Category: Strategies

Building a website is a hectic task that requires lots of planning. Depending on your strategy and the type of website you are building, it may also take time before your website starts generating any revenue. 

In today’s review, we’ll be looking at the crucial steps involved in setting up a successful website in 2021. These tips will significantly reduce the stress involved in building and marketing a modern site.

Create A Masterplan

It’s impossible to build a successful website when you have no idea what its objective is. So, before you start spending money on hosting and digital marketing courses, have a meeting with yourself and decide why you want to build the website and what you hope to achieve. These answers will solve at least half of the problems experienced in the next steps of setting up a site.

The first thing you need to figure out is the subject of the website. This should be followed by comprehensive research on whether there is a profitable market for your objective. The market analysis is really important, especially if you’re starting a blog you want to monetize. 

If your topic generates enough searches per month, move to the next step and find the keywords needed to support your main subject. There are lots of free and paid tools that can help you with keyword research.

At the end of the planning period, you should have a spreadsheet containing the main topic of your website and the supporting keywords for the internal pages.

Register A Domain Name And Choose A Host

Coming up with the perfect domain name should be super easy once you know what the website is about. However, there are some basic rules to follow when purchasing a domain name to improve the performance and visibility of your website. This is particularly crucial if you are building an affiliate blog since the name will influence how fast your website ranks.

Generally, there are two ways to determine the kind of domain name you’ll use. The first is to go with your brand if you already have a company. This basically means you’ll use your company name as the domain name. Established businesses need to use their company names since it gives the website legitimacy.

The other option is to come up with a creative name based on the topic or industry your website is targeting. For instance, if you are in the tech niche, you can create a domain name using tech terminologies. These domain names are a bit easier to rank since they’re easily recognizable to search engine bots.

All in all, a good domain name should be short, simple, and professional. Experts would also advise you against adding hyphens and numbers in the name.

Next up is finding the perfect host for your site. Pay for a reliable host to avoid costly downtimes. Some of the factors you need to consider when choosing a host are customer support, security, storage, backup options, and estimated traffic.

You must also think about the server types. There are generally three options here, dedicated, VPS, and shared. Shared servers are the cheapest, but they are far from ideal, especially for e-commerce and other sites that deal with delicate customer details.

Choose A Content Management System

CMS is the system that allows you to publish all the content appearing on your website. There are platforms to choose from, but WordPress is the most commonly used one.

The platform is popular because: 

• It has an intuitive dashboard
• It is scalable
• Has thousands of plugins
• It has lots of themes to choose from
• It can be integrated with BigCommerce and WooCommerce
• It’s open-source, so there is a lot of support from the community
• It’s great for SEO

Other options worth checking out are Squarespace, Elementor, Wix, and Shopify.

Design Your Website

This is one of the most critical steps in making a website since it directly affects the user experience. As the designers at nettonic.co.uk explain in their web design report, website visitors take just 2 seconds to determine whether they’ll stay on your site or not. This is a tiny window, so you must do your best to grab and retain your visitor’s attention as soon as possible.

The good news is that designing a website is nowhere as stressful as it used to be. You don’t even need any coding knowledge to get the job done. Most platforms come with free and paid themes that you can edit with simple drag-and-drop functions to personalize your site.

But, if you want to customize your site extensively, hiring an experienced developer is the best play.

Below are some of the factors to keep in mind while designing your website:

• User-friendliness
• Mobile-friendliness
• Loading time
• Aesthetics

Create Your Content

Consult any digital marketing expert, and they’ll tell you that content is king. Without high-quality content, all the effort you’ll put into creating a website and ranking it will be for nothing. You could attract thousands of visitors per month, but your conversion rate will be terrible if your blogs are poorly written.

It’s for that reason that you need to create the best content in your niche. Look at what other websites are doing and compile the information to build quality long-form content.

Make sure your homepage reflects your brand. The inner pages are just as useful so create quality blogs for these pages as well. 

