20 marketing strategies for rapid business growth

1. Engage in online communities

One of the Internet’s greatest strengths is its ability to bring together people with similar interests in online communities. This can be an excellent growth strategy for your brand. Responding to questions on Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora etc. to help drive targeted traffic to your website. It helps build credibility for your business and you personally also. Each week I aim to answer between 30-50 questions on various sites to build our online profile.

Marketing strategies for a startup business - 20 tips


2. Schedule social media posts using Buffer

One of my favourite schedulers is Buffer as I can schedule Facebook and Twitter posts for air events global weeks in advance and this saves an enormous of time. There are many scheduling sites that you can use and it is about choosing the one that works best for you, check out Hootsuite, Meet Edgar, Sprout Social and Tweet Deck also.

3. Subscribe on your competitors’ email lists for daily inspiration

Knowledge is power. We all have competitors, directly or indirectly. I encourage you to go onto their websites and subscribe to their newsletters so you can ensure you know when they are releasing new products, having a sale, hosting social media competitions and the like. Use a personal email, not your business email though.

4. Using Twitter to connect

When sharing content on Twitter, try mentioning people directly as this will create re-tweets and exposure for your brand. Focus on creating a regular cadence of content that is relevant to your target audience and authentic to your brand. I focus on keeping the tweets short, using visuals, incorporating relevant hashtags, asking questions and running polls. Social media is about building relationships and when someone shares one of your blogs, retweets or shares your content; they are showing interest in you and your brand. Thanking them on Twitter is a great opportunity to connect and encourages them to share again.

5. Use Infographics as part of your content

Infographics are informative and eye-catching and have all of the required information in one quick post. As business owners we are keen for each piece of content to have key takeaways and this means having a concise and memorable message. The use of visuals provides the ideal platform for this and by developing a compelling brand proposition through an infographic; we are increasing our customers remembering our key takeaways. I personally use Canva for my creative; however again there are a plethora of tools that can be used. Other recommendations are Infogram, Visme, Piktochart, Dipity, Info Active and Venngage.

6. Run an Instagram Hashtag contest

This is a very quick and easy way to generate an Instagram following, generate engagement, and collect user generated content. Instagram is a marketing platform that offers a rich opportunity to promote your business and brand to a very engaged audience in a relatively easy and cost effective way. We use Instagram contests to build our following and brand awareness. A couple of things you do need to consider is what type of content, is it a raffle or competition? What prizes are you going to give away? What hashtags are you going to use, you must ensure that they are relevant to your brand and audience. What time are you going to host the contest and remember to take into consideration time zones. Finally, how are you going to share and promote your Instagram contest?

*User generated content is any type of content that has been created and distributed by unpaid contributors. It can be pictures, testimonials, videos, tweets, blog posts and is the act of users promoting a brand rather than the brand itself.

7. Use Buzzsumo to find the most shared content for a keyword

This is an excellent tool for seeing what the most popular and shared content is for any topic in your industry. Enter the search term you need information on and Buzzsumo will show you the most shared results. I personally use this tool to determine if there is an SEO opportunity for air events global. It tells us how content performs online and breaks down that performance by multiple metrics across domains, keywords and topics. This data helps us create, optimise and promote content and is an excellent growth strategy.

8. Influencers

Influencer marketing is an important tool, however is a long-term, not a short-term strategy and needs to be integrated into your overall marketing strategy. Influencer marketing is the process of identifying, researching, engaging and supporting the people who create the online conversations that impact your brand. It is about finding opportunities to build relationships with people who touch your potential customers in some way. They are the people that will help you achieve more, with less.

Our two favourites are: The Right. Fit and Tribe

www.theright.fit

www.tribegroup.co

9. Creating presentations on Slideshare

Creating slideshares with useful tips, advice and content will help drive traffic to your website, in addition to helping with SEO, higher Google rankings, lead generations and has free analytics so you can see how you are tracking. Slide based presentations are a great, low-risk way to give your audience the information they need in an eye-catching visual format.

10. Using LinkedIn

Using LinkedIn is an easy way to share your content and can assist in building a targeted following that is different from your website and social media platforms. I use the advanced search as this allows me to search by industry, company size, demographic etc. It saves an enormous amount of time and introduces me to new connections in a very fast and efficient way.

11. Using YouTube for video

YouTube is an excellent marketing tool and is a great opportunity to post video tutorials on your business. From high traffic volume, viral marketing opportunities, search engine rankings and worldwide accessibility, YouTube is a resource to be added to your overall marketing campaign. I also like to use YouTube to answer our frequently asked questions and answers via a video link. If you are not using YouTube for your business, jump on today and create a YouTube channel, as it is an excellent way to share content.

