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The Importance of Videos in Content Marketing

Published on May 5, 2021

Marketing and advertising in general are hardly the same things they once were. Although commercials and video material used for content marketing have been around for decades, they have not been nearly as popular nor dominant as they currently are. The modern days we live in are filled with visual media and it surrounds us no matter what we do or where we go. Thanks to the advancements in information technology and the wider adoption of modern gadgets and hardware, as well as all the new social media platforms and the fact that everyone uses them, videos have never been more crucial for learning, getting news, having fun, and in marketing.

Brands have realized this years ago which is why you are seeing cleverly integrated adds all around you. As most of them are actively shifting to videos as an effective tool for marketing, it is crucial to understand their importance in content marketing. If you have a business of your own, chances are that you could be doing better with your marketing strategy especially when it comes to the modern means of getting your message to the world. Identifying the methods that make your brand stand out can further boost the engagement and help you down the line. In this article you can learn exactly what you need in order to do so. In the following sections you will find the five most important reasons why video-based content marketing can exponentially grow your brand.

1. Increased ROI

The return on marketing investment, or ROI, is crucial for any type of marketing campaign. In the content marketing space, video-based content provides higher ROI on average than any other form of content. Although the ROI is highly dependent on the quality of content and the strategy implemented, the rise of smartphones has added a great degree of ease into the once much harder act of video creation. Most viewers prefer videos that provide more information about the product or service offered by the business while keeping it entertaining. Considering the finer aspects of video creation, content marketers can keep their costs low and maximize the ROI simultaneously. Since everyone has a smartphone nowadays and they use popular apps every day, using the modern means of digital marketing is not only better for your marketing investment return but it is easy to implement and use.

2. Drastic Boost to Engagement

Statistically, videos on social media platforms generate around 120 times more shares and engagements on average than the combined impact of content based on text and images. What is more, an average modern customer prefers videos to both reading and looking at images anyway. Video-based content goes a long way in establishing a solid relationship with the client and also fostering trust and reliability of the brand. Providing consumers with videos that are very likely to be shared ensures that a larger audience gets introduced to your brand while strengthening the loyalty of your existing and returning clients. All of the top social media agencies strongly recommend the use of videos in digital marketing as much as possible since it yields so much results and benefits for any type of brand.

3. Improved Search Engine Optimization

Videos have been proven to increase the engagement a brand has with the customer base, thereby resulting in more time being spent on websites and social platforms of the brand. The time spent on the website boosts the search engine profile of the company, resulting in better statistics of the brand and a higher rating on search engines when a user looks for something related to the brand. Optimizing videos for SEO with accurate information in the description and the right tags will ensure that your website is one of the top 5 to be listed when a client looks up industry-based keywords. You can relatively easily boost the search engine ranking of your website by ensuring that videos on your website contain the right keywords, meta descriptions and titles, as well as thumbnail images. They should also be the right length since too short and too long marketing videos are not the favorites among the crowd.

4. Better Sales and Conversion

As observed by one of the leading digital marketing agency services in Thailand, videos used for content marketing drive both the sales and the conversion for the business. How we hear you ask? The human brain is largely visual, meaning most of the information about the world we get comes through out eyesight. This should be used by companies, and it is, which is why video-based content is popular among most users. If directed correctly, with the right amount of explanation about the business and the products or services they offer, videos can keep clients engaged for hours at a stretch, and definitely longer than either text, speech, or images. This high-level engagement further leads the users towards making a well-informed purchase decision with increased satisfaction.

5. Easy to Grasp

With most industries being primarily driven by media, consumption of video-based content is at its all-time peak. Best of all, the peak is continuously rising and there is no end in sight in terms of how much more the videos will become important for the contemporary individual. Studying a product or service in great detail is a time-consuming process, and in a fast-moving society like ours, videos serve this purpose in the lowest time possible. Video-based content is now accessible to individuals through their pocket devices and stable internet connections, both of which are readily and cheaply available all over the world. These are no longer luxuries but necessities without which the person would be at a large disadvantage. Because of this, it is easier for users to connect with the brand and also grasp the idea it is trying to transfer to them about the product or service more quickly, and countless times more efficiently.

Videos that are not optimized to suit the audience’s requirements can harm both the business and the brand image. Hence, it is essential to curate the videos effectively and avoid them hurting you instead of helping. As the most preferred social media agency in Thailand, IBEX can help you achieve that and much more on your way to a wider and more diverse customer base!

Take It from an Expert – These Common Instagram Growth Mistakes Will Waste Your Efforts

Published on April 15, 2021April 15, 2021

Marketing

Whether they’re running a page for fun, a small business, or a massive corporation, getting attention on Instagram is on a lot of people’s bucket lists these days. As of 2021, analysts estimate approximately one billion registered accounts on Instagram, and with at least 60 percent of this figure using the platform actively, Instagram has rapidly evolved into one of the most commercialized and business-favorable networks in the world.