Basic business information should be easily accessible to your website visitors. This includes contact information and location. If you are running an e-commerce store, add links for shipping, return policy, and payment methods at the footer.

Implement An SEO Strategy

Your SEO strategy starts when creating a website master plan and choosing a domain name. However, optimization is even more important once you have your content published.

SEO is a broad subject, but it generally covers onsite and offsite optimization. Onsite SEO involves optimizing your website and content to improve rankings. It works on keyword density, URLs, metatags, external and internal links, webpage loading speeds, and creating mobile-friendly content.

Offsite SEO aims to improve your rankings through campaigns like social media marketing and building backlinks through guest posts, website comments, and brand mentions. 

Finally, it’s time to launch your website. But that’s not the end of the road. Continue creating fresh content and updating the existing one. You must also stay updated with the latest “white hat” SEO techniques to improve the rankings of your web pages.

Heard about virtual telephone providers before? Virtual communication is no longer a thing of the future – the virtual age is now. A virtual telephone provider will promote a virtual phone number, but how do they differ from the phone number we know and use daily? Here is what a virtual telephone number is and how it can help you and your business develop.

What Is a Virtual Telephone Number?

A Virtual telephone number is basically the same as a regular telephone number. They are, however, not connected to a physical cellular device, or telephone line in any way. Gone are the days of having to use a telephone number for an individual, specific device, with a dedicated line of wires. A huge downside of this system was that incoming calls to that number could only be sent to that one particular destination, and in the case of business phone numbers, a business would have to set up hardware that would configure routing rules, voicemail, and extensions, which was time-consuming on both the consumer and business end.

With the introduction of a virtual phone number for a business, the days of endless “let me refer you, please hold” responses are severely cut down. The physical limitations that an old school phone system imposes disappear and businesses are now allowed to have better flexibility and control in the way they process and receive calls.

When virtual phone numbers are used in conjunction with cloud phone systems one can purchase them directly from the cloud service provider. This way everything can be managed through an admin portal. Having a multitude of virtual phone numbers for your business allows you to set and adjust the destination of each number and modify them in real-time without having to wait for your service provider to get around to the task.

How A Virtual Phone Number Benefits Your Business

Link Employees Across States to Streamline Incoming Calls

So what can it do for your business? So much. Does your company have multiple branches scattered around the country? A virtual phone number can Connect Communications Services and unify your business with ease. If you have departments that are across different states or cities, or if your business has multiple office branches, a virtual phone number can bring together your dispersed workforce. Rather than having all incoming calls ringing a phone in just one office, a virtual phone number enables and allows the incoming call to ring the phones across multiple separate offices.

What does this mean? You are able to decide on whether the destination of a virtual phone number will be a call to queue or if it will ring a group. This means that the virtual number will call all of the necessary representatives’ phones, who are either responsible for answering calls placed in the queue or group option. It does this all at the same time or successively – you decide. Depending on which of the call strategies you choose, either queue or group, a representative anywhere, completely regardless of their physical location, can then answer the call and provide assistance to the customer or consumer.

Employ A Local Phone Number Where You Have A Lot Of Clients

If your business headquarters are located in one part of the country, but your biggest customer base has developed elsewhere, you can let your clients call you with a local phone number, making you even more desirable and growing your market further.

Having a virtual phone number for your business can help you establish a presence in an area where you are not located, increasing your market reach and presence across the country, all the while keeping the cost of all your incoming calls to a minimum. You can do this by buying a virtual phone number from your service provider and setting the destination to the phones in your offices. This is a possibility even if your business is not in the area serviced by the numbers area code. This makes it easier and more desirable for people to call you.

Fully Enjoy Geographic Flexibility And Remote Working

As you now know, a virtual phone number means that you don’t have a fixed phone line. This means that you have geographic flexibility, which means that you have the freedom to play around with remote working, something put into the spotlight due to the pandemic.

