8 Powerful Content Marketing Ideas for Busy Professionals

April 27, 2019May 31, 2019MarketCrest

Running a small business keeps you busy – you’re working with customers and planning projects, ordering inventory and running everyday operations. There’s always something to do… but unfortunately, that means you might be overlooking a few important aspects of your company’s marketing.

And while it’s easy to forget, content marketing can be a tremendous benefit to your business. There are plenty of ways to lead productive marketing campaigns, even when you’re always on a time crunch.

These quick and easy content marketing ideas to help you keep your campaigns on-track are perfect for busy professionals like you.

8 Content Marketing Ideas for Busy Professionals

Coming up with content marketing ideas doesn’t have to be incredibly tough. In fact, if you’ve got a few ideas, you can spin them off into new ideas and reuse them month after month.

Still need a little help? Check out these eight content marketing ideas for busy professionals just like you to get started.

Content Marketing Idea #1: Official Months

Every month celebrates something, and if you can tie that month’s theme into what you’re writing about, you’ll be able to attract even more attention. For example, December is National Pear Month, National Drunk and Drugged Driving Prevention Month, National Human Rights Month, Spiritual Literacy Month and Worldwide Food Safety Month.

If you want to drill down further, every month has national weeks, too. In December, the 1st through the 7th is National Cookie Cutter Week, the 10th through the 17th is Human Rights Week, and Saturnalia is the 17th through the 23rd.

Further, the 1st is National Pie Day and National Eat a Red Apple Day, the 2nd is National Mutt Day, and the 5th is International Ninja Day.

Content Marketing Idea #2: Follow a Timeline

Create a timeline that shows the progression of events that led to big developments in your industry. If you’re in the heating and cooling industry, for example, you can show a brief history of how HVAC systems became widespread in American homes; if you’re in the organic farming industry, you can create an agriculture timeline.

Content Marketing Idea #3: Feature Good Deeds

Write a piece on good deeds your company has done or spotlight an employee who volunteers in the community. These types of human-interest pieces go a long way – and they’re often more likely to be shared on social media by the highlighted employee’s friends and family.

Content Marketing Idea #4: How-To Videos

Create a series of videos that show people how to use one of your products, and get written transcripts of each (might as well double-down on the SEO value!). If you’re in the clothing industry, for example, show people how to pair certain pieces; if you’re in the roofing industry, show people how to inspect their own roofs safely and effectively.

Content Marketing Idea #5: Turn Your Top Posts Into a Video or Slideshare

What are your top-performing blog posts or webpages? Combine them into a video that summarizes each, or create a slideshare that people can use to get the gist of what you’re saying. Don’t forget to include links to the original content, so those who want more information know where to find it.

Content Marketing Idea #6: Work on Listicles

Lists are incredibly popular – even lists of things not to do. Try something like “10 Reasons You MUST See XXX Before You Die” or “7 Things to Avoid When You Visit XXX.” Kick things off with a number so readers know what they’re getting into, and make sure you include plenty of visuals – that way, people will be more inclined to share.

Content Marketing Idea #7: Answer Your Customers’ Questions

Dig into your email and pull out a question one of your customers has sent to you. Answer it in a video or with text – and make sure you’re as helpful and informative as possible. If you choose to answer it in a video, offer a transcript beneath the video for those with impairments. Keep collecting questions from your users, and do one of these a week if you have enough questions – they’ll be some of your most popular pieces of content, and they’ll save you time in the future when people search for the same answers.

Content Marketing Idea #8: Interview Other Industry Experts

Talking to other industry experts – even if they’re not in your field – can be a great way to create content. Think about doing a few long interviews and breaking those up into different types of content; you can create video content, slideshares and even infographics, all of which should be accompanied by a text-based transcript.

How to Pull Off a Content Marketing Strategy

In order to successfully pull off a content marketing strategy, you’ll need to:

Define your process
Assign teammate roles
Create an editorial calendar
Use visuals

Define Your Process

Don’t approach marketing with a “wing it” attitude, but do leave plenty of room for creativity. Your process might look something like this:

Generate ideas
Assign a teammate to execute the idea
Pass the editorial process
Publish
Syndicate

If you have specific team members, such as a social media guru, he or she should know how many posts per day to share across your social sites; your writers should have deadlines; your blog manager should know when to publish posts.

It’s easy to lose things in the shuffle, so staying organized is the best way to reach your goals when it comes to content marketing.

Assign Teammate Roles

Every team needs to have specific roles. (And don’t sweat it if you have a small team – there’s usually a lot of crossover.)

Your team should include:

A social media manager who’s responsible for maintaining all social media channels, including sharing new posts and responding to comments and mentions.
A blog manager who runs your editorial calendar, assigns articles to writers, performs edits, and formats your posts.
Writers who are exceptionally skilled. You can hire freelancers if your team isn’t well-stocked, but make sure you’re hiring writers who are truly talented and have a thorough understanding of search engine optimization. The wrong writers can do more harm than good.

Create an Editorial Calendar

Putting together an editorial calendar can help ensure your content marketing strategy stays on track. Your blog manager can assign articles early based on what you’ve already planned, giving your writers – and you – more time to prep for upcoming events.