12. Make your emails personal

This is an important tool for air events global, as we want all of our clients and freelancers to feel valued. Personally thank them for doing business with you and ask if there is anything that you can help them with. Making an email personal will help build a strong business relationship and is a great opportunity to ask for feedback and also for reviews about your business. This can be time-consuming, however many of our clients and freelancers have told us how much they appreciated the personalisation.

13. Focus heavily on building email lists

You only realise the power of a good email list when you have one at your disposal. Consider a medium that goes straight to someone’s inbox with the message you want and in exactly the format that you want it. Email is still my favourite one to one communication for air events global as it helps us with the following:

Communicate with our users personally
Allows our users to opt-in to various notifications
Send out reminders and updates
It lets our users know about upcoming events
Keeps our users engaged with blogs and useful content
Reaches our audience very quickly
We use Campaign Monitor for our email campaign, however there are some fantastic options available, such as Mail Chimp.

14. Get in front of as many people as possible through PR

There are numerous networks that pair reporters with sources and each day you receive a list of stories that journalists who use the service are working on. If there is a story that is relevant to you, you can submit a pitch directly to the journalist. Make sure you check that you have quotes that they can use in their story, your name and contact details are included and a link to your website and social media handles.

Some of the sites that we use are HARO (help a reporter out), MyBlogU, PRNewswire, Source Bottle, Muck Rack, Media Kitty and Pitching Notes. You can DIY when it comes to PR, but there must be something that can WOW your readers and thus, be a reason for someone to write about.

15. Perfect your Customer Life Cycle

Understanding our customers and what they need is paramount in business. Talk to your customers and map each interaction (touch-point) that they have experienced with your brand. The best take away from this is finding out how you could improve their experience from one touch point to the next. I focus on how our users interact with our brand and how they make decisions and using various types of user feedback tools such as surveys and feedback forms is highly valuable. One user feedback tool that enables users to poll visitors with short surveys is Qualaroo and it appears at the bottom of the screen as a widget. It also has a feature that can allow you to create different rules about where and when the surveys are triggered and what questions will be asked. Some other tools to look into are Consumer Barometer, Poll Daddy, Web Engage and Kampyle.

16. Using Case Studies

The use of case studies is all part of telling a story and can be very effective in the eyes of your customers. A case study is a more developed version of the testimonial, however instead of using a quote from a customer, you tell the customers story. We like to begin with the customers problem and by including quotes, the benefits of using air events global and the successful end result weaved into a cohesive story, it is easy for other potential customers to see how they too can benefit by using our shared economy platform.

17. Build your own database

I set up Google Alerts for key phrases I know are related to my business and my target demographic. I then peruse all the suggested articles as they come in and if I find a piece that is relevant, I reach out to the author to get her/his contact info. I’ll email or tweet them asking if I can add them to our mailing list. Nine times out of ten, they say yes.

18. Guest Blogging

We have already established that getting quality traffic and creating brand influence are very important when it comes to growing your business and guest blogging can help. Buffer, the social media scheduling app managed to grow it’s customer base from 0 to 100,000 when it’s Co-Founder did approximately 150 guest posts over a short period of time. Blogging websites such as ShoutmeLoud, Outbrain and Hubspot often accept guest blog posts and can help get you the maximum exposure that you need.

19.  Digital Analytics, Click Tracking, and Scroll Tracking

Numbers are an important metric to check the success of any campaign. And this is where the digital analytics, click tracking, and scroll tracking come in handy. Using these tracking techniques, you can optimise your marketing return on investments and content offerings among other things to improve overall business performance. Click Tracking allows you to know the number of times each link has been clicked by your subscribers. You can also track when specific elements on the page are scrolled into view. This analytical approach helps to position text and links in a manner so that they get optimum response. Google Analytics is a great option to track numbers for your business.

20. Our favourite Traffic Growth Tools

There are many traffic growth tools that can help you get involved in conversations, gain insight into your competitors and help identify which areas of your website that should be optimised to increase traffic and we have our favourite 5: Colibri, MixRank, Pay with a Tweet, Click to Tweet and Twilighter.

And that’s a wrap…These are just some of the marketing growth tools that I use for air events global, however don’t be afraid to try new hacks. The name of the game is experimentation to see what works for you and your target audience. Growth is the destination and growth marketing strategies are the journey. Let the #hustle begin.

10 Point SEO Checklist For New Websites For Higher Search Rankings In 2018

 you’re looking to start a new blog in 2018, I’ve a quick tip for you. Don’t launch it until you’ve a SEO checklist.

Why? The reason is simple: with an SEO checklist, you can boost your search rankings really quickly even if you’ve a new website. This SEO checklist contain 10 major things that I always follow while launching a new blog for better SEO so it comes in handy for you too.

This basic SEO checklist for new websites can help you when launching your latest blog irrespective of the niche you have chosen. So let’s jump into the details with further ado.