Thousands of entrepreneurs are running profitable businesses solely off Instagram. However, raking in exponentially increasing revenue is largely dependent on the number of active and “interested” followers on a page. If you doubt it, ask Kylie Jenner or Rihanna (Fenty CEO) – while other factors must be considered when evaluating their business success, the large followings on Instagram (running into tens of millions) certainly played no small part.

However, unless you’re a celebrity or an overnight sensation, growing on Instagram was easier about five to ten years, following its debut in 2010. Back then, the strategies were new, fresh, and easily effective. Today, with inestimable competition across every niche you can imagine, the common hacks have become overused.

Well, despite how challenging growth and scaling may have become on social media, versatile entrepreneurs are relentlessly coming up with systems that actually work because growing on Instagram is not just an option – it’s essential in 2021. Most times, the most effective strategies are simply a matter of knowing what to avoid, and we’ll discuss some terrible mistakes below.

Those bots will be your downfall – eventually

“Awesome post”, “Great post”, “Nice photo”, “Good post”, “I’m lonely”… Within a second of posting a video or photo, hundreds of bots would turn and drop the same comments all over the place.

The quickest way to lay the foundation for poor growth on Instagram is to entirely automate your engagement. Turning to these inauthentic methods of growing your IG community is not only a way of ensuring zero results in the future, but you’re also micro-damaging the platform. People who follow you to gain value of any sort are more likely to unfollow soon, and when you show up on the explore page, no one wants to associate with a bot-loving brand.

“Bots make your account look great at face value,” said Nick Rogers, digital marketer, and Instagram growth expert. “It appears you have a lot of likes, followers, and comments, but to the trained eye, further glances at your account will immediately reveal that it’s fake. Why would you ever want a following of bots when they aren’t buying from you? Real people following you and your story is where the actual ROI of Instagram lies.”

Not leveraging influencers

Instagram is a community where trust and admiration validate a lot of transactions. People follow who they admire and patronize who they trust – or a brand recommended by someone they trust.

Based on customer behavior tracking, about 92 percent of people would patronize a product or service recommended by people they trust on social media. Also, your ROI on investments could be 11 times higher through a genuine influencer campaign than a platform’s automated ads.

Many business owners on IG would rather run massive giveaways and spend money on automation than paying for influencer marketing – fees that vary according to the number of followers on a page.

However, it’s also important to look into influencers you plan to connect with for business purposes. These days, the phony ones are making more moves than the genuine community owners.

“One of the biggest frauds going on these days is using giveaways to boost followers,” says Rogers. “Every week, someone is setting up a new one. They get in touch with celebrities, pay a certain amount and have them request their followers to follow a certain listed group of accounts, mostly wannabe influencers.”

Nick Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Pvsted Media (pronounced “posted”), a successful digital marketing and Instagram growth company. In partnership with his friend, Gabe Robinson, the 21-year-old had launched this company in 2019 following the surprising growth of his first Instagram page, Business-Driven Dream, an entrepreneurial community that organically attained 100,000 followers in the first four months. This page gave rise to several more including Investing Authority, and today, Pvsted Media, the parent company, has garnered over one million followers across social media – unaided by weak-result tactics such as phony giveaways.

In reality, giveaways might rake in a ton of followers, but you can be certain they are only there for subsequent giveaways. They don’t care about your content, your products, or your value. Just the occasional online gifting fair.

“The followers are simply there for a giveaway,” Rogers continues. “Once the giveaway is done, they unfollow or never engage with your content. These influencers still do brand deals based on follower numbers of an unengaged audience. My takeaway has always been this: short term these tactics might work, but you are set up for failure in the long term because you are trying to take a shortcut rather than build an audience of loyal followers. Many brands these days are more concerned with short-term rather than long-term wealth.”

Irrelevant and excessive hashtags will only result in bans

Instagram allows thirty hashtags per account and the wise strategy would be to select only hashtags relevant to your brand, the theme of your content, and your page in general. Using hashtags based on popularity or whatever is trending the most is extremely harmful to your page as it often results in shadow bans – basically, you stop growing entirely on the platform.

Use only a few hashtags per post and ensure they are relevant to your content and brand. Also, research on the frequently updated list of dangerous hashtags that result in instant bans. Avoid them and save your account from unnecessary growth delays and suspensions.

“I actually never use hashtags,” says Rogers, founder of the family-run Rogers Organization, an investment management company overseeing businesses in real estate and digital entities. “It often attracts random bot followers to my pages and is more of a distraction than anything else. Dropping one here or there for a unique post is fine, but overall, I’d recommend almost 100% of the time that we never use hashtags to try to reach new people.”

Posting high-quality content alone will only get you halfway through

Going through some of the courses being thrown around on Instagram ads, many would recommend simply posting high-resolution content and expecting your follower count to massively swell. Instagram is primarily a photo and video sharing app, but if you want to maximize its potential as an excellent marketing strategy, you have to do more than just post.

You must promote your page through influencer campaigns, running IG ads, using appropriate hashtags, and connecting directly with customers and other pages on the platform.

