automation platform, marketing strategy / Digital Marketing, Zoho Implementation

There are many methods for promoting a brand at the present time. However, marketing managers are always looking for workable methods that can make promotional efforts meaningful and efficient. To manage the lead generation process, the marketers must know the reason behind each action taken by visitors to a website.

From knowing which source is driving the visitors to a website to knowing what nurtures the marketing strategy, everything must be focused on. To make this simple, building relationships with prospects is important. Hence, most marketers are focusing on marketing automation.

In this blog, we will try to understand what marketing automation is and the features it brings in great length. So let’s begin.

What is Marketing Automation?

In simple language, marketing automation is the process of using software for automating repetitive marketing efforts. With the automation of repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks such as generating and segmenting leads, planning social media campaigns, sending emails and SMS, and qualifying leads, efficiency and personalization of user experiences can be ensured.

The goal of automating marketing services is to move your leads down the funnel and finally convert them. When used properly, the features of marketing automation lead to many positive results.

Why Marketing Automation?

Running online marketing activities without dedicated and efficient software is still possible when the size of your company is still small. However, just as a company keeps growing and attracts more leads, the marketers need more channels for engaging with customers because managing interactions becomes difficult.

Capturing, nurturing, and qualifying a wide range of leads, running effective campaigns for customer segments, and different post-purchase marketing activities required to get automated. This marketing automation keeps the customer engagement consistent and meaningful. The Zoho marketing tools do just that when it comes to automating everything.

According to Marketo, 76% of organizations implementing marketing automation generate a return on investment within the first year itself. That’s not all. It is also said that over 44% see a return within just six months. The most important function of marketing automation platforms is to automate and streamline activities carried out by the sales and marketing teams.

One can plan and execute lead generation and nurturing plans to launch a wide range of digital ad campaigns from a central hub without hitting buttons such as, “send” or “launch” on each message, email, or ad. The businesses that use marketing automation can see a wide range of benefits across all of their important everyday operations.

An important increase in the number of qualified leads that reach the sales team, a higher conversion rate, and better productivity for sales and marketing teams are good ways in which marketing automation helps a business.

Steps Needed to Start Marketing Automation

Over many years, marketing automation was considered rather difficult to understand. However, the use of marketing automation platforms such as Zoho Marketing Automation changed almost everything. This tool comes with a lot of simplicity that is combined with an actionable plan. Businesses of any size can automate their marketing.

There are mostly six prominent ways in which marketing automation can be started. They are mentioned below.

1. Setting Goals

Goal setting offers a clear direction for a marketing strategy. Some goals such as building brand engagement or increasing thought leadership are good to have but they are unlikely to bring in desired results as they are generic.

It is recommended for the marketing strategy goals to be precise, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Each and every effort of the marketing strategy must have a goal. This will channel your energy towards getting tangible results. In fact, you will also start seeing the results of your efforts quickly.

2. Creating and Segmenting Leads

An important aspect of marketing automation is the generation of good quality leads. This is a step that makes you capture all the leads that show interest in your brand whether it is subscribing to a newsletter, engaging with social media, or signing up for webinars.

There is a wide range of promotional channels for driving traffic to your landing page. These channels make lead generation effective. When you have good quality leads in your hands, you can also segment them into groups with similar characteristics, needs, and interests who show similar purchase patterns.

When you really get to segmenting the leads, you will see that it increases your campaign open rates, customer satisfaction, and many more things. You will know what your leads are looking for and you can find it easy to engage with them suitably. For instance, you can form segments such as “Website Visitors Under the Age 25” or “Women Aged Under 18” to make the lead nurturing process efficient.

3. Website Optimization

We know the importance of a website. It is like a modern business card that tells almost everything about your business. The key to increasing your conversions is to attract visitors to your website first.

When you deploy the right set of keywords, focus on content marketing, and high-quality user experience, you can be assured that your website will be seen. Website tracking in the marketing automation platform ensures that you get the exact count of all the visitors.

Understand what the visitors on your website are focusing on. Tracking those elements on the web page and discovering more about them while also knowing why the users clicked on a call-to-action button, a specific location, the source, etc. You should also know the number of clicks, the visits, and more.

4. Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Yet another important aspect of a business approach is to send targeted marketing messages to the leads at the right time using the right channel. This is the cornerstone of the lead nurturing process.

One of the best parts of a marketing automation campaign is that you can customise your leads as per their requirement and set up automated workflow or scheduled posts. Do not forget to include things such as emails, SMS, social, push notifications, and ad campaigns. Make sure that you are easily found where your audience is.

5. Scoring and Qualifying the Leads

Different attributes can be used for scoring more leads. You can move your leads through the funnel by adding numerical points based on important information that has been submitted.

The reaction of leads to the marketing campaigns, click-through rates, and how the leads are engaging with a brand shows a lot. This makes it easy for the marketing and sales team to respond appropriately while figuring out who is interested in buying your product and who is looking around generally.

6. Measuring Overall Performance

You can measure and contextualise the marketing activities that help you reach your target market. Getting a clear understanding of conversion rates, revenue growth, marketing returns, and other key performance indicators help immensely.

The marketing goals help in empowering you to improve your marketing strategies while optimising the returns. Choosing the key performance indicators helps in measuring progress quickly and accurately.

Features of Marketing Automation

Zoho Marketing automation platform helps in attracting website visitors, tuning anonymous visitors into leads, and converting leads into customers. The features that it offers bring marketing and sales operations closer. They are mentioned below.

1. Lead Management

These days, it is important to get leads to notice your brand and offer them the best experience well before the competitors can do it. Lead management helps in attracting leads, nurturing them, evaluating their sales-readiness, and handing over the best ones to the sales team.

From lead generation to understanding the online behaviour of these leads and evaluating them for sales, Zoho marketing automation helps in everything. It helps in managing the entire lead cycle. You can effectively engage, empower, and earn your customers using the marketing automation features of Zoho.

2. Lead Generation

You can get more leads by adding sign up forms and smart pop ups on the landing pages. Moreover, you can also bring leads by syncing the CRM leads or other apps. The benefit of automating marketing activities is that no opportunity for generating new leads is ever lost.

Business success depends entirely on the leads and one’s ability to get the audience excited about a brand. Leads can be attracted from many sources and with unique requirements. Your focus must be on creating a good relationship with the leads.

3. Behavioural Targeting

You must understand the online behaviour of your leads so that you can use important information for customising messages. Create profiles for all visitors on the basis of their browsing behaviour so that you can give them just what they are looking for.

There are two primary types of behavioural marketing.

Website Behavioural Marketing: Make sure that a visitor is interacting with the website in terms of page visits and link clicks. You can start by defining a goal for the visitor, group the visitors based on their actions, and create a personalised experience.
In-app Usage Targeting: Marketing automation allows you to see how the users are interacting with a product while getting an idea about the features that interest them the most. You can send tailor-made content for improving the user experience.

4. Multi-Channel Marketing: Marketing automation

allows you to drive brand awareness by forming a connection with the audience on the platforms they use. You can plan your marketing activities across many mediums, allocate a budget, and realise your ROI.

It is important to understand that leads are almost everywhere. Using the Zoho Marketing automation, you can easily reach out to the leads from various channels while giving them the freedom to choose how the leads wish to connect. In addition, all the lead data is stored in one place so it is easy to follow up any time and any way.

5. Engagement Marketing

Relevance is important to ensure good customer engagement. Hence, one must focus on building engagement programs that help in fostering strong customer relationships.

Journey Builder: It is possible to see and map the user experience with the brand’s products and services. You can create a personalised journey for each lead and customer to see how they have progressed at every step.
Autoresponders: Zoho marketing automation allows you to send an automated series to new leads or run promotional campaigns based on lead interactions with the previous emails.
Workflows: You can create flows to get your leads into the right email series. After this, you can also engage them with useful content.