Table of Contents [hide]

• 10 Point SEO Checklist for New Websites In 2018
• Few important SEO tips to remember with SEO checklist 2018
  • Choose between www and non www versions
  • Move your site to https version
  • Install Google Analytics, Set up Google and Bing Webmaster Tools Accounts
  • Set up robots.txt file
  • Take care of 404 Error Pages
  • Find long tail keywords
  • Always keep an eye on these 3 things
  • 3 quick link building tips
  • Final thoughts about SEO checklist for new websites in 2018

10 Point SEO Checklist For New Websites In 2018

Here’s a quick 10-point SEO checklist that can save your time and boost your SEO. Let’s first focus on the 3 most important on-page factors which are;

1. Title tags
2. Meta description
3. H2 and H3 tags

These 3 things play a crucial role in increasing your on-page optimization and helps you bring more traffic from search engines to the keywords that you want to rank for.

Quick tip: You can use Yoast SEO plugin for better optimization of your posts. You can make changes to both title, meta description and tags using this plugin.

#1. Title Tags: Title tag (h1 tag) is the most important ranking factor. Always make sure to create a unique title tag that’s not been used anywhere else (you can use Google search before to make sure you’re using a unique title).

Here’s a quick checklist for title tags:

• Is it unique?
• Have you included your primary keyword in your title?
• Is it less than 70 characters
• Is grammar check done?
• is it helpful to your readers?

#2. Meta description: Your meta description is what pops up when someone searches for a term in Google search (along with the title). So make sure to include it in every post.

Here is a quick checklist for meta description:

• Is it unique?
• Does it contain your primary keywords?
• Is it under 140 characters?
• Is it click-worthy? (click through rate is very important if you want to get better search rankings than your competitors)

#3. H2 and H3 tags: Just like H1 tag, H2 and H3 tags are crucial while optimizing your content. They can also serve you as sub headings to give better experience to your readers while skimming through your posts.

• Included at least one h2 tag with your primary keyword?
• Included at least 2 to 3 h3 tags within your content?

Next, we’ll focus on the linking part which is really critical. Basically there are 2 types of links;

1. Internal links (which are links to your old pages)
2. External links (other sites)

#4. Internal Links: Internal links can help you with better crawling rates from search engines. The more you link to your inner posts whenever you publish or update content, the better it is for your search rankings.

• Did you link to helpful and relevant pages within your website
• Did you link to most popular pages
• Don’t stuff your internal links with keyword based anchor text (make them look natural)

#5. Outbound Links: Most bloggers don’t realise the importance of linking to external and relevant sites from their content. But it’s also one of the ranking factors when you’re linking to relevant and authority sites.

• Did you link to relevant pages from other sites?
• Did you link to authoritative sites within your niche for better rankings?
• Are there any affiliate links? If yes, open them in new tabs and add rel=nofollow tags (it’s a must for every affiliate link)

Now, let’s discuss about the SEO checklist for images.

#6. Images: Using at least one image for every blog post you publish can do wonders and bring you a ton of visitors because people also use Google image search to find their favorite content. Make sure to give credit if you’re using others images. I recommend you to use free copyright images if possible.

• Are you using at least one image per post?
• Is your image copyright free? If not, give credits (with a link)
• Is your images are cropped with proper size in pixels
• Have you optimised your image size
• Alt tag included?

We’ll now talk about the URL structure in this SEO checklist as URL plays a vital role in both search results and social media sharing.

#7. URL permalinks: URL structure plays a vital role in your search engine rankings. So truncate your URL structure for better search engine visibility for your keywords that you want to rank for. Also use short and sweet URL’s for best user and search experience.

• Is your URL short and sweet?
• Does it include your primary keyword?
• Remove basic words like a, an, the, and etc
• Is your URL structure optimized well such as http://www.example.com/simple-example and not http://www.example.com/p=362

#8. Keywords: Without keywords, you can’t rank higher in search results. It’s essential for everyone to do keyword research before they even begin writing their posts. Try to use as many long tail keywords as possible if you want to get more rankings because they contribute to 70% of search traffic.

• Are you using your primary keyword within your title, alt tags, h2, h3 tags etc?
• Are you using LSI relevant keywords for your primary keyword?

#9. Page speed: Go to Pingdom tools to find out your site loading time. If it’s taking more than 3 seconds to load, use these tips to speed up your site.

• Is your page loading within 3 seconds? (if not, use PageSpeed Insights by Google to get recommendations and make your page loading times faster)
• Don’t use any flashy images or gigantic files to slow down your page speed and website performance

#10. User engagement: The social shares you get, the comments your content gets, every user engagement counts in getting better search rankings.

• Are you using social sharing buttons to let your audience easily share your blog posts?
• Are you using CTA (call to action like asking for comments or shares) at the end of content?
• Are you replying to your comments?

Few Important SEO Tips To Remember With SEO Checklist 2018

Here are a few important things that you must keep in mind while using the SEO checklist for new websites in 2018 to get better search rankings.