Use Visuals

“We are incredible at remembering pictures,” writes Dr. John Medina. “Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10 percent of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65 percent.”

If you use visuals on your site, your viewers are more likely to remember what they have seen. Using charts and graphs, infographics and videos can also boost site conversion.

Now, on to the content marketing ideas.

Ready to Implement Your Content Marketing Ideas?

These are just a few content marketing ideas you can use, but you don’t have to do it alone. If you are struggling to establish yourself in the digital world, we would love to help you improve your marketing campaigns.

Hiring a digital marketing company can improve your conversion rates, increase your revenues, and allow you to spend more time on the pieces of your business you really care about.

Feel free to reach out to us for a free consultation or you can contact us directly to get additional information.

Share this article:

Inbound Marketing Strategy for the Legal and Home Services Industries

March 13, 2019May 31, 2019MarketCrest

If you have a legal or home services business, you want leads. Not just any leads, though — you need to reach the people who want to buy your products and services.

You could spend lots of money on online or traditional media advertising… or, if you want to zero in on your target audience, you could develop an inbound marketing strategy, which is also known as content marketing.

First, you need to understandthe differences between inbound and outbound marketing. The difference between the two marks a cultural shift in the way businesses market to consumers, and this article explains each method and how they each produce results.

Inbound Marketing

The inbound marketing approach draws consumers to you and then engages them by providing added value. It’s done with incentives that encourage people to engage with your business and, in many cases, ask for more information about your product or service.

How Inbound Marketing Brings in Consumers

Inbound marketing concentrates on attracting new customers with relevant, useful content. The company creates blogs, social media posts, infographics, white papers, newsletters and other content people want to read. Once searchers arrive on your website, you engage them with emails, interactive content and chat, and you show them that you can provide continued value.

The goal is to be where potential clients can find you when they have questions or problems. People love to read, comment, share, and interact with useful content.

Successful inbound marketing uses search engine optimization, paid search and paid discovery to bring in traffic.

The information and solutions you provide show readers that your company is reliable and trustworthy. It creates a positive impression on potential clients that influences their buying decisions.

Inbound marketing is gentle compared to traditional advertising. The customer is nudged towards a sale with engagement and information. That’s a lot different than outbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing

We used to call outbound marketing plain old marketing. It’s TV and radio ads, billboards, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and telemarketing. Online, it includes banner and display ads, pop-ups, pop-unders and contextual ads.

But outbound marketing is an interruption, and it distracts people from what they really want to see. It throws itself at the audience to gain attention. Many ads are intrusive and repetitive, especially online, and they can annoy people to the point that they form a negative impression of your business.

Here’s what happened: Ads became noise instead of messaging. They started appearing everywhere — on TV, on your favorite news websites, and even in the games you play on your phone. They took over radio waves to the point that you can now buy subscriptions to ad-free music services for your car, your phone and your home. That over-saturation turned ads into something to ignore rather than something that could provide value. Online ad blockers and privacy settings let you reduce how often you see ads, and they’re working. In fact, clickthrough rates for online ads are at an all-time low of 0.05%.

Outbound marketing channels like print, outdoor and broadcast media just aren’t as effective as they were 10 years ago.

The Differences Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing

There are dozens of major differences between inbound and outbound marketing, but this infographic lets you see the most important at a glance.

Inbound marketing pulls in consumers with information written for their specific desires. Outbound marketing pushes the message out to everyone, whether or not they’re interested in what you have to offer.

Inbound marketing is interactive. It moves at the consumer’s pace. Outbound marketing is a one-way communication.

People discover inbound marketing content while researching a topic. Outbound marketing interrupts and disrupts the reader.

Inbound marketing uses blogs, social media, opt-in emails, search engine results, and influencer marketing. Outbound marketing includes display ads, billboards, telemarketing, print and broadcast ads.

Let’s look at how each method sends messages.

Inbound Marketing Uses Owned and Earned Media

Inbound marketing engages potential customers through owned and earned media.

Owned media refers to channels the business controls, such as a company website, social media profiles, and YouTube channel. The company makes all decisions on what’s written, as well as when and where it’s published.

Earned media is coverage you receive in publications that aren’t company-owned. You earn this kind of coverage through networking, newsworthiness and public relations. Earned media can be online or offline. You don’t control the content the way you can with owned media. It’s the result of all the work you put into inbound marketing.

Earned media examples include:

Digital PR
Social media mentions
Campaign hashtags
Online conversations in forums
Online reviews
Newspapers and magazines

Outbound Marketing Uses Paid Media

Outbound media uses paid media, like traditional offline channels, online pay-per-click, display ads or paid emails. Social media advertising plays a major role in outbound marketing, such as promoted posts on Twitter, Facebook advertising, and paid Instagram ads.

Pro Tip: You can use social media advertising to boost your inbound marketing campaign by pushing out owned content to your target audience.

The biggest difference is that with inbound marketing, the consumer is already interested. Outbound shouts a message at everyone and hopes it sticks.

Benefits of an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing reaches the right audience at the right time. This generates quality leads. A focus on inbound marketing means you spend your advertising budget on attracting traffic from the people most likely to buy.