Virtual numbers are a great tool to implement and can be very useful if you want to be reachable on your cell phone while you are away from the office. This is great if you do not want to share your personal contact details with the entire company and your clients. With the use of a virtual phone number service, you can set a number, separate from your personal number, to be receivable on your cell phone. This way your employees and clients can reach you by dialing a virtual phone number.

Evaluate The Performance of Your Campaigns

If you are running ads and sales campaigns, then you must evaluate the overall success of these campaigns. Instead of funneling all of the calls through the main line of your business, you can assign a different virtual number to every campaign you are running. This makes it much easier to track the popularity of a specific campaign just by looking at the phone numbers that have been dialed.

This way when the campaign is over you are able to download and review all business reports of past calls that have come through a specific virtual number. You could very well find that one of the data points will help you in evaluating the success of your campaigns and what sort to go with in the future.

 

A virtual number can really help increase and extend the reach of your business. From bringing your scattered workforce together, to providing new ways for you and your business to answer incoming calls, a virtual phone number allows your business to meet the requirements of your employees and to be accessible to your customers.

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems, used by everyone from bloggers to small businesses. WordPress offers an easy way to create and manage a website. Once you’ve settled on WordPress for your site, you’ll want to make sure you optimise it for search engine rankings. Here are some easy tips for WordPress SEO. 

1. Use a specialist SEO company. The easiest way to be sure you’re getting your SEO right is to hire experts. A specialist agency will know all the best tricks to improve your rankings and will know all about any changes in algorithms and ranking factors, saving you a lot of the work of keeping up with an always-changing industry. 
2. Check your site speed. Page loading times are an important step in improving your site. Faster pages make the site better to use for site users, but it also cuts bounce rate by not putting people off a slow site, and Google take speed into account for your search rankings. Choose a reliable host to avoid slow servers, and slim down anything slowing down your pages. 
3. Don’t let Google index your site until you’re ready. If you’re in the process of starting up a WordPress site, you’re probably making all kinds of changes that can result in 404 errors and other problems that impact your search ranking. In the back end of WordPress, look for an option that disallows search engines from indexing your site. Tick this box, and play around with your site as much as you want without upsetting search engines. When you’re finished, uncheck the option, and your site will start to be indexed again. 
4. Install an .xml sitemap plugin. These plugins are vital for WordPress, as they give search engines links to all your pages, allowing them to index your site much more quickly. 
5. Install an SEO plugin. A good SEO plugin can do a lot of your SEO jobs for you automatically with no effort from you. You can use the plugin to manage or remind you to manage things like page titles, meta descriptions, keyword optimisation, categories, tags and indexing. 
6. Block spam comments. There are lots of tools for WordPress to block spam, so make sure you’re using one. Spam comments can cause issues, as they contribute nothing useful and irritate site users. If they’re sharing dodgy links, this can impact your rankings, as the search engines will think you’re sharing questionable content. Search engines will also penalize your content for spam comments with low-quality keywords. Handle spam fast and get rid of it, to avoid being penalized by Google for somebody else’s spam. 
7. Use internal links. When you’re creating new content, link to older content that is relevant to your current topic. This is useful for your readers but is also useful for search rankings. Internal links keep people navigating around your site, which tells the search engines that your content is helpful and your site is worth staying on. It also helps Google to find and rank more pages on your site, improving your overall rankings. 

In 2021, the times when guessing was the primary way to win a customer are long gone. Artificial intelligence tools and machine learning algorithms have already made a few major shifts in the marketing industry by now. By automating a large part of their work, marketers are now able to focus on creative assignments that require their psychological knack or empathy rather than simply mechanical work.

But as much as the COVID outbreak forced most businesses to go online, it also accelerated AI and ML development in the marketing field. The rapid growth of e-commerce generated even bigger piles of data, and customer needs have changed. The industry called for new solutions to keep up with the times. And while more innovations are totally coming in the future, we can talk about a few curious trends made possible due to AI and ML development.