Choose Between Www And Non Www Versions

To a normal user, the 2 addresses http://www.example.com and http://example.com might appear same, but to Google, these two are completely different. You may say that both correspond to the same page, and in fact they do, but it is always recommended either of the two versions on the complete site for better SEO.

You may either use the link “www” or “non-www” while using the linking tags throughout your site. In case there’s a mismatch, Google would have to automatically discard any one of them leading to poor optimization. To solve the issue, select any one of them, and then redirect all the pages of the second version to the primary version.

So the action element here for you is to do the SEO friendly (301) redirection of one version to the preferred version.

Move Your Site To Https Version

Did you ever think of that extra ‘s’ in https? Well, it stands for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). Hackers can’t intercept any of your data as it encrypts your connection to a website. Here are the few reasons why you should enable https on your website immediately.

• Let’s say two websites are competing for same position for one particular user query then there is a tie. In that case, Google prefers the one that has https enabled. In order to provide better experience, Google makes frequent changes to its algorithm.
• If your website accepts credit cards or has a login functionality, then your website must have https. You should instill trust in users mind that you are making an effort to protect them from their private information being compromised.
• If you want certain pages load almost instantaneously on mobile, then those pages should be AMP-ready and for AMP( Accelerated Mobile Pages.), SSL is very important.
• Google is going to start indexing mobile so https is preferred over http in index.
• If http ‘s’ is not there on your website then the update chrome 56 will start displaying not secure in the browser bar and when it shows that to user, no one will dare to enter your website and compromise their private information. So, move to https today itself.

If you don’t want to lose your revenues and if you want your SEO to be strong then enable https on your website.

Install Google Analytics, Set Up Google And Bing Webmaster Tools Accounts

Google analytics is a great tool to keep a check on your site’s stats. It makes vital information like how many visitors viewed your site in the past, how many active users are on the site currently, what is the bounce rate for your site, how many visits were through organic search and how many were direct or through Facebook, etc. If you already have a Google account, setting up Analytics would be a matter of seconds.

Google Analytics provides basic info about your site, but if you need some deep info like what pages are being indexed, how is your site responding, what are the errors and warnings from Google’s point of view, is your site suffering from any kind of bugs or shortcomings, etc. These webmaster tools also allow you to contact the search engine support team directly in case you think that you being penalized. It’s a good idea to set up accounts on Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Here are some obvious reasons which force me to setup an account on Google Webmaster Tools specially:

– Specify the GEO Targeting for my websites
– To keep track of the various notifications coming from Google in the form of messages
– Links to my website
– Google index status.
– HTML improvement areas
– To keep track of various crawling errors for my website
– For making request to remove certain URL’s from Google index
– For XML sitemap submission etc

Link Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) Account with Google Analytics

Once you have prepared your analytics and webmaster tools account, you can further proceed to connect both of them which would help you to get the complete information from once dashboard itself. You should check this guide from Google in case you don’t know how to link your  GWT account with Google Analytics account.

Set Up Robots.Txt File

Robots.txt file contains information on which pages of your site must be crawled by the search engine bots, and which should be neglected. In case some of your pages have similar type of content, it is always recommended to use a robots.txt file or else the search engine might mark the pages as spam. This file is placed in the root folder of the website and provides basic info on the pages which the bots should crawl and then index in the search engine’s database.

If you haven’t set up a robots.txt file on your website, you should immediately add it to your website to make it more search engine friendly. You should  pay special attention while allowing or disallowing certain files or folders from your website for search engine index.

Create a sitemap.xml file and submit it to Google and Bing for faster indexing via Webmaster tools

It is agreed that the search engine bots continue to crawl and index a blog on an hourly basis to achieve the most relevant and updated results. But sometimes it is seen that a few posts under the blog are skipped due to any unwelcome reasons. These posts may be indexed later, but it might take a lot of time. For faster indexing of your site, experts always recommend to prepare a sitemap.xml file, which contains the basic architecture of your site and then submit it to the search engines like Google and Bing by using your webmaster tools account in each one of them independently.

For WordPress based websites, XML sitemaps can be generated automatically with this plugin. This plugin is really helpful for those guys who don’t know how to create an XML sitemap file for their website or blog.

Set up goals in Google Analytics

It is a human tendency to work better in a more planned manner when a particular goal is set. If you set your small goals in the analytics account, and try to achieve them in the set time period, you will realize that success has never been difficult. Different websites can have different goals depending upon the nature of their business and what they are expecting from their websites. For some websites, goal will be ecommernce transaction, for some it will be just form fill up, for others it can be newsletter subscription and for some it can be certain engagement related metrics.

In case you don’t know how to set up goals in Google Analytics, check this guide to keep track of specific actions that you want your website visitors taking.