Some of inbound marketing’s benefits include:

Increased trust
Quality traffic from a variety of channels
Solid return on investment

Increased Trust

Inbound marketing is about serving potential customers. You create appealing messages that deliver the information they want and need — sometimes even when they don’t know they need it.

There’s no pushy sales pitch. Inbound marketing content presents your company, products and services in a positive way. You position your business as a reliable resource. When the consumer is ready to buy, you’ll be top of mind.

Quality Traffic From Many Channels

Inbound marketing traffic comes from a variety of places:

Organic search
Social media
Website referrals
Online reviews
Word of mouth

When you use many traffic sources you reduce the risk of not being found because you relied on one channel.

Return on Investment

When you plan your inbound marketing campaign, state your objectives. What do you hope to achieve? How will you measure success?

It can be tricky to measure inbound marketing. For example, you may not know how many leads were generated by a campaign without using special tools that provide you with deep-dive insights. However, even without special tools, you can measure how many people downloaded a resource, watched a video or visited a website. You can also track the number of followers and subscribers you gain.

The bottom line:

Outline your marketing goals
Decide how you’ll measure success
Make sure everyone involved understands the concept and the implementation

Adopt a Long-Term Inbound Marketing Strategy

Like any successful advertising plan, an inbound marketing strategy doesn’t fall into place overnight. It takes time to plan, produce and execute an effective campaign.

You may need to add content creators, designers, copywriters, social media marketers and website developers to your team. Once you’ve added everyone you need, you need to get your whole team on the same page.

Take your time and focus on a long-term campaign that provides leads for a long time. It’s hard work, but it definitely pays off.

Examples of Long-Term Inbound Marketing

Check out these examples of long-term inbound marketing:

Create content hubs. Feature how-to video guides and related product information that you can repeatedly link back to in future inbound marketing efforts.
Engage with consumers to produce user-generated content. Try social media campaigns and photography contests. Allow happy customers to tell their stories.
Collaborate with related businesses to create online content. This expands your audience and promotional opportunities, and it positions you as a company with connections.

Analyze which types of content, calls-to-action and images resonate with your audience and capitalize on it. The key with inbound marketing is to create lasting connections with your consumers, and the way to do that is to relate to them wherever they are.

Should You Use Inbound or Outbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is the more popular marketing choice. It provides a better return on investment — inbound leads are 62% less expensive than outbound leads. If you want to build a relationship rather than make a quick buck, inbound marketing works better than outbound.

The caveat: it can be hard to immediately measure how effective your inbound marketing strategy is. An inbound strategy isn’t a hard sell. It’s not a transaction. The focus is on raising brand awareness and providing value. These are harder to quantify.

But outbound marketing is expensive and non-responsive, and it isn’t usually targeted. A business that spends big money on a mass audience TV advertisement can only hope it works. There’s no guarantee. Some outbound strategies, like telemarketing, will never work for most companies, but other methods do — including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google ads, which can direct messages to specific audiences.

A Word on Targeted Online Ads

Unlike traditional outbound marketing, targeted online ads use an inbound strategy. They show viewers things they find useful.

Many businesses do well with a combination of inbound marketing and targeted online ads.

There are advantages to both inbound and outbound methods for generating leads. The bottom line is you need to find the mix that works best with your potential clients.

Let’s Talk About Your New Marketing Strategy

Want to put an inbound marketing strategy in place for your company? Contact the digital marketing experts at MarketCrest, LLC for a free consultation. Our pros can test your current strategy and assess all your marketing options.

MarketCrest, LLC is an award-winning digital marketing consulting and services firm. We’re ready to put our expertise and resources to work to grow your revenue.

Share this article:

10 Secret SEO Tips From the Experts

January 3, 2019May 31, 2019MarketCrest

Standing out online is tough – you’re up against more than 1.8 billion websites.

That’s a lot of competition.

So how can you stand out? How can you compete with all of those other sites to get the lion’s share of clicks (and the business that results from those clicks)?

There are plenty of things you can start doing right now to kick off your journey toward dominating the web in your field – and these ten secret SEO tips will get you started:

Craft killer content
Be consistent
Make your site user-friendly
Speed up your site
Answer people’s questions
Take advantage of SEO tools and reports
Zoom in on local search
Structure your content properly
Make your site mobile-friendly
Build backlinks

10 Tips From SEO Experts You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Search engine optimization is the process of creating a website that search engine algorithms find irresistible. When a search engine crawler comes to your site, it goes through your pages looking for content that will be valuable to users. When it finds those pages, it puts them in that search engine’s index. Then, when a user types in a query (like tips from SEO experts or how to optimize my website), the search engine’s algorithm dips into the index to find the pages most likely to answer that query.

Not too long ago, SEO was a lot easier – and it was easier to game the system. That led to search engines delivering junk results to users, and that’s the last thing search engines want to do. They’re in the business of delivering quality results; if they don’t, people will stop using them.

Google continually updates its algorithm, as do the other major search engines. They’re always making tweaks and changes to ensure that they deliver the best possible results to their users. Your best bet is to work with an agency that understands SEO and keeps up with the latest updates – that way, you’re always one step ahead of your competition.