6. Analytics

Finally, Zoho marketing automation also helps you to get in-depth reports on lead growth, campaign performance, and revenue generation. You can effectively measure all the marketing goals with the power of precise analytics.

Graphs, reports, and customer journey traces enable you to use everything that a marketer needs for making smart and sound decisions. Moreover, they also allow you to visualise the performance of the marketing funnel from analysing the acquisition to studying the conversions.

Some ways in which analytics works in Zoho marketing automation are mentioned below:

Lead Insights: The lead insights allow you to see how many leads you have gained over a period while evaluating the effectiveness of the lead generation activities.
Lead Attribution Reports: You can also know which sources you are getting the leads from so that it becomes easy to focus on targeted promotions.
List Reports: You can compare your mailing lists to see which list is active and which one has the most engagement with the promotions.
Campaign Reports: Zoho marketing automation also allows you to see which campaigns have the most opens and clicks including the kind of content that works with your audience by comparing different campaigns.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a modern solution for simplifying the marketing process for a team while also giving the leads a unique user experience and constant engagement. When a brand focuses on delighting the prospects with service and meeting needs instantly, getting conversions and increasing the revenue becomes simple.

The various marketing automation tools help in capturing leads with information, reaching out to them through channels, and tracking the progress with the sales funnel. Encaptechno is experienced in working as a Zoho partner for many businesses with a record of helping them grow. Get in touch to get support in implementing marketing automation, today.

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Digital Marketing, Zoho Implementationautomating marketing activities, business approach, content marketing, lead generation processes, marketing automation, marketing automation platform, marketing strategy

How are AI Chatbots Revolutionizing Customer Support?

Abhishek Sharma / AI based chatbots, better customer experience, machine learning, salesforce einstein bots, zobot, zoho salesiq / CRM Services, Digital Marketing

Artificial intelligence and all its possible implications can no longer be ignored. The suitable use of AI services and programs can potentially revolutionise a business like never before. The evolved companies are using AI for automating even the most basic tasks, changing interactions, building relationships, deriving profits, and offering services.

Artificial intelligence has also improved customer experience with personalised communication, image recognition, chatbots, and other recommendations. Most businesses use AI to enhance and personalise customer experiences. AI has a beneficial influence on customer success operations with the use of chatbots.

In fact, it has turned out that for earning the confidence and commitment of customers, AI-based chatbots have become critical. In this blog, we will try and understand how AI chatbots are changing customer support. Read on to know more.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is computer software that helps businesses to automate conversations with customers. It is an artificial intelligence program that is designed to stimulate communications with customers. The customers can easily engage with an AI-based chatbot through the chat window, messaging and voice applications.

Everyone in the present world has come across a chatbot whether they know it or not. For some time now, chatbots have done an exceptional job of replacing the humans from one end of the conversation and have enabled human to machine interactions.

The thing with chatbots is that they can process data for responding to all kinds of needs powered by AI, NLP, and machine learning. In case the chatbots cannot answer a question or a request, the chat transfers to a human agent.

Mainly, there are two types of chatbots: Flow chatbots and AI chatbots. Both of them are designed to improve customer experience. Flow chatbots are like tree-based models which mean that the user is guided down a predetermined path defined by a developer.

The AI-based chatbots are self-trained so they can produce backlogs of knowledge according to the information they receive by interacting with customers. Multiple online customer service platforms use chatbots to manage the volume of questions, phone calls, and other requests.

Modern Chatbots Meet Customer Expectations

The technological developments that we see around us are in one way or another meant to be like human body developments. Chatbots were originally developed to replace human conversations with a machine. However, there was a lot of scope for improvement.

In the past, the chatbots took anywhere between nine to twelve months to build and get deployed. The cost of a large number of experts and chatbot dedicated software engineers required the first generation chatbots to be less cost-optimal than they could be.

Other than this, the chatbots also did not offer better customer experience. The robotic chatbots were scripted and they could not foresee user intent or engage in a meaningful and dynamic dialogue. User interaction suffered immensely because of this which eventually affected the overall user experience.

There was also a lack of understanding in the earlier chatbots for meeting the rising user expectations. They could not find the want of the users and they could also not formulate specific and personalised responses.

Changes in Customer Support Experience

A core principle of selling is the ability to strike suitable conversations. In the past, one on one human interactions were used to answer questions and address all the questions. However, with the evolution of online platforms, the feature of 24×7 customer support becomes ever-present. To fulfil this need, chatbots were developed. These chatbots are cost-effective and offer support at all times.

Traditional chatbots revolutionised the concept of customer engagement beyond measure. They recognized keywords but failed to recognize the context in which they were being used. These chatbots did not have the ability to understand human emotions such as anger, frustration, etc. They also did not understand the way people speak.

Even though the development of chatbots was efficient, they were mechanical in nature. On the other hand, the demand for personalised conversations was gaining attention to offer a seamless customer experience. This is how AI-based chatbots came into being. In addition to quick and affordable solutions, these chatbots understood the context and intent of customers before doing anything meaningful.

The chatbots recognized customer frustration and switched the changes to a human in the company’s support centre. AI chatbots offer a personalised customer experience by providing customer data to the agents in real-time. It was realised that customers want quick, and frictionless solutions to their problems and so, AI-based chatbots were introduced to make this happen. Zobot and Salesforce Einstein Bots are perfect examples of this.

Why are Chatbots Important for a Business?

Chatbots provide a quick and engaging customer experience with troubleshooting services, a help desk, and an assistant at all times. Chatbots are more convenient and it takes lesser time for customers to strike conversations using them. A bot uses AI to search through sizeable quantities of information while accurately selecting relevant answers for a consumer.

It has been noted that businesses that use chatbots can reduce conventional tasks while also handling different requests from customers. This quick way of handling customer questions and offering constant support helps businesses to improve customer loyalty. Some of the benefits of chatbots are mentioned below:

1. Reduction in Turnaround Time

It is challenging for businesses to maintain a balance between inbound customer queries and support agents. This is even if the company has a talented workforce and an agent is made responsible for handling only one customer at a time.

Manual tending to the customers leads to an increase in waiting time for customers due to which the business might lose a potential lead. On the other hand, chatbots have no such constraints. The implementation of AI-based chatbots can handle any number of customers and it can do this suitably.

2. Constant Customer Service and Support

The chatbots are capable of offering constant support to the customers. They use past conversations to improve at each stage.

The AI-based chatbots also enable everyone to offer at least the basic support needed for guiding a user to a specific section of the website while providing pricing details, etc.

3. Customer Needs

No matter which sector a business may operate in, it usually has a wide range of customer data needs including past transcripts of conversations, transaction history, etc. This is the data that is mostly unstructured because of which many companies fail when it comes to leveraging it.

The AI-based chatbots come with the ability to use this data for understanding the past and future requirements. It also helps the customers in receiving important information without manual intervention.

4. Omnichannel Experience

All businesses are needed to offer a better customer experience if they wish to grow in the market. In fact, this is what makes a business stand out. It can be difficult for agents to juggle between platforms for offering customer support in real-time.

On the other hand, AI-based chatbots are capable of offering an omnichannel experience with easy integration. Different platforms can also be integrated with chatbots. No matter which channels your customer needs, the business is always ready to offer it.

5. Personalised Recommendations

Artificial Intelligence assists the customers in the form of customer purchasing decisions and the creation of suggestions based on those findings. The suggestions also aid in the creation of focused branding and marketing initiatives that increase customer interest.

It must be noted that most online buyers believe that it is easy to obtain reliable and efficient suggestions using the power of AI and machine learning. The manual data can be used by AI to analyse purchasing trends and do predictive and prescriptive analyses to increase engagement.

AI discovers methods for shaping and creating a better customer experience interaction. Common opportunities such as upselling and cross-selling have the ability to increase because of improved suggestions.