Next, you must be consistent with posting. It’s not about the picture quality of your posts but how much value they add to the community, and how regularly you appear on the timeline. Content research is quite helpful for keeping up with a routine posting timeline.

Don’t be all over the place with your content

You’d occasionally stumble upon a page where it’s difficult to grasp the brand’s concept at a glance. From politics and sports to memes and cuisine, a brand that’s supposed to be marketing clothes and fashion accessories would indulge in posting the most random content. Some people post too much of their personal lives and too little of the actual business.

While a page does not necessarily fare better with a single theme all through, it’s important to be moderate when posting supportive content. Spreading yourself too thin with a wide range of concepts would only leave people confused about your intentions on the platform.

Instagram is the digital marketing goldmine of the 21^st century, and the most important values are authenticity, quality over quantity, and patience – you are going to need a lot of it. It’s a continuous journey and not a finish line.

How to Improve Customer Experience in eCommerce Stores

Published on April 14, 2021April 14, 2021

Marketing

As more and more shoppers seek convenience, a vast purview of options, and fair pricing, eCommerce shopping has slowly come to alter the retail industry. Consumer activity in eCommerce has been so furtive that the industry’s revenue is expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021, indicating that the dramatic move away from conventional retail will not be reversed anytime soon.

As such, delivering a stellar eCommerce customer experience today is not only advantageous to companies but also a necessity. As an increasing number of people shop online, their standards for a positive customer experience grow. According to research by PwC, 73% of all people consider customer experience to be a crucial component in their buying decisions, but only 49% of U.S. customers agree that they provide a good customer experience. In order to help eCommerce organizations close that gap, we have assimilated a list of five tips in this article that will help you understand how to improve customer experience for eCommerce.

1. Build a user-friendly website

The most crucial element in running an eCommerce store successfully is its website. This is because your website is usually the first touchpoint in your prospective customer’s journey, and thus you have to ensure that the first impression people have is a good one.

You can do this by building easy-to-navigate web pages that allow your customers to gain an intuitive grasp of how to proceed on your website to browse products or seek the services they need. As such, the UI of the website should be categorically organized, much the same way a physical store is. Also, ensure that the search button is easily discoverable and links to all your resources.

Building an easy-to-use website with a well-designed search bar can not only allow customers to find what they need but also makes for a great customer experience. Take the example of Zara’s website. It places the search bar in a way that it is big and clearly visible. In addition to that, it also lists its product categories as a carousel so that the user can skim through them easily to land upon the category that they want to shop.

2. Use upselling & cross-selling strategies

Providing items related to your customers’ purchases is also a very effective way to improve the customer experience for your eCommerce store. However, while doing so, ensure that you don’t bombard shoppers with every relevant product there is, but rather push items to your customer that will complement their shopping cart.

You can also craft compelling CTA(s) and provide offers to customers to persuade them to buy more or higher-priced items. Again, make sure that the frequency of your messages is just right since incessant upsells could alienate clients.

By providing high-value discounts and complimentary items, you can tie people to your eCommerce store so that they buy regularly and become repeat customers. Dollar Shave Club is the perfect example of this. Their confirmation email above shows you how it not only allows customers to know about an incoming shipment but also upsells other complementary products.

3. Employ chatbots to reduce cart abandonment rates

Were you aware that as many as 88% of shopping carts of eCommerce stores are abandoned by customers, irrespective of the industry they belong to?

Many a time, customers add products to their cart without fully understanding what they want or how and which product could fit their needs the best. This makes customers hesitate to buy a product that they might not be satisfied with later. What’s more, buyers could also be confused about different aspects of your website, such as what’s the return policy, how many payment options there are, among others, which often arises as a result of lack of customer support.

In order to help buyers understand these things, you can employ a chatbot to provide customer support to buyers at every hour of the day. Retail chatbots are not only available round-the-clock, but they also remind buyers about products in their shopping carts by tracking them from the time they add products to their cart and activating cart reminders to encourage them to make a purchase.

When it comes to choosing a chatbot for ecommerce stores, there are plenty of players in the market. But Acquire’s Chatbot and Intercom’s conversational platform are industry leaders.

4. Build a great community on social media

According to a study from IAB, around 90% of consumers claim that they would recommend a brand and its products to others after engaging with them on social media.

This is great news for eCommerce store owners. Social media not only allows them to interact with customers through their unique brand voice but also gives them a chance to retarget customers. By being active on your social media page and engaging customers on a daily basis, you can build a dedicated community of followers.

Take Black Milk Clothing, for example. The brand has a host of Facebook groups across the world, along with a huge group called “Sell, Swap, Buy”, with more than 15,000 members.

The brand uses its Facebook page very wisely, sometimes even featuring Instagram photos of their customers wearing or flaunting their products. This maneuver serves a double purpose: it makes existing customers happy and also gives prospective buyers a chance to see what their products look like on real people, giving them more incentive to buy their products.