Take Care Of 404 Error Pages

It becomes very disappointing as well as irritating for a visitor if he lands up on an “Error 404: Page not found”. These silly mistakes leave a bad impression on the mind of the visitor, and he would not simply just close the page increasing your bounce rate, but also would give priority to any other site over your site.

This is the reason that you should start showing 404 error page for all those requests where no page exists on your website. I have seen some website owners adding links for important sections of their website on a 404 page to help website visitors find pages of their interest.

Find Long Tail Keywords

Targeting long tail keywords increases your site monthly search visitors. Well, what are long tail keywords? These are the 3 or 4 keywords that are more specific. They get less traffic but have high conversion rate.

Use Google keyword planner to find long tail keywords on your seed keyword(keyword that you want to target). Make sure that the keyword you selected is relevant.

Apart from Google keyword planner, you can also use tools like SEMrush, KWFinder, Google Auto complete tool, Ubersuggest to find long tail keywords.

Once you collect long tail keywords of your niche then start using them in your post. SEO is all about keywords. To get the most out of it, you will always have to thoroughly analyze your keywords, and search for new ones using Google Keyword Tool.

You should have some targeted keywords in mind for most of pages that you are publishing on your website. You should use these keywords intelligently within targeted pages like in in the URL, title, meta data, heading section rest of page content. But don’t try to do keyword stuffing. Keywords should be added in a way that they seem to be adding value to the contents of your website.

Always Keep An Eye On These 3 Things

• Periodic Check for Broken Links: There are several free plugins and tools in the market which would analyze your site, and provide you with a list of all the links which are broken and need to be fixed. These tools are quick, and provide a simple environment for fast repairs. If you are using WordPress CMS on your website, you should check this plugin for finding and fixing all broken links on your website.
• Website Speed: If you have used too many HD images on your site, it is bound to get slow. This in turn would affect your SEO. This is the reason you must keep a check at this point too. There could be many more reasons which are making your website loading speed slow. For better rankings on major search engines including Google, your website should load within 2 seconds. If your WordPress based blog is taking too much of time in loading, you should check this ultimate guide.
• Mobile Friendly site: Your site needs to be tested well to ensure that it is supported by different web browsers running on different platforms like smartphone, tablet, or PC. Mobile friendly website is a must keeping in mind the huge growth in Internet users that have started using their smartphones and tables for browsing the websites of their interest in the recent times. And this trend is going to be more stronger in the coming days.

3 Quick Link Building Tips

Link building has always been a weapon of construction in SEO. A website with good number of backlinks arise a trust factor in the eyes of the search engine thus helping you to gain high rankings. So to gain better rankings for your website, start spending some time in these link building practices.

#1. Creating links from Infographics:  The good content always gains links by itself. So, infographics depend on the success of the content’s creation. To experience amazing results, your infographic should reach to your potential audience. How you can reach to wider audience and get links?

• Social media advertising: You can try Facebook ads or StumbleUpon Ads. Don’t keep more expectations. It tends to bounce quickly but conversion rate is less. But it helps to some extent so why to lose this chance of getting links.
• Submit to relevant sites: If you use sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon in a proper way, then you can get some links from here. Just observe how you tag posts on StumbleUpon and in what subReddits you are submitting your content.
• Twitter: You can’t imagine how many relationships you can build using Twitter. Find most influenced accounts on Twitter related to your niche. Follow them and promote their stuff (Re-tweet). They will recognise and retweet your stuff too which will help a lot not only in gaining traffic but also in getting links.

Do manual outreach. It takes good amount of time but it’s all worth.

#2. Building links from guest posts: Guest posting is one of the powerful link building strategies. Have a list of sites that accept guest posts before you write a single word. You can search for those sites by typing “keyword” + “write for us” or

“Keyword” + “guest post”.

Once you have the list of the sites that accept guest posts, check their guest post submission guidelines and what type of content works for them. So that you can tailor your post according to their audience.

Write an awesome headline, outline your content and produce killer stuff. Add 2 to 3 additional links to your brand-relevant pages outside your domain. Don’t keep unnecessary links as the real purpose of link in guest post is to support the content you have written for them.

#3. Using blogger outreach technique to build links: Google loves those sites that has credibility which means to how many authority sites your site is linked to. If you want only quality sites linked to your site then start using blogger outreach.

Here are some of the blogger outreach techniques that will help you to build quality links.

• Find bloggers’ email addresses. You can use Email hunter tool to find their email addresses. Email is the fastest way to reach out to bloggers.
• Follow writers and bloggers on Twitter and start interacting with them. Build relationships with them and they will sure include your link in their posts. Check who has tweeted your content. Reach out to them and thank them for sharing.
• If you find any broken link on other sites, then reach out to that blog owner and suggest one of your similar posts to replace it with. Some will be so grateful as you are helping them in finding errors and fixing it. So, there is good amount of chance that they will the replace the broken link with your suggested link.