6. Efficient Services

We have already understood in the points mentioned above that customers want rapid and efficient services which is something that should not be overlooked. AI-based chatbots satisfy this consistently and efficiently.

The chatbots have few mistakes which make it easy for customers to obtain the information that is needed for improving their analytical abilities. Customer service can either make or break a business because it must be responsive, consistent, and focused.

Chatbots for example can answer simple questions, minimise touchpoints, expedite conversations and assist with complicated situations. AI-powered virtual assistants aid consumers in navigating the procedure and conversing with them. Natural language processing, voice assistants, and machine learning can allow AI agents to make it easy to approach customers online.

7. Real-Time Decision Making

Organisations may also employ tracking and data analytics for interacting with the customers on a deeper level because of technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Other than this, facial expressions can also be taken into account for allowing a personalised and tailored customer experience.

The AI technologies also help in data cleaning, merging, and rearranging helps in making quick decisions. Other than this customer feedback, service requests, and response times can also be improved. The AI technology can be used for extracting customer trends and customer interactions.

With the real-time data, visual analysis and personal engagement with customers also improves considerably. The information used helps in providing excellent customer support along with fostering deeper relationships.

8. Better Product Recommendations

The teams can use AI-driven suggestions for offering the best products recommendations by combining the data and knowledge together. It is also possible to improve sales by collecting data such as website search questions, purchase habits and so on.

The suggestions have the ability to offer the best product characteristics and dynamic data. With the media initiatives, product suggestions can also lead to a better customer experience. The customers can learn more about the items they have purchased while locating comparable ones that can improve their experience.

Product suggestions also help in determining which aspects of a product such as composition, performance, scope, and function can be improved. This increases the overall product characteristics while also improving the core emphasis on products and services.

Conclusion

To make sure that the customer information is used successfully, data is important for ensuring the best customer experience. All customers must be served by an AI-based customer support centre and AI solutions are an excellent way to do that. Companies must integrate this technology at the earliest.

More and more businesses are focusing on improving the customer experience for gaining loyalty and confidence. Great outcomes are possible if data-driven marketing innovations are used as a part of the marketing plan.

With the integration of customer data, AI is evolving to offer many options for customers including the creation of customer journey maps, reducing turnaround times, simplifying customer interactions, and increasing customer engagements. Making sure that these aspects are integrated will ensure user-friendly customer support and experience.

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CRM Services, Digital MarketingAI based chatbots, better customer experience, machine learning, salesforce einstein bots, zobot, zoho salesiq

What is Content Marketing and Why Is It Important?

Abhinav Bhalla / content marketing strategy, content strategy, lead generation, marketing strategy, online marketing services, quality content / Digital Marketing

The content that you consume makes a difference in your life subconsciously. It is until you keep consuming the same quality of content repeatedly that it starts surfacing in the conscious mind and starts influencing your decisions as well. That is the power of content.

All the digital content that you like consuming is created, shared, and promoted with the aim to create value. Brands across all sectors continue to create content that offers great value to the viewers. If a brand publishes good content then attracting customers and increasing prominence amongst the customers becomes easy.

Content creation and promotion have become extremely popular methods that drive digital marketing forward. If the marketing plan does not have a good content marketing strategy then the efforts do not lead to meaningful results. Content marketing is a powerful tool that helps businesses increase their web traffic and overall brand awareness. It helps in boosting sales.

According to modern business marketers, content marketing is the key to success in the present digital age. Without a well-planned content strategy, businesses will be left behind easily. In this post, we will explore what is content marketing and all the reasons why it is considered important?

What is Content Marketing?

A content marketing strategy is a detailed plan that is used for attracting, engaging, and retaining. There are various formats of content that brands can create including, blogs, articles, videos, infographics, social media posts, podcasts, whitepapers, newsletters and other media. Content marketing is done to establish expertise, promote brand awareness, and keep your business at the top of the customer’s mind.

If you hire a content marketing team then the prime responsibility of that team will be to develop and distribute relevant and useful content. When the content marketing is done right, the brand message goes out loud and clear amongst the customers.

With consistent use of content marketing and online marketing services, a brand can establish and nurture relationships with prospective and existing customers. When the audience thinks of a company as a partner interested in their success and as a valuable source of advice and guidance, they are more likely to choose the brand when it is the time to buy.

Working on Content Marketing

A business can use content marketing for attracting leads and making a product or service case when someone is looking for what to buy and close the sales. If you wish to use a content strategy effectively, it is necessary to deliver the right content at all possible stages of the sales cycle.

From awareness to consideration and purchase, the quality of content should be consistent. Approaching the content marketing strategy in this way makes the process very easy. Given below are three stages of the content marketing plan used by brands to engage the audience and sell their products or services.

1. Awareness Stage

This is the first stage of producing quality content. In this stage, the content creation should be focused on addressing the top concerns of the audience. Things such as writing about the pain points, challenges, and questions offer all brands the best ways of engaging with the audience.

Keep in mind that the quality of the content at this stage is educational and offers how-to advice. The brands must not be focused on selling at this stage. Rather, the selling should be in the consideration and closing phases. Some of the best content pieces that brands can publish at this stage include blog posts, e-books, videos, newsletters, and articles.

2. Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, the content quality is supposed to give a hybrid of useful information and marketing. It should be focused on educating the reader about all features that must be looked out for and how these features solve the needs of users.

The content should have a bent toward what the brand is offering the customers when it is at this stage. The best content pieces to create and publish at this stage include case studies, how-to videos, how-to articles, checklists, worksheets, etc.

3. Closing Stage

Content marketing plays an extremely important role when a prospect is close to purchasing. This is the stage where you can focus completely on sales until you continue to drive home. At the consideration stage, the content should be created to convince the customer about how great your brand’s products or services are.

The fundamental message of content in this stage should be expertise, knowledge, and differentiating benefits of what must be sold. Some of the best content pieces in this stage include user-generated content, buyer’s guide, product videos, research reports, etc.

Why is Content Marketing Important?

Regardless of which industry you may be a part of, content marketing is an effective way to enhance your marketing efforts. Each brand with a successful marketing strategy can use the power of content creation in one way or another.

With an ever-growing number of internet users and rising e-commerce trends, digital marketing reigns over all the traditional marketing methods. You can plan the creation of quality content and maximize its potential by sharing it on the right platforms.

You must remember that the search engines keep refining their algorithms in an ongoing effort when it comes to offering results to search queries. Hence, providing good content in terms of both readability and effectiveness can be important when you are trying to grow a loyal audience.

To make this structured, below mentioned are some of the reasons that explain the importance of content marketing to us.

1. Fundamental Part of Online Lead Generation

The primary importance of content marketing is the fact it links and supports almost all elements of a digital marketing strategy. You can think of content marketing that gives your online lead generation plan a good head start.

The content created can be used for blogs, emails, social media, PPC ads, etc. With a dependable content marketing strategy in place, each channel uses the marketing tactics that are considered best for achieving marketing goals and sales revenue targets.

When a brand creates engaging and high-quality content, it can be easily built into the digital marketing campaign with seamlessness. Basically, you need good content to attract customers to your website or social media accounts. Once that happens, the quality of content should keep rising if you wish to have this visitor return again and again.

The overall quality of content has the ability to determine whether they will sign up for an offer or supply you with an email address. In addition, your email base also needs content based on their relationship to your company and stage in the buying cycle.

2. Establish Reliability

You can establish trust with your audience when you continue creating good quality content. Creating valuable content also enables you to form a long-lasting relationship with the customers. Once this trust has been created, a business garners a positive reputation and this keeps growing with each content piece.

Content is a powerful tool to engage and keep your audience interested in what your brand offers now and in the future as well. If your business can attract a positive experience from the content that you produce and provide then you are good to go. This way, the brand will leave a good impression in the long run.