5. Provide excellent customer support

As said above, the power of excellent customer support can never be understated. And while chatbots come in handy to service customer queries at odd hours of the day or even handle an inordinate number of basic inquiries simultaneously, it doesn’t quite provide the interpersonal connection that a human does.

A customer with a defective product is obviously going to be comparatively more emotional. Having them engage with chatbots could potentially leave them sulking because of the lack of empathy, prompting them to leave you a bad review. That is why you should ensure that your customer support personnel is always equipped to quite literally save the day for your customer, and in the process, save yours too.

At the same time, be extremely pedantic about who you place your faith in since these support personnel are the face of your brand for your consumers. Educate your support team personnel in the art of customer support through real-life examples and exemplars. Take Zappos, for example. Known for having an obsessive focus around its customers’ experience, Zappos is often the benchmark for providing customer support, along with, of course, Amazon.

Shown above is just one example of Amazon‘s many successful customer support stories, where a customer support personnel services the customer while roleplaying with them, adding an extra dimension to their experience in the process.

Conclusion

When everything’s said and done, delivering a satisfactory customer experience is certainly no cakewalk. It is a continuous process that involves tailing the customer on their buyer journey and helping them at every stage in the process. It also involves understanding your audience well and creating the right support systems for them to enjoy a good experience shopping with you.

8 Tips to Make the Most Out Of Your Explainer Video

Published on April 9, 2021April 9, 2021

Marketing

Explainer videos have become popular and the go-to marketing tool for many organizations. Entrepreneurs are embracing the technology to boost their online visibility and increase conversions. To sell products or services effectively, the importance of creating high-quality explainer videos cannot be over-emphasized. They should offer valuable information to customers, among other things.

Creating an explainer video is not difficult. It is not also a walk in the park either. Explainer videos are roughly 60 to 90 seconds long and one of the best ways to engage your target audience. Spiel creative claim that while shorter videos are more accessible, they should be as long as it needs to be to sell your product or meet your goals.

In this article, we will look at the ways you can make the most out of your explainer video and ensure conversions.

Let us delve into specifics.

1. Creative scripting

Scripting is among the first order of businesses in the pre-production phase of video creation. It is the backbone of the whole project. As such, drafting a creative script is imperative.

During the scripting process, allow your imagination to run wild. Be unique and think outside the norm. Look at what your competitors are doing and come up with something more relevant and concise. It should also be memorable, among other things.

2. Simplicity is key

You only have a couple of seconds to get your information across. Considering that people have a short attention span, it is essential to incorporate simplicity in your explainer videos to grab the attention of your clients.

In the one or so minute you have, start by addressing your clients’ pain points. Address this issue by offering a solution. This is the part where you introduce your products or services to viewers. Explain further its working mechanism or how to use it. At the end of the video, introduce a call-to-action.

The essence of keeping it simple is to allow you to do all the above-stated things in less than two minutes.

3. Value addition

Consumers are on a constant quest for quality and value. So, when creating explainer videos, look for ways in which you can add value to them.

For instance, you can create free tutorials that educate your clients on how to use products or services effectively.

For those looking to promote their brands, offering incentives is a great place to start. Urge your viewers to engage through commenting, liking, and sharing, for them to leverage gifts. By offering such incentives, your target audience is more likely to engage with your explainer videos, which helps in growing your reach and visibility exponentially.

4. Make it engaging

I am yet to meet someone who spends a minute or two watching a boring video on the internet.

The online world is competitive, to say the least. Due to content saturation, brands are crafting high-quality videos to ensure customer engagement.

The first step to make your explainer videos more engaging is to learn how to capture the audience’s attention. To ensure you do this effectively, you must understand your target audience. What are they inclined towards? What are their knowledge gaps? What are their pain points? It is only by having the answers to the above questions that you can create content that engages with your consumers.

Another way to create engaging explainer videos is to make use of eye-catching visuals. In a world where people have a vast array of fun videos to watch, making use of visuals allows you to capture the attention of existing and prospective clients. It allows you to get your point across more interestingly and dynamically.

5. Mobile-friendliness

Technological advancements have revolutionized everyday living. Particularly on internet surfing, the number of people using their phones to surf the internet is on a steady incline. For this reason, creating a mobile-friendly explainer video is of paramount importance.

Optimizing your explainer videos for mobile is not only beneficial to your target audience but is also vital for search engine optimization and boosting web traffic. Additionally, since a vast number of younger web users frequent websites via their mobile devices, creating mobile-friendly explainer devices allows you to reach them easily.

6. Expert voice over

Voice-overs are an integral part of high-quality video production. When handled by an expert, they help grab the viewers’ attention, making them connect with the content better. Besides, they are instrumental in storytelling, allowing you to get your point across better.

Additionally, voice-overs can be localized. By doing so, you can target certain demographics and people from one ethnic group. Through the rich tones from professional voice-overs, you create wider audience connections, among other things.