To find posts that have lot of links, you can use tools like SEMrush. So that you can create much better piece of content.

Out of all the above mentioned techniques, the following are most important while using this SEO checklist for new sites in 2018.

• SEO Friendly Titles: Use title tags to every post and it should be unique. The title needs to be compact, descriptive, and attention seeking. Try to restrict your title within 60-65 characters.
• SEO Friendly Description: Provide a brief meta description for every page. Meta description should be relevant to the page and try to limit it within 160 characters.
• Use Heading Tags: You should use heading tags in your content to highlight important points. You can think of including the targeted keyword for a page once in your h1 tag.
• SEO Friendly URL Structure: Ensure that the Page URL has been optimized for better results. Always use something like http://example.com//seo/seo-strategies-for-newbies.html instead of http://example.com//webdirectory/folder/ht349post.html.
• SEO Optimized Images: Optimize your images by using Alt tags to make them eligible for better rankings in major search engines including Google.

Final Thoughts About SEO Checklist For New Websites In 2018

I always use the 10 point SEO checklist on all the new websites I run to improve their search rankings quickly. That’s the reason why I decided to write a detailed SEO checklist post to help you boost your SEO.

Are you maintaining any such SEO checklist that you use to run through before or just after making your website live? Please share your thoughts and ideas etc around SEO checklist in the comments section. In case you have any questions for me, do let me know in the comments.

12 E-Commerce Marketing Tools to Get More Sales in Less Time

Photo by Bench Accounting

Now, e-commerce marketing is all about keeping your brand visible to users during their micro-moments. First, people learn about your products. Then they compare your products with those of your competitors (here the unique selling point, or USP, comes into play).

After that, users make the decision to buy. If you are able to reach visitors during their micro-moments, then you have a much better chance of achieving conversions.

Moreover, marketing automation has provided new ways for businesses to provide value to customers without compromising on their profits.

Here are 12 epic e-commerce marketing tools that let you do more in less time, thereby having a tremendous positive impact on your sales.

1. GetResponse – For Marketing Automation

GetResponse assists your marketing strategy with its WorkFlow Planner, which triggers actions based on conditions.

For example, GetResponse can automatically send an email to the person who just abandoned the cart on your website. OR it can send an email to the person who returned from the payment gateway page.

Here are some great features offered by GetResponse:

• You have the power to design the entire user experience with simple workflows.
• It lets you track and address cart abandoners, website visitors, and successful purchases.
• You can create conditions based on if-then logic. Automatic events are created based on user behaviors.
• GetResponse allows you to get a real-time view of the subscriber journey.
• You can add filters to apply sharp targeting to your actions.
• The software lets you create a conversion path that’s educational, enjoyable, and compelling.

2. Reactful – For Real-Time Visitor Experience Optimization

Reactful is a great product that lets you reach specific goals on your website. Whether you need user engagement, video views, file downloads, or to trigger custom events based on user actions, Reactful is the perfect software for all your needs.

Here are some advantages offered by Reactful:

• It offers easy integration with your favorite marketing tools.
• The software has powerful UX controls to ensure a positive user experience.
• It is secure, fast, and does not slow down your site like other tools do.
• It offers a point and click editor to take action on data.

Here are some example actions that Reactful can do for you:

Problem: Visitors stop reading the page after they have viewed 34% of it.

Solution: You can react by providing an arrow pointing to the bottom of the page at the moment they stop reading.

Problem: Idle visitors are abandoning your site.

Solution: React by adding a lightbox with a call-to-action.

3. Banana Splash – For Mobile Web Conversions

Banana Splash is an awesome tool for increasing mobile leads and sales. It helps to optimize the mobile web funnel and deliver real-time customized experiences for every user.

Simply type in the URL of your website, add your name and email, and select your industry. Once you have added this information, you will need to choose a “splash.” This could be a pop-up message, coupon, app download, email signup, or any other call to action.

You have the power to select a design, add the text you wish to display, and choose where and when you want to show your ad.

You can select times of day, what web pages the splash should appear on, and other simple targeting options.

After you have completed these actions, the system generates a line of JavaScript code. You can add this to your website for triggering actions based on real-time mobile events.

4. 3DBin – For Creating Interactive 3D Videos of Your Products

E-commerce websites should have clear and interactive videos of their products. 3DBin makes this possible and presents an excellent user experience in order to generate more conversions.

3DBin allows you to create an interactive 360-degree view of any product. Simply follow the steps below:

• Take pictures of the product that you wish to display in the video.
• Upload the pictures to 3DBin.com.
• Get the 360-degree view of the object.

It’s simple and easy, and if you want, you can simply use this tool as a plugin.

5. Prisync – For Tracking the Prices of Your Competitors

Prices have a significant role to play when it comes to e-commerce conversions. Customers are more inclined to choose a product that is offered at a lower price.

So it is important to keep track of your competitor pricing in order to stop customers from going to your competitors.