3. Increase Conversions

Content is more like a map that guides the users to a brand’s real value. Content offers the customers an ability to share important information with the audience in an attractive manner. In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that content marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods to generate new leads for a brand.

When you create content that features an engaging call to action buttons, you will be able to generate leads efficiently. In addition, the content marketing strategy also has the ability to impact the conversion rates as well. It can improve your brand conversion rate because it allows you to connect with and inform your leads directly.

Customers are highly likely to invest in what your brand is offering if they have a good idea about what you are and all that you stand for. When you create good content consistently, you can easily influence your audience to make informed decisions about your brand’s value addition.

4. Long-term Success

Planning way ahead for your content strategy does not help to free you from the everyday stress of planning and posting something, but it will also enable you to focus on long-term success. You will be able to strategize effectively and deliver quantifiable results. You can have teamwork on a content bank because that is an activity that is helpful when it comes to creating and publishing content timely.

When you begin to keep a record of the content pieces that you have used already by storing them all in one place, you get a better perspective. You can also work on creating and storing promotional materials such as photos, pre-written text, videos, or anything that you might want to put in a calendar.

The content pieces that are considered evergreen can also be helpful or considered relevant to your audience. You can use the old content that did well and repurpose it according to the ongoing trends or new releases made by your brand.

Other than this, the new product updates and educational content work great, and promotions are also very relevant. Focussing on sharing events, behind-the-scenes content, and company news just as it keeps coming up is also helpful.

5. Better ROI

A good content marketing strategy helps in getting a good return on investment in the long run. Content marketing does not just precede the traditional marketing methods but it also attracts many other website visitors and leads. Consistent creation of content increases traffic and as the traffic increases, the conversions do too.

As mentioned above, these conversions are good quality leads that serve the purpose of being a good building block for your sales funnel. The website visitors who convert have also been chosen to engage with your content by accepting an offer that is displayed on the website.

The offer can be an infographic, white papers, consultation, etc. The content strategy is developed for the buying journey. It offers valuable information at every stage of the buying cycle. In this manner, website visitors can convert to leads and from there to new clients. This is a constant flow of content that nurtures prospects at each step.

6. SEO Optimization

Search engines such as Google perform a crawl of each website’s content for finding what users can bring to a website. Good content ends up generating more traffic because of the simple fact that the search engines have a better idea about the purpose of a business.

Optimization of web pages for better performance helps in increasing search engine ranking. SEO is a technical reason to create good content. It is something that matters immensely. You must give the search engines good reasons to connect with your content and promote it to the right customers.

Remember that your buyers go online and use the search engines for finding solutions using keyword phrases. Google then reveals the top content choices for these phrases. If a business masters how to get to the top of search then the brand can win in the organic search. It becomes easy to bring qualified traffic to the website and increase that traffic by publishing good content consistently.

Conclusion

Creating content can be a lot of fun when you understand the importance of doing it properly. It is important to realize that a haphazard approach will not do if your goal is to get results. You can hire content marketing services so that there is a dedicated professional to brainstorm some ideas that should be written about.

The key to success lies majorly in aligning all your content with the overall marketing and branding strategy and creating a defined schedule. For this, you need a detailed content calendar. This might seem like a lot to do, but just when you get around to doing it, you will end up saving plenty of time all through the month.

For any other information on content marketing services, feel free to get in touch with Encaptechno.

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Digital Marketingcontent marketing strategy, content strategy, lead generation, marketing strategy, online marketing services, quality content

Best Ways for Small Business E-Commerce to Compete With Big Businesses

Abhinav Bhalla / crm integration, digital marketing strategy, ecommerce platforms, salesforce commerce cloud, skilled IT consultant, zoho commerce configuration / Digital Marketing

The internet can be a pretty overwhelming and jammed place for the one who is running either a small or a medium-sized business. Competing with the big businesses that are established is definitely not an easy thing to pull off. What’s more, the market size is huge and with each passing year, the numbers of digital buyers continue to expand to billions of users all over the world.

Small and medium-sized businesses need a comprehensive and smartly planned digital marketing strategy to compete against enterprise brands as they face an age-old challenge. Anyone who runs a small-sized business has to think about the e-commerce strategy while also considering factors such as time, budget, and resources.

There are also some practical tips that help in the growth of small businesses. In this blog, we will be discussing them one after another. So if you are running a small or a medium-sized business then the tips given below can help your quest for e-commerce growth.

Building Digital Reputation

Just because a business is established at a large scale does not mean that it will have prominence at the same scale as well. There are multiple corporations that have a mediocre presence across the nation too. When you really get looking up the internet for reviews, you will be amazed at what will come across.

On the other hand, there are some small businesses that have a big name in their community as well. If you have a small business with a well-earned reputation in an industry then the results can be rewarding as compared to a large business that might struggle to enjoy benefits such as these. Focusing a little more time and effort on building the online reputation of a business by asking for customer feedback, getting and responding to reviews and looking for ways to build awareness can be successful.

With a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, it becomes easier for small and medium-sized businesses to create a dependable presence. When a business wants to get its name out there, expensive traditional advertising is involved. At present, there are multiple methods to get customers. In addition, social media marketing is also an effective method that helps in increasing your footing, meeting customers, and sharing business voice and personality.

Digital marketing methods such as social advertising and pay-per-click ads offer you the opportunity to reach a new audience for a streamlined investment as compared to traditional advertising. In addition, you can also take advantage of the tried and tested methods of marketing such as print and online ads by using analytics techniques to look for audiences.

Many customers need to see the name of a brand multiple times before they even think of doing business. Hence, the more you are successful in getting your name out there with the customers, the better chances you will have at standing up against big brands that have good recognition.

Monitoring Important Metrics and Making Suitable Changes

A business plan is something that evolves from time to time but the metrics that are considered while measuring success are more than likely to stay all the same. One must be ahead of the metrics for uncovering important insights about where there is room for improvement so that the e-commerce strategy can be adjusted based on that.

It is necessary to understand the traffic that is moving to the website of a small business or a channel. It is important to find how shoppers look for a website including organic search, social, paid to advertise, etc. After you know what kind of traffic attracts the most shoppers, it becomes easy to focus on customer behaviors that can drive more traffic. For instance, in case the customers come across a small business by the medium of organic search, the SEO strategy can be doubled down and supplemented with a paid campaign.

Other than this, it is also important to know the conversion rate so that you can know the number of visitors who have placed an order. When this number is compared with the industry average, it can be determined if the products and services are competitive or not. Tracking the conversion rate over time will help in identifying trends and acting on them at the right time. If the conversion rate drops quickly then this might indicate a problem with the checkout system or site performance.

A good digital marketing strategy can also help to know the average number of units per transaction. You can increase this number for boosting the bottom line and improving this unit, the lower value items that compliment a shopper’s primary purchase can be recommended.

Finally, another way to do this is by tracking the number of all the orders that are placed on a channel. Once this number is understood along with the trends that keep changing with time, inventory planning becomes easy. Monitoring the orders with time also helps in planning for high and low demand. For precision, post-sale adjustments should not be counted as returns. Only when the performance of a business is identified, it becomes easy to find opportunities and strengths for continued success.

Creation of Engaging Content on All Platforms

People from across the world search for something or another each second on Google. The total number of searches that happen on a daily basis comes down to somewhere in billions. To make this easy, most people look for products and services when they go on Google. If the companies wish to attract the attention of these people then the creation of suitable content in line with search trends, intent, and keywords is important. In this way, the right customers get attracted to the website and drive conversions.

Live Commerce is an important aspect of Salesforce Commerce Cloud that hosts live virtual events such as shopping opportunities. This is a channel that makes the line between entertainment and shopping very subtle. When used in the right way, this channel can be a lucrative way for small businesses to earn good money.