7. Showcase the benefits, not features

When creating an explainer video, you may be tempted to go on and on about the product specifications. Yes, this is information that the user deserves to know. However, you only have a minute or so to speak about the product or service. Don’t you think it is wiser to inform your target audience of the perks of using the product or service?

Instead of talking about the features, showcase the benefits. It is the sure-fire way to get people interested in what you are selling.

8. Partner with industry experts

As stated earlier, explainer videos are not extremely difficult to make. As much as you may want to save money, hiring an industry expert is one of the best decisions you can make for your brand.

Companies that specialize in explainer videos are your best bet. Since it is in their line of work, explainer video experts will give your videos explanations that create better engagement. Through their experience, they will create videos that promote brand awareness and increase customer retention.

Bottomline

Explainer videos are an integral part of business advertising. For this reason, creating one that resonates with your target audience is of the utmost importance. By following the eight steps listed above, you are setting yourself up for success in explainer video production and in converting sales.

Going Down the Rabbit Hole of Modern-Day SEO with Jason Hennessey

Published on March 30, 2021

Marketing

Remember the early 2000s? Those years way before the pandemic struck seem so far away now, and yet the picture of it all is still so familiar to us: chunky flip-phones, questionable fashion trends, good music – and, of course, the continuous rise of the internet. Back then, we’d wait minutes for the screeching sound of our computers attempting to form some semblance of a connection to the available Wi-fi. If that were to happen today, everybody would complain bitterly.

Then again, the internet in our modern setting has gone leaps and bounds to evolve into an almost untamable creature of its own, breathing and morphing into so many shapes and sizes that it’s hard to keep track sometimes. A good distinction between the face of the internet only 20 years ago and today can be represented in every website’s current, heavy reliance on search engine optimization.

SEO wasn’t popular back then. There were hardly any college courses on it. If one wished to learn about SEO online, they would have to really scour the internet for scraps of information on the subject matter.

Today, SEO is a key mechanism which turns the gears that drive any online platform’s success. As it is when objects closer to us appear larger, SEO enables more related web pages to be put in the spotlight according to their ranking in the search engine’s algorithm. From this concept alone, it’s a no-brainer that in recent years, the SEO niche has become a cornerstone in the tech industry.

Ironically, it is because of SEO’s popularity that the quest for quality SEO services often results in a person going down an endless rabbit hole.

For instance, it’s extremely difficult to educate oneself so thoroughly in the subject matter. If someone were to attempt to write a book on SEO, and if they were determined to ensure that every piece of information in this book remains up to date for a long time, this would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Publishing takes a while. And in that period between the writing and the book’s subsequent publishing, Google, for example, would have updated its algorithm very quickly and frequently. Once the book has been released to the public, it’s likely some or most of the information in that book would be rendered obsolete. The fact that search engines update their algorithms to match current trends makes it ridiculously impossible for one to have a solid, time-tested blueprint on SEO.

This leads to the situation where the quantity of SEO specialists greatly overwhelms the quality of existing services. Everyone can pick up a book, sure. But does everyone have the passion, the dedication, the drive to keep up with the ever-mutating trends on something as volatile as search engine optimization?

It should, therefore, come to no surprise that there are plenty of people who claim to be experts on SEO but in fact have no idea what they’re doing.

Jason Hennessey, the current owner of Hennessey Digital, a digital marketing agency currently worth over 10 million dollars in revenue, recounted a story which led to the formation of his third business. After dabbling in the entertainment industry and subsequently going on to develop his business in the wedding niche by building websites, Hennessey found his passion in SEO. He was then invited to give a talk at a lawyer’s house in Atlanta, Georgia. Standing amidst a group of fifty prominent lawyers, Hennessey, a novice in the legal industry, shed invaluable light unto them that day. He had nothing else to offer them but his secrets on how to market their law firms through search engine optimization. Applying the knowledge and experience obtained when he was growing his wedding-related websites, he spoke to them about the strategies he personally used to raise the rankings of his wedding websites in the eyes of the search engine algorithm.

After the talk, some from the audience spoke to him about their troubles. One of them told him, “I’m paying an SEO company 7,000 dollars a month, and they’re not doing any of this stuff.”

This was when Hennessey was offered the opportunity to gain some bucks growing their law firms’ websites, which then enabled him to go on and build another agency which he sold later on, EverSpark Interactive.

It’s a strange and admittedly scary reality: some people in the SEO business don’t actually know what they’re doing. Or, rather, they don’t know everything about the very subject in which they should be specialists.

So, what separates people like Hennessey and the other self-proclaimed ‘specialists’ in the SEO industry?

Hennessey went down the rabbit hole, but he never got lost. Instead, he found something in there.

See, the thing about tackling a behemoth that can grow to the size of what SEO is now (and will be in the future) is that one must be constantly learning. In Hennessey’s case, he learned about SEO during its unpopular days in 2001. All he had to start with was Aaron Wall’s ‘SEO Book’, which he read from cover to cover twice before he started to practice tinkering with websites on his own. It was a trial-and-error situation for him, where he had to constantly troubleshoot his own mistakes in order to fix them.