Chatbots Have Become More Elaborate

Today, chatbots are nothing new. For a few years now, they’ve been with us answering questions, solving problems, and giving us a company when we felt lonely navigating a website. Largely thanks to the virtual assistants, most people are used to communicating with AI-powered characters and accept this part of reality quite well.

From dimwitted, tongue-tied robots to quite nice interlocutors, present chatbots have become even more sophisticated and received a new life. Now, they can solve complicated issues, drive sales, and even more often, a standard customer call can go without the involvement of a human assistant. Truth be told, two of three people can’t even tell a chatbot from a real person. And in fact, AI-powered tools have become so elaborate that a few years ago Facebook had to discontinue their experiment because their chatbot invented its own language humans didn’t understand.

As creepy as it sounds, but chatbots are helping marketers in many ways. Along with collecting data, they process tons of tasks – from simple questions-and-answers to promoting products, influencing customer decisions, and improving their overall experience. If you can’t afford a professional stylist – no worries – as an AI-powered fashion chatbot will pick a killer look for you.

Given its value, more and more businesses are investing money and effort in this technology. It’s a matter of time when every company and organization adopts chatbots for their online spaces. As of now, it’s clear, if you’re not one of them, you’re missing out on a very lucrative opportunity.

Voice Search

“I remember how around six years ago I was spending hours reading silly phrases for Google. “Where to buy coursework”, “best hospital Texas where”, “cry me a river”. It made no sense to me back then, but now I feel proud of being involved in teaching their machines to recognize human speech”, says Charlotte, a part-time freelancer.

A worldwide transfer to mobile devices raised new needs. People craved more hands-free access to use their devices on the move, and machine learning made it possible. It started with random people articulating random phrases and all the way grew into smart assistants who can understand human speech as accurately as 95%, which is really close to an actual human.

In fact, over half of their search requests, people do in voice, and this is the trend marketers can’t ignore. It means adjusting their content and marketing strategies so that they could reach customers even through the focused voice search. It’s yet unclear how long it will take before voice-focused marketing becomes a necessity rather than innovation, but it’s worth thinking this out as soon as right now.

Better Data Analysis    

The idea that machine-learning tools help marketers to analyze tons of data is not new. In the past, we’ve already seen how brands improve user experience and offer better personalization based on their research of customers’ behavior, purchasing patterns, and demographics. In 2021, however, this experience will go above and beyond these factors alone.

As technologies progress, marketers receive exponentially more data. This not only includes the information customers themselves eagerly provide, but rather collected in the background, largely through biometrics, voice assistance technologies, and IoT devices. Marketers are yet unsure how to make 100% use of this data, but it’s clear that we can expect a new, even higher personalization level of marketing messages in the future.

As of 2021, social media are about to take the primary spot among promotion channels. Due to a variety of ML-powered tools, marketers can collect and analyze data about what people think and say, effectively interact with the audience through different SM channels, and manipulate information to create the right impression about the brand.

Better Customer Experience through AR and VR

For years now, AR and VR tools have been gaining their share in a variety of industries, including video games, education, and design. In a wider sense, however, it is still perceived as something out-of-the-world and rarely has any practical implementation rather than for entertainment.

But the tendency is about to change, as more and more businesses are trying to embrace these technologies for their marketing purposes. And by now, there are even a few precedents. For example, IKEA launched an AR-assisted app where you can try on their furniture for your home interior before you actually buy it. Along with being pure fun, this is a perfect marketing move that helps you out to make the right decision and saves the company from a good deal of returns and paperwork.

Some fashion brands didn’t want to lag behind either, and you may see how Gucci, Zara, Vogue, and Burberry implemented AR and VR solutions in their stores and advertising campaigns.

Bottom Line

Considering everything said, AI and ML tools are fast in reshaping our reality, and marketers have to adjust. Along with much simplified processes, there are new customer needs to satisfy and new marketing challenges to meet. We don’t know what the future holds, but we surely know that marketing will depend on smart tech and the software even more.