In case you have a limited budget then using free and open-source tools such as Google Trends is one of the best ways to understand emerging keywords. You can also learn how to successfully include them in your content and promote it. Remember to see the results and make necessary updates so that your performance is improved.

Keep in mind that as the various social channels keep on becoming a large part of the e-commerce puzzle, looking out for opportunities on Instagram and Facebook will become increasingly important. It does not matter if the audience is small, efforts must be made to conduct events that give you a chance to communicate with leads. Find ways to answer questions about your products and services while demonstrating the features.

For instance, if you run a beauty products store and are planning to launch it soon then life with demonstrations, skincare tips, and the right way to use the product can be helpful. These methods can increase the conversion rate remarkably and also provide a unique and innovative experience to the customers.

Easing the Product Discovery

It is not merely sufficient to drive all the traffic to just one website, one needs the shoppers to convert as well. A great way to achieve this is by eliminating all steps in the customer journey that do not ensure an easy shopping experience. The focus must be on making the shopping experience as easy as possible while driving high conversions and revenue. Checking in metrics for insights about what must be done for improving conversions helps.

You can also create guided selling techniques such as assessment or quizzes for encouraging product discovery and helping customers to find what they are looking for. Interesting and innovative content helps the customers to visualize a product and spend a lot more time on a website. If you run a small business then focus on creating valuable content for social media and e-commerce platforms.

It has been noted that artificial intelligence tools make a significant difference in product discovery, particularly for the small businesses that may not have resources for manually mining data for searching insights. AI is something that comes with the ability to take all the guesswork out of product recommendations and automate merchandising. Most customers appreciate this and are open to using artificial intelligence when it comes to customer engagement including the millennials.

Optimizing Checkout Workflow

The entire customer journey does not necessarily end at the “add to cart”, rather the cart is an experience in itself. The process of streamlining the cart by updating items as they are added while allowing the customers to create a wish list is an important step.

It can pay off to create easy-to-spot “Bin” or “Remove” buttons. These buttons can be important to ensure a seamless checkout experience and they usually have a high interaction rate on cart pages. You must also not forget to provide a wide range of payment methods that contribute to offering an improved customer experience. Also make it a point to allow all-important global digital payment methods including credit cards or mobile wallets such as Google Pay, Paytm, Apple Pay, etc.

One more thing to keep in mind while running e-commerce platforms is that most of the customers prefer an easy and small business method that can make shopping easy. When delivery channels are strained because of supply chain problems and there is a huge demand, it is time to consider the best methods for getting all products to customers. To make this easy, a connected store and digital inventory system help in buying online products and picking them up at a local shop.

Testing Marketing Trends Often

There is no doubt that the big brands have the budget to go all-in on the latest marketing trends but the small business also has a big benefit. The workforce contributing to the success of a small or medium-sized business is small which means that there is room to be more nimble when it comes to marketing strategy. It can also help to test some marketing trends before the final budget is improved.

CRM integration makes the process of having a strong marketing process extremely simple. A small business may not come with the ability to float massive ideas but it definitely comes with the benefit of executing and iterating quickly which is important for getting the results you want. Small and medium-sized businesses can use innovation for gaining a competitive edge over big businesses easily.

The key is to just follow the marketing trends, test them, and roll out a digital marketing strategy that can eventually prove beneficial. If someone running a small business is successful in finding this strategy and then genuinely using it for good then the result is always good.

Customer Feedback and Service

Let’s say that a small business has been working hard on creating the best customer experience. Now the best way to do this in the present time is by managing online reputation and receiving constructive feedback on methods that improve a business. In case you fail to receive this information promptly then you can also consider reaching out to loyal customers and asking for their feedback on how you can improve.

From this point, it is easy to implement processes that improve a business. Your customers may wish to add pick-ups for a business or maybe they could have a similar question about a service that can be answered on a page of the website. This is an example of the fact that the customers are interested in a good quality experience and their feedback can set you apart from the big brands that do not have easy flexibility in customer feedback.

Small and medium-sized businesses have the ability to develop a much stronger and more personal relationship with the customers. High-quality customer service has as great value as any other product or service. Rather, most people use customer service as a requisite of deciding whether or not a business should be done.

Small business owners should remember that customers appreciate good quality relationships and experiences and not only end results. In case the customers offer a relationship that they cannot get at a big business then they will come to you first regardless of the fact that they might have to pay more.

Conclusion

Small businesses must understand that time and streamlined budgets are resources that can empower them. In case the goal is to increase the sales then something must be done to upgrade a business and how it functions. The financial and branding goals can be difficult to achieve if the important resources are not used wisely.

Steps such as CRM integration can be a game-changer for small businesses to compete with big businesses. The focus must be on lead generation, online marketing, and automation tools to get good results in the end. However, in case you are managing and keeping a track of customers, these tools do not help as much.

Investing in a CRM is a tested way to increase sales and productivity, save money and improve customer experience. If you run a small business and are struggling to stand out in your industry then we can help you reach your maximum potential. Get in touch with us at Encaptechno and speak to a skilled IT consultant from our team.

After doing a detailed analysis, we will suggest you choose from the best platforms including Zoho Commerce Configuration or Salesforce E-commerce Cloud for optimal results.

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Digital Marketingcrm integration, digital marketing strategy, ecommerce platforms, salesforce commerce cloud, skilled IT consultant, zoho commerce configuration

How Digital Marketing Is Ruling the World?

Abhinav Bhalla / customer targeting campaigns, digital marketing services, increased website traffic, online lead generation, social media presence / Digital Marketing

The practice of digital marketing is typically linked to the marketing campaigns that appear on electronic devices. This is a kind of marketing that can particularly take multiple forms including search engine marketing, paid social ads, social media posts, online videos, etc.

Very often, digital marketing is compared with traditional marketing uses magazine ads, direct mails, and billboards. However, digital marketing wins in the present time because most people live on the internet. As a digital marketing professional, one must learn to take advantage of the digital world with a strong online lead generation strategy and social media presence.

The process of building a brand and offering an improved customer experience comes with an ability to attract many more potential customers when customer-targeted campaigns are into play.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the process of promoting brands so that they connect with potential customers using the internet and other ways of digital communication. This commonly includes email, web, social media, multimedia messages, texts, etc. Essentially, it can be said that in case a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it is called digital marketing.

Digital marketing is often defined using many different digital tactics and channels for connecting with customers where most time is spent online. Right from the website to the brand assets of a business, digital advertising, online brochures, email marketing and much more, there are many methods that fall under the wide umbrella of digital marketing.

There are various ways in which the potential of digital marketing channels can be maximized. The passionate, dedicated, and experienced digital marketers also have a clear picture of how all campaigns support the goals. Based on the goals of a marketing strategy, it is easy to support a large campaign with the use of free and paid channels.

A content marketer can effectively create blog posts that serve to create leads from a web guide including information that the business specialized in. This can lead to increased website traffic. On the other hand, a social media marketing professional can help in promoting the blog posts using the paid and organic posts on the social media accounts of a business. In addition, an email marketer can create an email campaign for sending more information to those who download the ebook.

Why is Digital Marketing Ruling the World?

Digital marketing is a method by which brands can effectively reach a larger audience when compared with the traditional methods. It becomes to target the prospects that are likely to buy a product or a service with digital marketing. In addition, it is cost-efficient as compared to traditional advertising and also allows you to measure success on an everyday basis.

All brands that have a well planned and effective online lead generation strategy in place have the ability to rule the world. Some of the benefits offered by digital marketing that show why it is ruling the world are mentioned below.

1. Targeting the Right Prospects

In traditional advertising, there is only limited control over who sees the ad. When you place an advertisement on television, billboard, or even a magazine, there is not much control. You can most definitely measure the demographics such as the readership but still, you cannot attain a significant amount of information.