“When a student is ready to learn, a teacher will appear,” Hennessey said.

But knowledge so vast cannot be obtained from a single book. People like Hennessey go down the endless path of scouring for knowledge: they read everything on SEO, whether the content is online or forever imprinted upon the pages of a book or magazine. SEO is everywhere – and especially now, there are ample opportunities to learn all this information on one’s own. However, one must proceed with caution. Filter out the useful from the bad. Follow trends. Spend any available time possible on keeping up with the rapid changes in this genre.

Another notable thing Hennessey did was that he built relationships with others passionate about SEO. In his SEO-related educational website, iloveseo.com, there is not only endless information provided – it also sells SEO-inspired T-shirts and so on. Sure, it’s a great marketing tactic, but it’s also useful for connecting with other people around the world, and this allows people to share their information and passion for SEO.

In essence, growth isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing when it comes to education. Sure, getting a degree and specializing in SEO is wonderful. But the learning doesn’t stop there. Hennessey’s skills in SEO can only be credited to his endless efforts to teach himself more and more things about the subject.

So, indeed, getting a grip on modern-day SEO isn’t easy. But it is possible, if only one were willing to venture deeper down the rabbit hole.

10 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability

Published on March 16, 2021

Marketing

Deliverability is one of the metrics for email marketing. It is the ratio of delivered letters to the total number of sent ones. Sometimes the email is rejected even before it is sent. For example, the mailing service moderator looked at the letters and decided that they are likely to end up in spam. The service will reject the mailing and tell you what went wrong to protect the sender from this.

The fact that the letter has been delivered does not mean that it got into the “Inbox”. Perhaps email services considered the message as spam, and then it went to the corresponding user’s folder. Or the letter will be marked as spam due to the spam protection by CleanTalk, which one can install on cleantalk.org. Today, we will figure out why emails end up in spam and how to improve their deliverability.

Why Do Emails End Up in Spam?

Most emails end up in spam because of the work of the spam filters, and not because of the individual settings of users. Spam filters are algorithms that check billions of emails every day. They know how these letters look like, what is written in them, and what mailboxes they are sent from. Based on this information, the spam filter concludes whether the letter is from a fraudster or a respectable sender.

What else spam filters evaluate in emails:

The quality of the subscriber database. The spam filter checks if there are any invalid mailboxes, spam traps, or users who have already unsubscribed. If there are many of them, this is a signal that the database was collected illegally;
Domain and IP reputation. The filters consider how long has the domain been registered, whether its base is gradually increasing, and whether subscribers complain about spam;
Authentication settings. It is the “ID” of the mailing list. If everything is in order with these settings, the letter will most likely get into the Inbox;
It specifies what to do with a letter that does not have authentication configured;
It includes a layout, design, and text;

Next, we’ll figure out what can be improved in each of these sections so that emails arrive in the Inbox.

How to Improve Deliverability of Your Letters?

1. Use double opt-in

We recommend you to accept users’ subscriptions in 2 steps. First, you need to ask for their contact data on the site, then send a confirmation letter. In this way, you will protect yourself from errors in addresses, bots, and the competitors’ tricks.

2. Unsubscribe inactive users

Imagine a situation: a user has not opened a single letter in 6-8 months. This can mean two things: he is not interested in the newsletter, or the mailbox is not used. Both situations can negatively affect deliverability, so it is better to delete the contact. If the user unsubscribed from the mailing list, but the letter still comes, with a high probability he will send it to spam. Respect your followers’ choices, and do not force them to complain about you.

3. Do not engage in parsing

Parsing programs collect all the email addresses they can find in the public domain. It turns out a huge database of broken and abandoned emails. In addition to the low efficiency of mailing, you may encounter legal problems because users did not give their consent to receive letters.

4. Start your mailing by warming up the database and domain

If there have not been any mailings from the IP address yet, then the provider does not know about your working methods and the usual frequency of sending letters. Do not start sending emails to the entire database at once — you risk getting into spam. Choose a small group of addresses (200-300), and increase your mailing volume every day. If you do everything right, then you will get a good reputation and a green light for mailing all over the base.

5. Write a subject that matches the content of the letter

Users are not very happy when they are offered gifts in the subject line, when in the letter’s body they find a standard product catalog without a bonus or discount. Do not try to attract attention to the subject with Caps Lock or exclamation marks. Get the user interested in something else: devote it to the holiday, or tell what content the subscriber will read in the email.

6. Check your spelling

For many subscribers, spelling mistakes are the reason to send an email to spam. Spam filters also check grammar and punctuation. If you do not want to proofread the text, you can check it using special services.

7. Avoid spam words

These are words and phrases that are common in spammers’ emails. When the spam filter detects them in the mailing list, it automatically adds spam points to the message.

8. Less colorful fonts

Spammers often use bright text colors to draw users’ attention to links and buttons. Make sure that your newsletter is not excessively bright. You can use multiple colors, but it is better not to use many of them.