Secret SEO Tip #1: Craft Killer Content

Content is the backbone of the internet, but here’s the catch: You have between 3 and 5 seconds to grab a user’s interest. If you can’t do it within that time frame, they’re going to click the “Back” button and leave your website for good. (Another downside to that is that Google tracks those clicks away from your site and counts them toward your bounce rate. If your bounce rate is high, Google takes that as a signal that you’re not providing the information users want or expect to find – and then becomes less likely to deliver that page in search results.)

Beyond the first 3 to 5 seconds, you have to keep your users engaged. Most website users leave before 59 seconds have elapsed – and if you haven’t completely captivated your audience by then, you’re probably not going to.

And the best way to do that is through amazing content.

Content can be more than text. It can be visually pleasing images, like infographics, or it can be video with a transcription, or it can be a list of products you’re selling.

The basis of your SEO strategy should always be content. You can’t optimize your site for users without it.

In most cases, that does involve a lot of text. Text is easy for Googlebot (Google’s search engine crawler) and its colleagues, Bingbot (Bing’s crawler) and Slurp (Yahoo!’s crawler), to understand. If your text is structured properly, each of those bots can sort through your page and determine what it’s about, assign it a ranking, and store it in its own engine’s index. (See SEO Tip #8 for more information.)

Secret SEO Tip #2: Be Consistent

Search engine optimization doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, either. When you commit to SEO, you must commit to sticking it out for the long haul. Usually, you won’t see immediate results – and if you call it quits, the work you did do will most likely be for nothing.

It takes time for search engines to notice content and start delivering it to users. But the good news is that once the search engines do start noticing your content, they’re more likely to come back and crawl often.

When you regularly update your website with blog posts, new pages, new products or listings, and other content, your site will do much better than one that’s gathering dust. Regular updates show Google and other search engines that your site is active and can offer searchers the most current information.

Secret SEO Tip #3: Make Your Site User-Friendly

Your website isn’t for you – it’s for your users. And the one thing that Google is most interested in, aside from you answering a searcher’s query, is user experience, or UX. The search engine prides itself on delivering the best quality results, and that includes websites that searchers enjoy using.

Understanding – and catering to – your users is essential in creating a good UX. Think of your website as your customer’s pathway toward doing business with you. If you have a brick-and-mortar location, it’s clean, easy to navigate and easy to make purchases; your website needs to be the same way.

Remember, too, that Google is tracking what people do on your website when it delivers it in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. The better your UX is, the longer people will stay, and the more likely they are to click through to other pages. This is a huge factor in SEO.

Secret SEO Tip #4: Speed Up Your Site

Part of a good UX is fast loading time, but there’s more to it than that – Google uses site speed as a ranking factor, particularly on mobile searches. (You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to figure out how fast your site loads for visitors.)

Slow pages won’t rank as well, because again, Google and other search engines are in the business of delivering the best possible results.

The good news? You can almost always make your website load faster. You can optimize images, use a content delivery network, minify code or even work with a faster web host to boost your site speed.

Secret SEO Tip #5: Answer People’s Questions

If you’re not answering any questions (or queries, which are the terms people type into search engines), Google isn’t going to deliver your site to anyone – let alone put you in the top spot on Page 1.

It’s incredibly important that the pages on your website answer queries.

A Word on Keywords

Many people want to rank for “vanity” keywords. Vanity keywords are those that may describe what the website or page is about, but that aren’t likely to deliver qualified traffic that produces high conversion rates.

Let’s say a business owner wants to rank for the term “houseplants” because he sells beautiful houseplants in Colorado. While the term “houseplants” is searched very frequently, it’s very unlikely to send him qualified customers.

That business owner would enjoy better results with a specific keyword, like “peace lily for sale in Colorado” or “buy peace lilies.”

When you create content for your website, it’s important to figure out exactly what your customers are searching for. Then, provide answers to their queries.

Secret SEO Tip #6: Take Advantage of SEO Tools and Reports

If you’re not taking advantage of analytics tools, keyword researching tools and in-depth reporting tools (or you’re not working with a firm that does), you’re not fully committed to SEO.

While there are many tools out there for optimizing search performance, here are a few of the most useful choices:

Google Analytics
Moz
KISSMetrics
CrazyEgg
Google Keyword Planner (the version available to advertisers only)
QuickSprout

Secret SEO Tip #7: Zoom in on Local Search

Local SEO is more important than ever if you have a brick-and-mortar location where you sell products or serve your clients. In addition to putting your location on your website and having a robust Google My Business listing, you need to optimize your site for local search.

To that end, title tags, header tags and meta descriptions must include local information. Include reviews – or the ability to review your business – on your website, and claim your profiles on review sites like Yelp. There are several review management tools you can use, too, including Reputation Love.

Having a great Google My Business listing and locally optimized content on your website can also help ensure that you show up in Google’s 3-Pack, which is the group of three results it shows beneath the map on a search.