The world has replaced in store shopping with online shopping. Online shopping saves time and energy, you no longer have to visit several shops searching for a specific item that you want. You have it all at your fingertips, on your smartphone or computer, and most sites offer price drop alerts so you will not miss anything. According to Google, nearly 75% of all online purchases are triggered by digital marketing efforts. But it’s not that easy.. customers are researching your business before making any purchases, they google every detail to be sure your business is trustworthy and make sure that you have locations nearby to turn to if they have questions or need to return an item. But what if you are running a big multi-location business? How do you need to manage your multi-location marketing strategy?

When we talk about digital marketing we are referring to the overall online strategy that you are investing in to influence your target audiences. It’s a collective term that consists of strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, etc. Digital marketing has become a powerful strategy for all businesses. But how will you adjust that strategy in the cases of single-location and multi-location businesses?

What is the difference between a multi-location business and a single location business?

At first glance, it may seem that the only difference is that one has more storefronts than the other. But, there is more to it than that. While running a multi-location business you need to consider several points. 

• Are you selling the same product in all your stores?
• Do you offer one type of product at only one or a few locations?
• Will you have individual websites across different locations or only one?

Answering these and many more questions will help you to plan a strategy and sell your product better at each location.

Here are the steps of planning a digital marketing campaign

1. Define your target buyer persona
2. Identify your key digital marketing goals 
3. Choose what KPIs to use to measure your progress
4. Define your budgets
5. Analyze your competitors
6. Research focus topics and determine keywords
7. Decide on content assets, timeline, and marketing team
8. Create assets
9. Go live

Launching an online marketing strategy for a multi-location business requires detail-oriented and data-driven professionals. For multi-location businesses using automation software and tools to save your time is a must, and will help your business grow faster. Specifically with a poor PPC strategy you have the potential to waste lots of money on advertising that isn’t generating leads locally, so it’s very recommended to use a PPC advertising management software.

How to Localize Your Multi-Location Business’s Marketing Strategy

1. Personalize your shop for each location

You will need to create indexable pages for each of the branches of your brand. On these pages you will use location-specific content, reviews from the locals, photo or video content in that location (you can show your location or your staff), local keywords. Implementing SEO best practices will increase the visibility on the search engine results page according to the most important customer keyword searches for your business. Add the local address, phone number, and email address for each business location. All these factors will let your buyer feel closer to your brand, and you will gain their trust. 

2. Adapt your marketing actions for each business locally

First of all, you will need to define the national strategy. When the skeleton of your marketing campaign is well defined, you can start adapting it focusing on individual business locations. For example with Google Ads you have limits choosing target areas, in some places, the influence marketing will have depends on where your target populations of people are located for each business. In certain areas, people may be more attached to different types of marketing, like email or content marketing. Ask yourself these questions:

• Who is your local consumer?
• What problems do they need to be solved?
• What is our local store’s solution to this problem?
• Are there regional traditions, events, or landmarks you can use to personalize your local targeting?

Remember that personalization is the key to success.

3. Create Google My Business pages for each of your locations

Your goal is to gain your customers` trust by making their local business’s contact information easy to find on Google. This is an easy digital marketing solution to implement if you don’t already have a page for each business location. You will lose many customers if they search and find a different location that is not in their area.

4. PPC ads for each location

When you have a multi-location business, this means you have a much wider range of customers and buyer personas that you must sell to. It’s very important to create PPC ads targeting each location and monitor performance closely to make sure you are not missing valuable customers in each area. Use the geo-targeting feature in your ad, so your consumers would see the location closest to them. 

5. Collect Data

You may run awesome marketing campaigns and high-quality ads, but you will never discover the insights you will need to succeed in your future campaign optimizations if you don’t measure your digital marketing results. A/B test different strategies in different areas to understand which campaign attributes bring you more profit.