9. Add an unsubscribe link

Users may not like the newsletter. This is normal. It is better to provide them with the opportunity to unsubscribe and not click on the Spam button.

10. Do not send emails of one image

This technique is often used by spammers, which is why email services block picture messages. Besides, if the user has disabled images, he will not even see your letter. Also, add Alt and Title tags to images. Alt is the text that appears instead of the picture. It helps to read the letter if the images are disabled. The title pops up if you hover over an already loaded image.

In Conclusion

It is not easy to keep in mind all the factors that affect deliverability. You should test emails before sending them. Create multiple mailboxes in popular mail services. Check how each provider reacts to the letter — whether it will be delivered to the Inbox or not. Good luck!

10 Features of a Viral Social Media Post

Published on January 27, 2021

Marketing

Viral marketing has been here for a while. Yet, many social media influencers and those striving to become ones still underscore the importance of viral posts. Besides, many social media fans and bloggers have no knowledge or skill vital for developing viral content. Expert SMM writers of write-essay-for-me.com service have prepared the list of top 10 aspects to consider. It’s for For those wishing to master the skill. Read on to become the viral content guru, making your audience and posts speak for you.

Why Engage in Viral Marketing?

The impact of viral marketing is well-known. Some posts are going viral and bringing businesses to new heights without extra effort on their part. Once you publish a post that goes viral, hundreds and thousands of your subscribers share it with their friends. It does all the marketing work for you. As a result, the output of your marketing campaign increases manifold. Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

But to make vital content marketing work, you need to understand the rules of the game. In the era of information overload, users are not that easily talked into sharing your content. Here are the essential tips for achieving the intended effect with your posts.

Use the Help of Professionals

First and foremost, you need to evaluate your SMM skills and answer one question. Can you adequately represent your brand in an engaging, exciting way? If your answer is “no,” then it’s time to look for competent professionals. You need someone with experience in giving a new life to products and brands. That’s what studentessay4you.com/college-coursework-help.html writers can do for you. They enliven any campaign or marketing message by giving it the humor, brevity, and appeal your target audience needs. Don’t risk your brand’s reputation if you feel you can’t do it on your own; rely on the professionals’ help to reach out to your readers and prospective clients in a way they’ll love.

Develop a Consistent SMM Strategy

Without a strategy, you don’t have a roadmap and don’t know where to move on with your marketing content. Marketing is not a one-day affair; it requires consistency and thorough planning for the campaign to achieve far-reaching effects. Thus, we highly recommend starting with a strategic plan and closely follow it for weeks and months of brand reputation establishment.

Know Your Audience

Trying to reach out to people and make them repost your content without understanding their needs and interests is short-sighted. How can you be sure that your content is interesting for them if you don’t know what interests them overall? Thus, thorough preparatory work is needed to learn your audience better. It’s to find out what they like and need, giving them precisely that.

Go an Extra Mile with Headings

Most social media users don’t go farther than the first or second line of a post. Your headline is your strategic attention-grabber. Marketers assign exceptional value to titles of posts and articles, and that’s not in vain. A regular Internet surfer has an average attention span of 6 seconds. In most cases, you have only that tiny period to urge the reader to stay on your page. Use that potential to a maximum by creating involving, intriguing, and shocking headings. But don’t forget that making the reader stay doesn’t necessarily mean making the reader content with your text. For them to like your content, it has to correspond to the promise in a striking heading.

Arouse Positive Emotions

An emotional appeal is another secret weapon of viral content that marketers know quite well. To use that weapon wisely, don’t try to shock or intimidate your readers; positive emotions sell much better as a rule. People like the content that makes them laugh or recollect some sweet moments from the past. Give them such positive emotions, and they will thankfully respond to that effort by sharing your post with others.

Don’t Sound Too Salesy

Though any social marketing effort’s primary purpose is to sell something (and readers know it), sounding too salesy pushes most readers away. People are sick and tired of being pushed into buying or ordering something. So they stray away from aggressive marketers, preferring to preserve their freedom of choice. Experts of ordercoursework.com service suggest shifting from openly commercial slogans to more implicit, native advertising by showing the unique benefits of the marketed product/service and the unique value using them will give to the readers.

Combine Textual and Visual Appeal

Enriching your text with bright, appealing visuals always works much better than text alone. Users like understandable infographics or some funny pictures relevant to the content. Don’t ignore this additional tool for attention-grabbing. It may do you a good service in promoting your content among followers.

Don’t Lie

No matter how tempted you are to present some facts about your product or service in a more favorable light. Don’t do it anyway. Customers hate lies as they feel manipulated and erroneously pushed into buying something they really don’t need. Besides, manipulation of facts in commercials and social posts is a crime for which you’ll be sued. So are you ready to take so many risks?

Proofread the Posts before Publishing

The way your post looks right after you completed it and the way it should look when your followers read it are sometimes two worlds apart. To arouse readers’ trust and sound like an authoritative figure, you need to make texts look polished. That’s impossible without a couple of rounds of editing and proofreading.