Secret SEO Tip #8: Structure Your Content Properly

In order for Google’s algorithm, Hummingbird, to understand what your website’s pages are about, you must structure your content properly. That means creating a URL that has your keyword in it, using a title tag that also includes your keyword, and using variants of your keyword throughout header tags and body text within each page.

Let’s say your keyword is secret SEO tips. You’ll want to include that throughout your document, as well as variants of that phrase – like expert SEO tips and SEO secrets. Hummingbird can fly into your pages, extract all the important information from your headers and semantic keywords (words and phrases that are similar, but not an exact match, to your target keyword), and determine that you have an extremely valuable page that will help people.

Pro Tip: Name the images on your site for SEO, too, and give them alt text that reflects the same keywords.

Secret SEO Tip #9: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

For websites, design is important – especially when it comes to mobile-friendliness. Most searches take place on mobile devices, with an increasing number of those originating with voice search – and that means your site needs to be mobile-friendly. In fact, Google unleashed Mobilegeddon in 2015, which gave a huge boost to mobile-friendly pages in the SERPs.

Now, Google has shifted to mobile-first indexing. There’s still only one Google index that includes mobile and desktop versions of websites, but moving forward, the search engine is going to index mobile versions of content and rank it that way.

Check your site’s mobile-friendliness using the Google Mobile-Friendly testing tool.

Secret SEO Tip #10: Build Backlinks

Backlinks are still an important ranking factor for the search engines. They’re also referred to as inbound links, and they’re a signal to Google and other search engines that your content is valuable.

The key: The links have to come from reputable sites. If they come from spammy, junk websites, they could even catch you a Google penalty – especially if the algorithm believes you’re trying to game the system by collecting these junk links.

Good links take some effort to get but pay off big time in the long run. You can’t get them artificially; you have to create great content that people want to link to. Authentic links are the only kind of links you want.

Putting All the Secret SEO Tips Together

A great SEO strategy has even more facets than we’re able to outline here. And the fact is, no matter what you do, you’re not going to skyrocket to Page 1 in the SERPs overnight.

But there’s good news. Your efforts will pay off, and when they do, things will start to snowball for your website and your business.

Need help taking your search performance to the next level? We’re here to help. Get in touch with us at (469) 661-1040 today for a free SEO consultation.

Share this article:

The Best Digital Marketing Techniques: Free Tips From a Professional Consultant

August 20, 2018July 13, 2018MarketCrest

In today’s digital world, you have to keep on top of different digital marketing techniques to stay relevant and reach out to your target audience.

Experts project Google to have a 32.4% market share of the net digital ad revenue worldwide in 2018. It remains the biggest search engine in the industry. With the digital age, it’s important to switch your marketing strategy to fit the internet landscape.

Majority of consumers today spend a lot of time online. It’s important to use digital marketing techniques that drive more people to your business.

The best way to grow your business is to hire an SEO agency. They have the know-how when it comes to digital marketing techniques. There are some things you can do on your own, especially if you’re starting to apply digital marketing techniques to your strategies.

Here are some techniques you can use like a pro:

Keep Up With the Upcoming Digital Marketing Trends

Of all the techniques you can use for digital marketing, “trend hijacking” is one of the useful ones so far. It’s best if you put your brand out there, especially on the World Wide Web.

There are a lot of trends going on in the digital world related to your brand that can help you gain a massive number of online audiences.

The best marketing techniques you can use to capitalize on this is to use tools like Google Trends to help identify ongoing trends.

If you have the right set of tools and the passion to stay ahead, you can strive and gain knowledge. This can help you surpass your competitors and make your way to the top.

Use Automation Apps

The digital marketing world is fast-paced and ever-changing. If you want to stay on top of your competitors, one of the best marketing techniques is to get into marketing automation.

It’s the best method if your marketing strategy involves result-driven approaches.

Market automation apps can help fill up the knowledge gap your business might have. There are a lot of apps out there that automate the promotion of your business. Some of these apps can do:

Automated e-mail marketing
Automatic Twitter tweet posting
Automatic Facebook feed posting

To test its degree of success, you need to observe the engagement and responses from your target audience. Some people prefer “real people” engaging them in your social media channels.

There are chatbots out there that can simulate an almost human-like conversation, so you can look for that if you want to get the most out of automation.

Optimize Your Marketing Techniques for Mobile Devices

A mobile-optimized strategy delivers a lot of value for a lot of businesses, especially local ones. Some mobile strategies faced controversies in recent times.

One of the reasons is the fact that mobile-responsive websites convert more people on higher resolution screens compared to the lower ones.

Google still keeps its mobile-first stance on the situation, but it’s undeniable that a large chunk of people online use desktops, laptops, and tablets for their online business transactions.

If you want to optimize your marketing techniques for mobile, keep these factors in mind. Build mobile-responsive websites that have relevant and engaging content, Call-To-Actions, and faster load times.

Use Social Media Marketing More

This marketing strategy is one of the newest approaches you can use to gain a massive audience for your brand. With large subscriber bases, social media networks like Facebook serve as one of your primary channels for brand promotion.

Facebook, for example, influences 52% of consumers’ online and offline purchases.

You can use social media trends to place your brand out for all subscribers to see. Recent changes to social network policies now make them more viable advertising platforms. It comes with a price since you need to pay these platforms to advertise you more.