• Prisync allows automatic tracking of the product prices of your competition.
• Prices are updated four times a day, so there is no risk at all.
• The solution offers dynamic reporting and email alerts whenever your competitors update a price.

You simply need to add the products and the competitor’s URL to the software, and Prisync will monitor all the price updates in a beautiful dashboard.

6. Zendesk – For Effective Customer Service

Zendesk is the leader in customer service software. You can easily set up 24/7 online service portals, robust knowledge bases, online communities, and intuitive FAQ searches.

Zendesk offers great features, such as:

• Multi-channel support service (email, social, text, chat, etc.)
• Live chat software
• Social messaging apps
• Integrated call center software
• Various apps that integrate with Zendesk in numerous categories, including analytics and reporting, agent productivity, CRM, e-commerce, and social media
• Shared team inbox
• Effective analytics and reporting
• The ability to benchmark your customer satisfaction ratings and support team performance against your targets

7. Shopify POS Retail – Everything You Need to Sell in Person

A successful e-commerce marketing strategy comprises optimizing both online and offline sales. One of the crucial components of selling goods is the method of payment accepted by a company.

Allowing your customers to pay via their own choice of payment can have a positive impact on your sales. Shopify POS is a powerful solution that allows your customers to pay with cash, credit, gift cards, Apple Pay, or Android Pay.

Some of the main advantages that Shopify POS offers are:

• Record payments made via cash, external credit card terminals, store credit, or custom payment methods.
• Generate individual PINs for easier staff management, and track your staff’s sales and register usage.
• Record partial payments or split payments.
• Monitor all your daily cash flow in a single dashboard.

8. CoSchedule – For Complete Social Media Management

E-commerce and social media go hand in hand. The powerful social analytics Coschedule offers make it easier to track ROI and get maximum sales.

Here are some of the top features this tool offers:

• Uncover message level analytics, and easily share your most engaging content.
• Track your content’s organic reach through campaign engagement reports.
• Utilize powerful integration offered by Google Docs, Evernote, WordPress, Chrome, Google Analytics and Headline Analyzer.
• Create your own marketing calendar, and simply drag and drop content for easy rescheduling.

9. Optimizely – For Conversion Friendly A/B Testing

Optimizely helps you choose improvements that maximize the revenue and profits of your business. What kind of improvements? Let’s take a look:

• With a strong focus on customer experience, this tool creates different versions of your website and studies customer responses to each one. Why is this important? Testing these versions with A/B tests lets you understand what engages your customers the most. The main aim of these experiments is to improve conversion rates and, eventually, your revenue.
• The visual editor of this tool is unique, allowing you to implement changes by clicking rather than coding.
• Lift measurement and analytics measure the impact all your personalization choices have on your e-commerce site.
• You can easily track click-through rates and conversion rates.
• Optimizely is compatible with any device, including Android and iOS platforms.
• You can easily handle the software without a development team.

The outcome is a new workflow that facilitates the creation of campaigns aimed at multiple consumers. This workflow can handle the complexities involved with personalizing at scale.

10. ReferralCandy – For E-commerce Store Referrals

ReferralCandy lets you use different marketing techniques to rake in customers. The software is simple and easy to use, but what boosts the popularity of this tool is its referral incentives.

The methods ReferralCandy uses all but guarantee a sale once a customer visits your site. This ability makes the software ideal for online stores just starting out, as well as for older e-commerce sites.

The referral program produces the best results when a buyer is invited to take part in the first couple of days of making a purchase.

The tool has a unique refer-a-friend program that offers users a wide variety of advocate invitation choices. These include post-purchase pop-ups, emails, links contained within newsletters, and bulk or manual invite options.

Advocates can sign up for this program via a sign-up form or by clicking a link. The software also lets advocates choose their reward preferences, as well as the frequency with which they would like to receive updates about the referral program.

11. BuzzSumo – For Purposeful Content Marketing

BuzzSumo is the go-to tool when it comes to marketing research, especially for content marketing programs.

The platform lets users review seasonality and gauge the popularity of a specific topic on social media. BuzzSumo has some great content curation features, and you can use them to investigate how certain content or topics perform on the Internet.

The most helpful features include:

• Content alerts: this nifty tool lets you set up custom alerts that notify you whenever anybody mentions a certain keyword. This is valuable information when you’re link building on current topics.
• You can set up separate alerts for branded search terms and keywords, along with author, link, and domain alerts. These alerts prove useful to SEOs.
• Content analysis reports: if detailed reports are what you’re after, you’re in luck. The BuzzSumo dashboard allows you to see and know everything about a specific subject.
• Domain comparisons: this feature allows for a detailed comparison between two domains and provides the data for you in real time.

12. SEMrush – For SEO Analysis

Available via the cloud, SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO tools out there and allows you to access your campaign anytime, anywhere.