Interact with the Audience

Some marketers falsely believe that their effort ends with the publication of posts. However, it is a one-sided approach lacking reciprocity. Today’s users like to interact with the brands they like, which requires feedback and continuous communication. Therefore, you should be ready to publish posts and articles, answer questions. Also, Discuss some issues, post positive and negative reviews of clients, provide customer support, etc.

If the post Didn’t Work Out…Try Again

There is one thing you should keep in mind. Even if you take all the steps mentioned above, your social media posts are still not doomed to success. The human factor is roulette, with some content types working out well and others failing to touch people’s hearts. Anyway, a failure to make your post viral shouldn’t discourage you. Test another approach, pick another type of content, and try again. Someday your efforts will surely pay off.

How to use a Telemarketing Campaign For Business Marketing

Published on January 21, 2021

Business/Marketing

Telemarketing still plays a significant role in growing and improving different businesses. It may seem to you that making numerous cold calls every day is outdated. Especially when social media offers some new strategies for business improvement. Although business marketing approaches are changing, telemarketing is still an essential part of it. The research has shown that building a good telemarketing campaign can help business in various ways, so it shouldn’t be foreseen since you can use it to achieve desired results. The best way to check out if telemarketing works for you is to test it out on your business and see if there are any improvements. We believe you’ll be surprised by the outcome. Here is how you can use a telemarketing campaign for business marketing.

1. Lead generation

If you want to grow your business using telemarketing, you’ll need to make a good plan and prepare for making the calls. Telemarketing can be a great way to get to many potential customers. In the beginning, it requires endless cold calls and you try to gather as many interested people as possible. But if you do it right, it can lead to getting many new satisfied customers, which is your main goal. If you want to make the telemarketing campaign work, you need the right database. You don’t want to call just anyone because that will increase the number of calls you’ll have to make, and also lower down the chance to collect leads. Instead, you want to hit your target group, which is most likely to be interested in your offer. Write down the main message of your company that you want to forward, and keep it in mind during the call. Also, arm yourself with patience. After a while, it will become easier, and the business will grow thanks to the application of a good telemarketing strategy.

2. Collecting the right database

If you’re using telemarketing as a way to grow your business, it is essential for you to understand whether you have the right database. If you’re not talking to the right people, your telemarketing campaign will likely fail. Make sure you do a cross-check every year to check if you’re sending emails to the right person and if everything is running smoothly. After some time, job positions change, and not the same person is in charge of the same job as a while ago. Especially if you’re spending money on direct mail, you want to make sure that it is getting to the right person. Every year, take some time to call your contacts and check if everything is still running the same way. You can use the help of Linkedin to check your data and keep up with changes.

3. Launching a new product

If you’ve launched a new product and want to notify your existing and potential customers, it is best to that via phone call. Yes, you can send an email, but if you want to increase the number of sales, that is not the most practical way. People are busy these days and the fact is that a small number of your customers are so loyal and interested in your product to the point that they will chat via email and make an appointment with you. That is why you should focus on telemarketing. Building momentum during a phone call can help you convince more people to meet you in person and discuss buying the product you launched. If you want to increase the number of sales, a good telemarketing campaign can help a lot. If you need a professional to help you increase your conversion rate, you should check out copenhagentelemarketing.dk. They can contact your potential or existing customers directly, and help you sell more products and achieve your sales goals.

4. Unobtrusive customer conquest

People often find cold calls too intrusive and tend to withdraw when they feel like that. Forcing the conversation just to achieve your goal of scheduling a face to face meeting to present your product or service can lead to a contra effect. You want these conversations to be very spontaneous and warm. So instead of trying to arrange a meeting, you can try out something new. For example, you can ask the person you’re talking to whether they are interested in watching a short demo or presentation on your web page. This idea can sound much more appealing to them in comparison to taking their time to see you without knowing if they are even interested in your offer. Everyone has a few minutes to take a look at something they can benefit from. Especially if you find the right approach and ask them to look at an offer they won’t be able to say no to.

5. Taking care of your customers

If you want to build a positive company image, you should care about your customers. A friendly call once in a while can go a long way. You should try to call your existing clients at least twice a year, ask them if they are satisfied with your product and service, and let them know you’re there for them. It is a nice gesture that you can also benefit from. You can also use it to let them know about your new offers, so there is a big chance they’ll get interested, and you’ll make some additional sales. Taking good care of your customers will ensure they stay loyal to you, and keep using your service for a long time. And you’ll build your credibility, which is essential in every business.

Conclusion:

The internet era has come and changed the way businesses work. But that doesn’t mean telemarketing doesn’t have its purpose anymore. A good telemarketing strategy can be very useful for business marketing. It can collect more clients, help you build a good database, raise your credibility, help you sell new products and services, and much more. If you’re skeptical about whether telemarketing strategies work for your business, we recommend testing it out. You’ll be surprised how much talking to your clients over the phone can help to collect new customers, and improving your business.

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