The price is worth paying since the reach of Social Media is wide. You can target your ads to specific audiences that are more likely to support your brand.

Optimize Your Conversion Rate Through Your Website

When talking about Conversion Rate Optimization, it involves steps that help make your brand more attractive to your audience. It’s a systematic way of expanding your customer base and let you get the best out of your brand in different ways.

There are a lot of ways you can increase your conversion rate and reduce the bounce rate of your website.

The simple things like filling out forms, subscribing to your blog, clicking on a call to action, and the like can help persuade your site visitors. It helps you steer them into performing an action that you want. Using CRO can help you get more understanding about your website visitors’ behaviors and how to best adapt to it.

Make Your Brand Appear in Search Engine Results with SEO

You can use some SEO marketing strategies to focus on expanding your brand’s visibility on the search engine results without paying for the ads. What you need to have an effective SEO strategy is a technical knowledge that helps boost your rankings, drive more website traffic, and increase the search engines’ recognition for your brand.

There are a lot of aspects you need to consider when it comes to SEO, from the optimal word count to how other websites link to you online.

The main objective of your SEO strategy is to make your site in a way that search engines prioritize it more than your competitors. That way, you can get more customers and let your business flourish in this digital landscape.

Don’t be Afraid to Use Paid Marketing and Campaigns

Despite having an attached price tag, paid marketing is one of the most effective means for you to use search engines for paid ads. When you pay Google or Yahoo for advertisements, your website becomes visible at the top of the search results with the “Ad” label.

There is a lot of research supporting the fact that a lot of people online click more on paid search results compared to other forms of online advertisements.

When looking for things online through search engines, people who click your ads find it more relevant to their search queries. It adds another layer of legitimacy to your website since people will acknowledge the money you shell out to advertise your brand.

It’s one of the better marketing techniques to partner with your SEO efforts.

Familiarize Yourself with Influencer Marketing for PR

Another marketing technique you should capitalize on is influencer marketing. It’s one of the most recent and distinct digital marketing strategies that has its own set of benefits for your brand. You can link it to your content strategy, SEO efforts, and social marketing techniques.

Influencer marketing means that you promote your brand through the use of experts, influencers, popular figures, and other celebrities.

These people have followers that can change what people consider for buying.

It’s categorized under word-of-mouth marketing, which has the potential to spread faster especially when your influencer has at least a million followers.

Reveal the Power of Partnership with Affiliate Marketing

This is another of the many great digital marketing techniques you can use to market your brand online.

This type of marketing has a lot of similarities with commission-based marketing, where you pay your affiliate based on how they perform. When you engage in affiliate marketing, you only pay your affiliate if they’re successful at selling your brand to people.

There are a lot of companies that use affiliate marketing today, like:

Banks
Finance Companies
Travel agencies

Most of these companies report a successful campaign through this strategy. You can try it out and see if it works out for you.

Identify Your Goals to Know the Tools You’ll Need

Your marketing techniques should always tie in with your business goals. No matter what kind of goal your company has, you need to know the methods necessary to measure it. The method you’ll use to measure success depends on the kind of business you have, as well as the goals you set for yourself.

The metrics that you use can help you adjust your strategy based on whether you’re meeting your goals. Knowing the areas where you need to improve can help ensure that your business strategy is sound and adaptable as the digital marketing landscape continues to change.

Get More Digital Marketing Techniques Today!

There are a lot of great marketing strategies out there that you can use depending on the kind of business you have. Knowing what works can take a lot of trial and error on your part, especially if you’re doing it on your own.

If you want a more efficient way to implement your digital marketing strategies, getting an SEO agency is the best way to go.

If you need assistance with your marketing strategy, we can help.

We have a lot of experience working with various brands.

We can determine the right techniques you can use to ensure that your business thrives in the digital landscape.

Do you have more questions? We offer free consultations and services that can boost your company to the top of the search engine results. Contact us today to get you started on your journey to success.

Share this article:

5 Website Strategies for Better Results

July 6, 2018September 3, 2018MarketCrest

Your customers are online – and it’s your job to reach them, capture their attention and cultivate a relationship. In this post, our resident marketing experts explain how you can do exactly that by employing these five website strategies:

Making your website mobile
Harnessing the power of content
Using smart calls-to-action
Being social media-savvy
Keeping tabs on your competitors

Each of these website strategies is connected, and when they’re used properly, they’ll strengthen your brand and empower you to grow your business.

Here’s how.

5 Website Strategies for Better Results

Where’s the first place you look when you need information? You whip out your phone, open your laptop or start scrolling on your tablet.

That’s what your prospective customers do, too.

You need to position your company as the only company your prospects need. To do that, you have to:

Show search engines why your site is valuable to these searchers
Draw in potential customers on their own terms
Provide a useful, pleasant experience

What is Website Traffic, Anyway?

The term website traffic refers to the number of people who visit your site. It’s just one metric of your success, though – you need to attract your ideal customer and provide the user experience, or U/X, that he or she expects.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to visitors who come to your site because they found you in the search engine results pages, or SERPs.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic refers to visitors who clicked an ad on Google or one of your social media platforms.