On the other hand, digital marketing campaigns enable you to find and target a specific audience while sending a personalized and high converting message to the audience. You can effectively take benefit of social media features shown on ads to some audiences based on factors such as age, location, gender, interests, behaviours, networks, etc.

In addition, you can also use PPC or SEO strategies for serving ads to users who have already shown their interests in the products or services. You can also search specific keywords related to your industry. Finally, digital marketing services allow you to carry out research that is needed to identify a buyer persona. It also allows you to refine a marketing plan with time so that it can be ensured that you are reaching your prospects effectively.

Digital marketing is a strategy that helps you market to subgroups within the larger target audience. In case you sell various products and services to different buyer personas then this is something that is particularly helpful.

2. Cost-effective

Digital marketing is a lot more cost-effective as compared to traditional marketing methods. It helps you track online lead generation campaigns on an everyday basis and reduce the amount of money that is spent on a channel if it does not show a high ROI.

When it comes to the traditional marketing methods, it is actually the opposite. It does not make a difference how a billboard is performing. The cost will still be the same regardless of the fact if it converts for you or not.

Using digital marketing methods, you can have complete control on where you are spending your money. Rather than paying for the PPC campaigns, you can spend money on the design software for creating high converting content.

The digital marketing strategies can enable you to consistently retarget while also ensuring that no money is wasted on channels that do not work well. If we look at things from a large perspective then taking the digital marketing services is a cost-effective solution and offers many opportunities to make sure that you get the maximum return.

A small or medium-sized business can allocate a limited budget for digital marketing campaigns. The money can be effectively invested in social media, SEO, and blogging which are three strategies that can offer a higher ROI with minimal spending.

3. Competitive Edge

Digital marketing is a process using which you can outrank bigger players in an industry. A small business cannot effectively compete with the major brands in an industry many of which have a lot of money to invest in online lead generation campaigns.

Fortunately, there are many opportunities for outranking the big players using strategic digital marketing methods. For example, you can identify some keywords that are related to a product or service while creating content that helps in ranking on search engines using these keywords.

It must be noted that the search engines do not care which brand is the biggest. Rather, search engines prioritize the content that resonates the most with the target audience. In addition, social media allows you to reach new audiences using influencer marketing.

Even if most people do not follow brands on social media, many of them follow influencers who show their products and services. In case you work for small to medium-sized companies, this can be a good avenue for consideration.

4. Measurable Method

The customer-targeted campaigns planned with digital marketing are easily measurable. Digital marketing is a method that comes with the ability to offer a comprehensive and start to end view of all important factors that can potentially matter to a brand.

The factors such as impressions, clicks, views, shares, and time spent on a page can be measured effectively. This is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing. Using traditional advertising is useful for achieving some goals and one of the biggest benefits that it offers is measurability.

As opposed to most online marketing efforts, digital marketing enables marketers to see precise results and that too in real-time. In case you have put a newspaper ad, you will understand the dynamics of people turning to the page where your ad is there.

You will never know whether the ad is responsible for sales at all. However, using digital marketing strategies, it becomes easy to know if the ad is responsible for any sales, to begin with. You can measure the ROI of any possible aspect of your marketing efforts.

5. Personalization

Availing the digital marketing services can effectively allow you to gather customer data in a manner that offline marketing cannot. The data that is collected digitally tends to be a lot more precise and specific as compared to other data.

Let’s say that a brand offers financial products and services and wishes to offer some special discounts to people who have looked at the products already. You would already know that it is easy to get better results in case you target the offer to the person’s interest so let’s assume that you prepare two campaigns.

One campaign is for the young people who have looked to the financial products and services, and the other one is for the new-age entrepreneurs who have considered some of the retirement plans. Without automated tracking, it is difficult to know the number of customer profiles, brochures, etc. With the use of digital marketing, on the other hand, all this information will be available quickly.

6. Customer Connection

Using digital marketing strategies, brands can establish a much better connection with the customers. It is a method that allows you to communicate with the customers in real-time. Even more importantly, digital marketing allows the customers to connect with you.

The brands must think about their social media strategy. It can be valuable when the target audiences see the latest post but it is a lot better when they comment on it and share it ahead as well. This can create greater popularity around the products and services along with increased visibility each time someone joins the conversation.

Interaction with the customers benefits both the businesses and customers. The level of engagement increases as they become active participants in a brand’s story. Any sense of ownership can create a better sense of security and brand loyalty.

7. Easy Conversions

With an established online lead generation campaign running in place, the conversions become easy and convenient. The customers can take action instantly after seeing an ad or a content piece. The instant result that comes with the use of traditional advertisements is that you can hope for a phone call shortly after someone sees an ad.

However, how often is it that someone has the time to reach out to a company while they are busy completing a task at hand? Using digital marketing, they can click on a link or a blog post and move well along the sales funnel. People may not make a purchase immediately but they will stay connected and also give you a chance for further interaction.

Role of Digital Marketing In a Brand’s Success

Traditional marketing definitely exists in print ads, physical marketing, phone communications, and much more, but the good thing with digital marketing is that occurs both online and electronically. This means that there are many possibilities for brands to reach customers including social media, search engines, and videos.

This is where digital marketing is important for a business and brand awareness. Almost all brands have a website but if they do not then they have a social media presence or an ad strategy. Digital marketing is so common that customers have started depending on it as a method to learn more about brands.

To sum it up, digital marketing is needed to be competitive as a business owner. There are multiple options and strategies associated with digital marketing that can be used. You can actually start getting creative while experimenting with a wide range of marketing methods on a budget.

Using digital marketing, you can also use tools such as analytics dashboards for monitoring the success and ROI of a marketing campaign. This is a lot more than what you can do with traditional promotional content such as a print ad or a billboard.

Conclusion

Digital marketing must be one of the primary focuses of almost all businesses and their online lead generation strategy. Online marketing is an excellent method to stay in touch with your customers and almost nothing else offers you the level of personalization that digital data can offer.

The more you embrace the wide possibilities of digital marketing, the more you will be able to realize the growth potential of your company. If you run a business and want it to stand out in the market then taking digital marketing services is a must.

At Encaptechno, we specialize in offering the best online marketing services. Get in touch with us to know more about how we can help you gain a better standing in the market.

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Digital Marketingcustomer targeting campaigns, digital marketing services, increased website traffic, online lead generation, social media presence

Proven Tips to Grow On Social Media

Abhinav Bhalla / brand enhancement, customer interaction, customer service, social media marketing, valuable content / Digital Marketing

In the present world, social media is known as one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. It is prevalent for offering many benefits that help people and businesses reach millions of customers worldwide. In case a business is not using the profitable source of social media marketing, there is a chance of missing out on a remarkable marketing opportunity that can play a key role in increasing overall revenue.

A good social media marketing strategy can be a powerful way for businesses of all sizes for reaching prospects and customers. Let’s say you run a brand and you are not present on social media then you will end up missing out on a large chunk of the audience who will never come to know about your brand.

On the other hand, your customers will be interacting with your competitors through social media regularly on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. If you have already not woken up to this fact then we would like to reiterate for you that social media marketing can be your key to bringing great success. You can collaborate with loyal brand advocates and also drive leads and sales.

There are some proven tips that can be used to grow on social media. However, before we begin to understand all those tips, we will first start by understanding what social media marketing is and its importance for your business.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing can be considered as a form of internet marketing that includes creating and sharing valuable content on social media networks. The main objective of social media marketing is to achieve marketing and branding goals. It can commonly include activities such as posting valuable textual content, image updates, videos, etc. for driving audience engagement and paid advertising.

A well planned and implemented social media marketing strategy can help in achieving many goals like building conversions, raising brand awareness, increasing website traffic, improving communication and interaction with audiences, creating a strong brand identity and positive brand association, etc. The more engaged an audience is on a social media network, the better it becomes for you to achieve marketing goals.