SEMrush provides a detailed, behind-the-scenes look at your biggest competitors and lets you use the information to develop a more profitable marketing campaign. The software has many useful features for online businesses:

• Makes it easier than ever before to build benchmark data
• Helps you identify your top competitors and analyze the performance of your organic searches
• Facilitates the research of long tail keywords, analyzes common keywords, locates keyword gaps, and measures keyword competition
• Allows you to track competitor ranks
• Supports paid keyword tracking and analysis, as well as paid search competitors
• Prominently displays ad campaigns and helps monetize any web traffic your site receives
• Lets you compare domains and visualize the data you require
• Makes auditing websites easier—you’re now able to track keyword positions
• Comes with a simple drag-and-drop report builder

E-Commerce Marketing Tools Simplify Your Life

10 Digital Tools Omi Sido Couldn’t Live Without in 2018

Omi Sido is an SEO and Web Development professional with more than 7 years of experience in both web and traditional advertising, promotions, events and campaigns.

Omi is currently Senior Technical SEO at Canon Europe and has worked on integrated campaigns for major clients such as Vectone Mobile, Delight Mobile, The Global Real Estate Institute and Daily Mail.

As an SEO professional, Omi Sido explains how he breaks down his essential role as search engine optimizer into 3 essential parts:

• To deliver the most useful content for any user performing a particular search, analysing and segmenting intent to buy vs. general information gathering
• Having the most visibility for a client’s content via hyperlinks and mentions from relevant external web pages
• Analysing long-term user behaviour signals, such as attracting the most clicks on a search result and continuously reducing bounce rates.

Omi prides himself on providing lasting results that extend beyond a quick, temporary boost in rankings for his clients.

Over to you, Omi Sido…

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Ten Digital tools?… Only ten (smiling)?

As a digital marketer who specialises in technical SEO, I use lots of tools! But if I have to choose, here are my top 10 (in no particular order).

• Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog’s SEO spider is an auditing tool that allows me to quickly scan large numbers of web pages for potential SEO issues.

I love technical SEO audits and Screaming Frog can be very efficient in tracking down errors and then allowing me to quickly extract a full report and get down to fixing those errors in minutes.

• DeepCrawl

An online app based crawling software allowing me to access my account from anywhere, even from my smartphone thus I am able to notice problems wherever I go -and I travel a lot.

With DeepCrawl, I can better understand the architecture of my clients’ website (priceless) and advise them on areas for improvement.

• OnCrawl

Similar to the previous two crawlers I can talk about OnCrawl for days but the thing I really like about this tool is that it gives me the ability to analyze my log files and consequently the ability to understand the relation between my most crawled page groups and the page groups that drive the more SEO visits.

In short, pages that are often crawled by Google but do not generate any SEO visits are a waste of crawl budget.

• SEMrush

SEMRush is by far one of my top tools for keyword research. The thing I really like about this tool is that it allows me to analyse not only how my website is doing in organic search, but also how my competitors are doing as well. Enough said!

• GTMetrix

Page load speed can negatively impact not just SEO but also UX. I use GTMetrix to examine the load speed of pages and identify opportunities for improvement. There are many page speed tools out there but GTMetrix is probably the most user-friendly one out of all of them.

• Ahrefs

I don’t know what I’d do without this tool when it comes to tracking the results of any link-building campaign, and in my experience, Ahrefs has the best signal to noise ratio.

• AWR Cloud

Every single business that wants to be found in search engines needs to be tracking and analyzing their rankings. I believe that AWR is the best tool to that at the moment. If you have a question about the rankings you or your competitors have, you’ll be able to find it within AWR.

• Google Analytics

You simply can’t improve your Digital Marketing effectiveness if you don’t understand how people are arriving and using your website. Saying that Google Analytics doesn’t just give you website insights, it is also incredibly valuable to the commercial success of your business.

Now add to this historical data – which is incredibly useful for flagging change – and you’ve got the complete picture of how your business is performing online. Google Analytics is the tool I use absolutely every single day.

• Keyword Tool

This tool is simple, quick and reliable. All you have to do is plug in a keyword and get hundreds of long and short tail keywords.

Keyword Tool will also run searches for popular YouTube keywords – great for coming up with ideas for the content or topic of my next video. Of course, I am talking about The Sunday Talk.

• Answer The Public

Every time I want to know what questions my target audience type into Google, I just pop the keyword into Answer The Public and I get a hefty list.

As machine learning begins to take precedence online this tool helps me tap into the power of semantic search (finding my target audience and creating content that connects). Very often I use this tool to generate search engine infographics on the fly. Then I can download the images and use them for reporting or presentations.

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A big thank you to Omi Sido for this brilliant list of digital tools!

Please do look out for future ‘10 Digital Tools … Couldn’t Live Without’ blog posts from additional digital marketing industry experts as we’ll be publishing more of this series soon!

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