Business credit cards provide financial support to businesses in almost all industries. These credit cards work pretty much like personal cards except for a few differences. 

The cards give you a line of credit that increases your purchasing power, making it easier for you to meet your company’s financial needs. The cards can be used at different points of sale, but they do have a credit limit, just like with personal credit cards.

Like other credit cards in the market, business credit card bills must be cleared on time and in full. Failure to do so attracts interest charges, late fees, and other penalties. 

On a brighter note, proper use of a business credit card will improve your company’s credit rating and attract several perks and rewards. The perks vary from one issuer to the next, so you may want to shop around and find the card that gives your business the best value.

What’s the Difference Between Business and Personal Credit Cards?

The most obvious difference between a business credit card and a consumer card is a simple fact that business cards are meant to support a company’s financial obligations and not personal needs.

The truth is that the issuer may have a hard time determining whether a particular charge was for your business or consumer expenses. However, if you use a credit card for businesses to meet personal needs, your consumer protection reduces significantly. Not to mention the damage it could have on your company’s books. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to avoid using these cards for personal expenses.

Business and personal credit cards also have different reporting policies, and consumer credit card activities are reported to TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax every month. Meanwhile, some business credit card issuers report the credit card performance to commercial credit bureaus only, while others report to both commercial and consumer credit bureaus. 

Small business credit cards have higher credit limits than personal cards. That’s one of several reasons why companies benefit hugely from business credit cards.

What Are the Benefits of Business Credit Cards?

They Are Convenient

Using small business credit cards is fast and easier compared to cash and checkbooks. 

They Enhance Cash Flow

Business credit cards boost the flow of cash in your company. You’ll have a financial cushion even when sales are low, or your account receivables are behind. 

They also keep your business operational by providing funds for inventory and emergency expenses. 

They Offer Incentives

Business credit cards attract incentives like signup bonuses, cashback, miles, shopping discounts, and points. 

Before shopping for a business credit card, you may want to look at your books and see where most of your expenses go. Use this insight to get a credit card whose rewards are in line with your company’s needs. For instance, if a significant chunk of your capital goes towards traveling, a credit card with miles incentives may be a better choice than one offering shopping discounts.

They Are Easy to Qualify For

Getting a secured small business credit card can be easier than traditional bank loans. This is especially true if your business doesn’t have an established credit history. 

They Simplify Bookkeeping

These credit cards streamline business expenses in several ways. First, tracking employees’ expenditure is so much easier when everything is done from the credit card and not their consumer cards. Some issuers even give you the option of setting employee credit card spending limits.  

If you are issuing the business card to an employee, make sure they’re well aware of the necessary measures to take to prevent business credit card fraud, everyone should be careful with that.

Issuers also provide monthly statements, quarterly/annual summaries, and additional record-keeping tools. This makes it easier to track your company’s spending pattern and simplifies auditing and payment of taxes. 

They Improve Your Company Credit Rating

Small-business credit cards can build your company’s credit, improving your eligibility for lines of credit, bank loans, and other corporate credit cards that have higher limits and lower charges and interest rates. This can be achieved by using the card within the set limit and clearing the balances on time.

Drawbacks of Business Credit Cards

They Are Expensive

Business credit cards have higher interest rates than most bank loans and fixed lines of credit. Penalties like late fees are also steep.

Interest Rates Fluctuate

Issuers can adjust the interest based on several factors like how you’re using your account.

They Come With Less Protection

The protection on small business credit cards is nowhere as comprehensive as with consumer cards. Go through the fine print and check the level of protection offered before applying for the card.

They May Require Personal Legal Liability

Some small business credit cards will require your personal security, meaning the card’s activities can negatively affect your personal credit rating.

You will find small business cards very useful if your business needs steady cash flow, streamlined expenses, and more purchasing power. They do come with a few drawbacks but, in most cases, the benefits outweigh the cons.