An efficient and effective website brings in organic traffic. You can boost your site’s traffic by employing these five tried-and-true website strategies.

1. Go Mobile

Even in this wildly connected era, nearly 50% of all businesses still don’t have websites. If your site is up and running, you’re ahead of at least half of your competitors – and if it’s good, you’re ahead of even more.

The majority of online searches take place on smartphones and tablets, so Google uses a mobile-first index to evaluate whether a site is worth delivering to people searching on mobile devices. If a site isn’t responsive, or if it doesn’t work properly on a phone or tablet, Google (and other search engines) are far less likely to deliver it to searchers using one of those devices.

When a new visitor comes to your site, you have a window that’s only open for 3 to 5 seconds. Your site has to load and look appealing enough for users to stick around within that window – otherwise, that user will click the “Back” button and return to the search results.

When a visitor quickly leaves, Google determines that your site didn’t fulfill that user’s needs. With a high enough bounce rate (which is a topic for another day!), your rankings will drop… and Google will become less likely to deliver your website to searchers.

Your next steps:

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly. (Test its mobile-friendliness here.)
Make sure your website is fast. (Test its speed here.)

Getting users to your site is hard enough. Letting them leave because you weren’t prepared is like flushing your marketing funds down the drain.

Pro tip: Older sites can be tough to optimize for mobile, so sometimes it’s best (read: easiest and most cost-effective) to start from scratch.

2. Harness the Power of Content

Strong content is the cornerstone of every successful digital marketing strategy. Good content that people can “Like” and share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media platforms will bring more traffic to your site.

When people search the internet for something, they’re ready to learn. It’s your job to give them the information and experience they want.

They have a problem. You have the solution.

Your content is the medium that connects you. It’s what search engine crawlers “read” to determine what each page on your website is about, and it’s what search engine algorithms use to rank your site among other, similar sites for usefulness.

The content on your website can inform. It can inspire. It can sell.

Quality content establishes trust, builds rapport and sets the tone with prospective customers.

Your next steps:

Make a list of the most frequently asked questions about your products and services.
Turn everything on your list into a blog post. Link to reputable sites (those ending in .gov, .edu or .mil, or large publications such as the New York Times) to help build trust.
Publish informative, useful content on a regular schedule, whether it’s every Monday at 10 a.m. or every Thursday at 1 p.m. The point is to create a schedule and stick to it so search engine crawlers and regular readers know what to expect.

Pro tip: Don’t write for length. Write for quality. Get to the point quickly and succinctly. Avoid using “fluff” that doesn’t help visitors. Remember, Google is watching how long people stay on your pages and where they go next – and they’re using that information to determine how valuable your site is.

What About Video Content?

Video will comprise 80% of all internet traffic by 2019. Check out these video marketing stats:

Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than those who don’t use it
92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others
90% of users say videos are helpful in the decision-making process

Your next steps:

Create videos that answer your customers’ questions and post them on your website. You can live-stream, create slideshows or show off product features.
Share your videos on all your social media channels, and include transcripts when there’s space to do so (such as on YouTube). Always include links back to your site where viewers can learn more on the topic or about your company.

Pro tip: Use subtitles on your videos, because 80 percent of people watch them with the sound off.

3. Use Calls-to-Action Wisely

Most of the pages on your website need a call-to-action, or CTA. A call-to-action is a piece of content that compels readers to take a very specific action, like buying your product, signing up for updates or clicking through to another page.

You’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into bringing visitors to your site and keeping them engaged, so you need a great CTA that seals the deal.

Calls-to-action need to tell the reader exactly what you want them to do and provide them with an opportunity to do it. You can use inline text or a button – whatever fits best with your brand’s tone and your website’s design.

Examples for inline text CTAs:

Click here to get your free one-hour consultation!
Get exclusive access to MarketCrest’s expert advice now by filling out the form below.
Find out how affordable our services are right now!
Get your free copy of our award-winning e-Book by clicking here.
Increase your leads by 1500% in one week – click here to learn our secret formula!

Examples for button CTAs:

Get a free e-Book now.
Let me in!
Sign me up!
Tell me the secret!
I want great deals!

Your next steps:

Identify pages on your website that need CTAs. Any page that offers a product, information or help can benefit from a call-to-action.
Come up with exciting text or great verbiage for a button.

Pro tip: Put a different CTA on every page and track its success. If some types, such as buttons, get more action than inline text CTAs do, make a few tweaks to perfect your strategy until your conversions increase.

What About Email Lists?

Opt-in email lists are extremely powerful tools in any marketing strategy.

But you can’t get something for nothing.

Offering your website visitors something they need – say, an e-book that gives people inside information from an industry expert (you!) or exclusive access to hot real estate listings – is the first step in cultivating your email list.

For example, if you know users look to you for how-to guides or for tips on working in your industry, you already know what types of deliverables to produce.

Pro tip: If you collect phone numbers when you make a sale, offer an option for people to opt into text marketing. Legally, you must ensure that people understand what they’re signing up for (this goes for email marketing, too) – and you must also provide an opportunity for people to opt out if they no longer wish to receive marketing messages from you.