What is Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A social media marketing strategy serves as a detailed blueprint capable of solving all problems on the social media channels. An effective social media marketing strategy is not limited to posting photos and tweets. Rather, it is a well thought out plan which highlights things such as what you are posting, and a goal that you wish to achieve from it.

Just as any other strategy, a social media marketing strategy comes way before you actually start creating. It is a detailed plan with thought-provoking ideas, a purpose, and a path to a definite chief aim that you are trying to achieve. With a social media marketing strategy, you can enhance your customer interaction processes and eventually your brand awareness as well.

Consider that you are building your own small business. Now, you will not just open a shop the very next day you decide that you want to do a business. There are many things involved in the process that includes planning, strategizing, and implementing and it is similar with each new step you will take towards building a business.

A strategy is an important part of social media marketing. It demands an in-depth understanding of your audience, what they expect, how their expectations align with your goals, and finally, how you can attract them with an offer that gets them on board.

A crucial thing that you must remember here is that you can have several social media goals. You can use social media marketing tools to get more leads, share important product or service information, expand brand awareness, your network, or anything that helps in connecting with your customers.

Moreover, you can create different strategies for different platforms based on the nature of a platform. You can post content on Facebook for generating more leads, Instagram for sharing visually attractive content, and YouTube for informative content.

Tips to Grow on Social Media

With the changing times, the business processes present today have changed as well. A social media platform enables us to go further beyond boundaries while reaching out to millions all over the world. In case you are a small to a medium-sized business owner who wishes to expand the reach then it is important to be where the existing and potential customers are present.

Being present on social media and continuously publishing valuable content can help your brand grow at a great speed. Below mentioned are some of the tips that you can use to grow on social media channels.

1. Customer Engagement Plan

Social media marketing has proven itself as one of the most popular methods for creating an environment that enables people to access, use and exchange information. The brands that wish to grow in the market and make a name for themselves must understand that building a customer engagement plan is a must for brand enhancement.

Hence, the marketing team must work on developing a customer engagement plan for building social media presence. If made nicely then this plan can help in deciding how to relate with a customer, and increase engagement. Social media marketing is the best way to connect, engage, and attract more customers. The more you connect with the audience, the more likely you can convert them.

Brands should be focused on creating a two-way contact with the target audience. In addition, communication and increased consumer interaction is an effective way to attract exposure to the brand message. With fundamental market analysis, it becomes easy to decide which social networks a brand should be targeting. On the basis of a well-planned strategy, the brands can maximize their reach and customer engagement with social media marketing.

2. Being Active on Popular Platforms

Social media is easily one of the most stress-free and lucrative digital marketing platforms which if used effectively can help in increasing business visibility and brand awareness. To see the results of this, businesses will have to create social media profiles for their brand for networking with their target audience.

Brand awareness can be enhanced if there is enough presence on social media networks. Based on which channels can work well for a business, efforts must be made to publish regular content on these platforms. With a couple of hours spent on social media on a weekly basis, marketers claim that their social media marketing efforts increase brand visibility and the user experience.

Hence, there is no doubt that by having a dedicated social media handle on popular platforms, businesses can benefit immensely and with regular use, it can also become possible to produce a wide audience for a business in almost no time. Marketers must be mindful of the fact that being active on social media platforms is being worked on while a strategy is planned.

3. Being Aware of the Competition

There is a wide range of social media profiles accessible to the masses. Going live on social media can be a brand’s choice for understanding the competitors better and also knowing different strategies being implemented to attract the audience.

In addition, it is also easy to see the content that is being posted on the social media profiles of your competitor while judging the posts that do better. After the completion of this analysis, you can look into all the questions asked by the audience and also include the questions in a social media marketing strategy.

Businesses can go through a competitor’s post, comments and the manner in which engagement is being done with the audience. Other than this, you can also read and understand the questions that the audience asks and how your business can improve according to those concerns.

Social media marketing offers you an opportunity to research increasingly about how well informed an audience is. On the basis of these comparisons, you can answer questions effectively and make yourself much more aware of important things that you didn’t know about earlier. Study the customer service of your competitor and compare it with your customer service to analyze how you can do better than them.

4. Publishing Valuable Content

Businesses must make it a habit to publish relevant and informative content on social media. All the other tips do not grow as much they can if the content published from the official accounts of brands is not useful.

Taking the support of an expert content development agency can be helpful. Businesses must remember that if they get the publishing valuable content part right then the success will automatically on the social media channels.

5. Building Transparency

By creating a strong social media presence and using a good strategy in place, you can build transparency. Even though sometimes it is not possible to control what people might say about you, you can still manage your brand image by understanding more about your audience by learning from what people are saying.

Increasing customer interaction with the social media followers and building more transparent communication channels can help in getting greater customer insights when compared with tools or data. It will also build an authentic image for your brand.

7. Understanding Purchasing Patterns

Social media networks are always open to everyone which further enables businesses to follow customer activities of potential buyers. Social media helps marketers to be informed about the likes, dislikes, inclinations, and target audience so that it can become simple to form an improved social media marketing strategy.

Understanding the purchasing patterns of the audience also allows you to focus on things that you may not be following while the creation of content and therefore becoming better at digital marketing strategies. A social media marketing strategy gives you a chance to see what interests your customers the most.

You can develop content that is related to your audience for particularly increasing engagement on the social media handles. This helps in gaining better access to see different demographics of people who visited your account and the kind of content that was liked on the social media profile. When you do this, you will significantly improve your marketing skills and create engaging content.

8. Communicating With Audience

No matter which industry may be operating in, finding customers on social media is easy in the present time. This is major because most people in the present time are active on social media platforms. The customers use social media to connect with friends, family, and acquaintances and for a network with brands and businesses.

On the other hand, social media networks are also a great tool to increase customer interaction all around the world. Businesses should keep in mind that owning and running a business offers a much better chance to communicate with a wide audience. Plus, one can learn about social media statistics by going on the internet, connecting, and buying something.

9. Boosting Website Traffic

If a business has a strong web presence, then social media growth plays the role of supplementing the presence. The use of social media helps in reaching different audiences in a useful, entertaining, and personal way while referring to potential customers you may never have had a chance to engage with previously.

This has the potential to work well in almost all cases when it is done correctly. The website and foot traffic can increase easily with the effective use of social media marketing. Let your business be known with the power of social media. You can add a link to your website in your stories on social media or with your every post. There are many ways and exploring each one of them can pay off in the long run.

Conclusion

Each and every business that is running in the market has different goals and methods of measuring success. Using social media regularly can help in achieving business goals efficiently. Either businesses can achieve the goals themselves or they can take the support of professionals who are experienced in offering these services.

If you want to grow on social media, make sure that you are mindful of all the tips that are mentioned above. If you follow them then your brand will not just succeed, but it will quickly emerge at the top as well.

If you wish to attain social media growth by publishing valuable content and interacting with the customers in the right ways, then taking the expertise of a professional can be helpful. Let your brand shine and gain the necessary growth on social media by getting in touch with the experienced digital marketing professionals of Encaptechno.

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Digital Marketingbrand enhancement, customer interaction, customer service, social media marketing, valuable content

How Does Website Navigation Improve Business Conversions?

Abhinav Bhalla / better user experience, improvement in SERP ranking, lead capture form, online marketing company, smooth website navigations, UI/UX design, website development / Digital Marketing

Website navigation is an important aspect of distinguishing a brand. A systematic, organized, and transparent navigation system works as a blueprint for directing visitors to various pages and information on a website. It plays an important role in encouraging visitors to stay for long, use the content, and have a better user experience that can lead to more sales and brand loyalty.

Many businesses create website navigation as more of an afterthought after the pages and content. In fact, many internet users were able to predict the locations where important content would be based on the standard website navigation structure.

If users have trouble finding a page on the website, chances are that there is a problem in the UI/UX design of the website. This leads to lesser time on sites, low conversion rates, and high bounce rates. In case you are managing an e-commerce store, bad website navigation can negatively affect your bottom line and revenue.

In this blog, we will see how does website navigation improves business conversions. We will also learn some best practices that shed a light on the methods that should be implemented for smooth website navigation.

What is Website Navigation?

Website navigation can be termed as the process of navigating websites, applications, and pages on the internet. The technology responsible for smooth website navigation is called hypertext or hypermedia which is nothing but a text-based web page that uses hyperlinks for connecting one page to other pages on the internet.

A hyperlink is responsible for leading your web browser to a URL. This URL can indicate which file the browser should access from the server and it also downloads and renders the data so that the user can see it. The internal links are responsible for leading a user to different pages on the same domain and the external links lead to different pages on another web domain, an entirely different website and server.

The website navigation uses menus with internal links that make it easy for visitors to find pages that they are looking for. Most of the websites feature the menu at the top of the website. This section is commonly called a header in the website development language. Some common pages linked in the website menu include “About Us”, “Blog”, “Contact”, “Features”, “Plan and Pricing”, etc. Good navigation can be counted as an important element of a user-friendly site.

Importance of Website Navigation

It would be suitable to say that website navigation can either make or break the visitor experience. When you attempt to navigate a website without any logical or a well-defined structure, the user will feel stuck in a maze with no reference at all. The process can be frustrating, unpleasant, and overwhelming.

On the other hand, smooth website navigation can improve business conversions and turn a potentially negative user experience into a positive one. The website navigation structure has the capacity to have an immense impact on sales, conversions, and bounce rates. If the visitors feel that they cannot find what they are looking for then they are likely to leave and this is the last thing that any business would want. Therefore, making sure that there is a clear, structural, and specific website navigation is important because that enables visitors to find things instantly.

Website Navigation and User Experience

User experience is actually the way in which a visitor understands a website’s visibility and aesthetics. It is natural that all businesses would want to offer the best user experience to the visitors who come to a website. To make sure that happens, there are many aspects that play an important role such as fonts, colors, headlines, page load time, images, form designs, etc.

If the website navigation is not optimized properly then there is no point in thinking about offering a better user experience. Think for a second that a user comes on a website and is unable to find a web form conveniently. What do you think will happen? If you are thinking that the user will get irritated and leave, you are correct. No matter how attractive the website may be, if the website is not functional, the user will leave.

On the other hand, if the website navigation is optimized, the visitors can flow from one page to another without any problem. When the website development is done keeping in mind a better user experience, the visitors come back to the website again and again. This is precisely how conversions improve website navigation.

Businesses must remember that customers visit many websites each day and have no shortage of online platforms to find what they are looking for. In case you do not offer them smooth website navigation then they will not care to come back again. Instead, the competitor will have a better chance of winning the customer.

Ways to Improve Website Navigation

By now, we know that businesses must keep the visitors on the websites for exploring further and making a purchase. If the website is successful in optimization, the visitors will feel inspired to click on the links and they will be attracted to the offers. So we know that keeping the visitors engaged is what we need on the website but how do we do that?

Below, we will see some of the tips that can be implemented so that no conversions are lost. Some of the website navigation tips that help in improving conversions are mentioned below.

1. Customer Oriented

Oftentimes, it can be easy to get caught up in the minute details of running a business rather than staying focused on where the customers are coming from. However, falling into this trap while planning your website navigation can lead to a lot of confusion, high bounce rates, and frustration.

One of the best choices is to include a link to your portfolio in front of the customer. You can use secondary items in the sub-navigation that can make it easy to find important pages such as the contact page, pricing information, testimonials, request a quote form, etc. This way, the customer will have no problem finding what they came looking for and they will form a good impression.

2. Mobile Optimization

To ensure overall smooth website navigation, it is necessary to have a mobile responsive navigation menu that is essential to any website. The customers want the mobile user experience to be just as good as the desktop experience.

Hence, it is significant to offer the website visitors a responsive and optimized navigation bar that can guarantee an improvement in the mobile conversion rate. You can think of simplifying the navigation bar for your mobile website. The more useless options you offer to the visitors, the worse will be their user experience.

The website must have an effective mobile menu that conveys the most important things about a business. It should be as simple as that. Any inconsequential information that you may want to offer a user must be moved to the website’s footer.

3. Replace Drop Down Menu

If the options in the drop-down menu are complex or unfamiliar, you can consider replacing them with a detailed page. The usability research shows drop-down menus can be frustrating for users.

In addition, you will also have to let go of valuable information to make everything fit properly. Many prominent websites use this method to help customers navigate their support menu. As opposed to cramming all the support options into a drop-down menu, it is best to create a page that has different products to offer. The visuals then can make it easy to find the right options a simple thing to do.

Remember that website navigation is not the place for your creativity or clever tricks. It is necessary to use clear design and text so that the visitors can see and know what they mean. The website must have a clear and understandable flow so that the user experience can be seamless too.

4. Hypertext

A very common problem during website development is letting the design get in the way of functionality. In case the visitors cannot tell a hyperlink from a copy then this means that there is a problem. A very simple way to make the hypertext visible is by ensuring that it differs from all elements on the page and not when the visitors roll the link.

A great strategy is to edit it in a different color, underline it and also make the entire thing bold. In addition, you can also turn the header navigation link into buttons just as you think is correct and will please your visitors.

5. Navigation Bar

There are many websites that either has too many or too few links in the navigation bar. It is definitely important to think about what you want people to do on the website but you must also think about what the visitors may want. It has to be a two-way street.

There is a possibility that you may want your visitors to get converted but your visitors may have just come to know more about the business or learn about what you are doing. If you think that the navigation menu begins to look somewhat cluttered then you can organize your website better. Use a heading and include a sub-menu with other link categories.

6. Sidebar Separation

The sidebar should not look like the content on the page. It is supposed to stand out so this means that the website development must be done focusing on colors. In fact, color psychology can be used for doing this.

The designers can edit the sidebar with background color as opposed to the body copy. Based on the preference of the website designer, different spaces can work very well. One just has to make sure that there is a significant separation between the sidebar and other elements.

7. Navigation Placement

It is great to use your creativity in the best ways that you can think are possible but never at the cost of an easy user experience. Therefore, make sure that the navigation is put in places where people can find it easily.

This includes things such as header navigation bar, sidebar, and footer. These spaces can be used so that the visitors can find what they need properly. In case you wish to add creative navigation like using multimedia then you must make it obvious so that the users can click.

8. Call to Action Buttons

Not so long ago, many websites used to have buttons for header navigation. However, in the present time, all the visual noise can often feel clunky. It can feel that you are not being allowed to focus on links in your website navigation.

Focus on reversing all the unnecessary buttons to the call to action buttons. You can also make it a practice to ask your visitors for signing up for an email list, scheduling a call, and showing a demo for your product. No matter what the case may be, the call to action buttons must be more than other links.

Conclusion

It is necessary to keep in mind that if the business succeeds in website navigation then the visitors will continue to browse and take desired actions such as creating an account, completing a purchase, and then exiting finally. More than anything, the business conversions will improve significantly and the visitors will talk about the amazing user experience offered by the website.

By giving careful attention to your website goals and the kind of visitors that you have, the website navigation can be planned and designed. Make sure that the visitors can find the functionality that they are looking for on the website by taking digital marketing support from an online marketing company.

Encaptechno offers a detailed report for your website’s navigation. Get in touch with us to make sure that your website is offering a good website navigation experience to your esteemed customers so that your conversions do not suffer.

How Does Website Navigation Improve Business Conversions? Read More »

Digital Marketingbetter user experience, improvement in SERP ranking, lead capture form, online marketing company, smooth website navigations, UI/UX design, website development

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