4. Be Social

Social media posts drive targeted traffic right to your website. The user knows exactly what he or she is going to get after a click, and you’re uniquely positioned to deliver a great experience.

The key is to meet your customers where they are and make it easy for them to engage your brand. The more frequently you share useful content, the more visible your brand becomes across these mediums.

Check out these social media statistics to inform your next steps:

73% of American adults use YouTube
68% use Facebook
35% use Instagram
29% use Pinterest
27% use Snapchat
25% use LinkedIn
24% use Twitter

Visibility on social media sites can boost your site’s visibility in search engines, and it helps build consumer trust. Even better, some of your competitors aren’t using social media – and that makes you far more visible.

Your next steps:

Create profiles on every social media site your clients are using. Be consistent with your branding on each.
Create or claim any listings on reputable websites, like Google My Business and Yelp, but avoid spammy business directories.
Use promotions through these websites to get people to visit your site, such as discounts and promotions available only to first-time customers.
Follow strong businesses in your community. Reach out and see if anyone wants to cross promote with you. If you run a yoga studio, start offering products with a local beauty supply or organic lotion company along with packages of classes.

Pro tip: Commit to a minimum number of social media posts each week, and make sure you stick to it. When someone interacts with your company by leaving a comment, reply! Share a mix of images, videos and text – and promote other businesses as well as your own.

5. Pay Attention to Your Competitors

Search for your business on Google by typing in a key phrase an ordinary person would use. If you run a roofing company in Dallas, for example, type in things like roof replacement in Dallas or Dallas roof repair.

What companies come up in the organic search results? Which companies are paying for ads related to your business? Make note of who’s ranking naturally and who’s paying for ad space.

Visit your competitors’ websites. Look for:

Calls-to-action on each page. See how they’re wording CTAs and what they’re offering in return for a customer’s email address and other contact information.
Blog posts. Check to see how frequently they’re posting on their blog and see what they’re writing about.
Content. Find out what type of information they’re offering readers and compare it to the information you’re sharing. Evaluate it objectively, and if theirs is more useful, step up your game.
Social media buttons. Follow the icons to your competitors’ Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages to see how often they post, how much they interact with customers, and what they’re sharing.

Once you’ve done a little recon, it’s time to copy what the competition is doing – and put your own twist on it to make it even better.

Your next steps:

Keep track of what the competition is doing so you can do it better.
Get free tips from an expert digital marketing consultant.

Pro tip: If you see something your competitors are doing that you think would work well for your own business, do it! Just make sure you track the results so you know where to focus more of your efforts.

Implementing Winning Website Strategies

You’re busy, but you know you need to keep growing your business and helping it thrive.

We get that – and we’re here to help.

Check out our powerful content marketing ideas for busy business owners or skip ahead and call us for a completely free marketing consultation. We’ll walk through what you’re already doing right and show you how you can save time and money while increasing your bottom line.

One simple phone call can help you get more from your marketing budget than you ever thought was possible.

Call us at 469-661-1040 or fill out the form below to get the help you need today.

Share this article:

Your Guide to SEO Basics for Small Business Owners

June 5, 2018July 20, 2018MarketCrest

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is part art and part science. It involves creating content for your website that’s optimized for search engines – but part of good SEO is optimizing your content for readers, too. Learning SEO basics isn’t terribly difficult, and it definitely pays off.

So where do you start?

SEO Basics: What You Need to Know About Optimization

Basic search engine optimization techniques include:

How to implement SEO in your web design
How to research the best, most profitable keywords
Understanding Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Using keywords and their counterparts in your content
Hiring the right SEO professionals
Tracking performance

Before you can dive into the specifics, you need to understand search engine optimization and why it’s important, which the following section covers.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a digital marketing tool available to every business owner with an online presence. It helps SMBs reach potential and existing customers through major search engines, which all generally follow Google’s lead.

A basic SEO strategy keeps the principles behind a standard Google search in mind.

Users enter a phrase called a query into a search engine. These words best approximate what the user is looking for, such as “where to find pho in Dallas” or “how to knit a scarf.”

When Google receives a query, it automatically assembles a collection of results that provide an answer. The most complete and accurate answers, as determined by Google’s algorithm, appear at the top of the search engine results page, or SERP.

This is possible because Google’s crawler – commonly called the Googlebot – reads the content of each page it discovers and uses more than 200 factors to assign it a ranking. The algorithm Google uses latent semantic indexing. That means Google can recognize related terms and phrases in groups (like knit, knitting, yarn, stitch and purl) to understand, categorize and rank pages.

Think of Google like a giant file cabinet. It files away useful webpages in each drawer and knows precisely where to go when someone needs an answer.

The higher a page ranks in the SERPs, the more likely users are to click it.

Businesses can optimize online content with specific Google searches in mind. For example, a local shoe store can optimize its content to reach people searching terms like “Nike retailer” or “designer boots in San Francisco.”

Good SEO is about more than keywords, though. It’s an entire strategy that successful businesses implement to gain greater visibility in the SERPs and, as a result, more traffic and more sales.

How to Implement SEO Basics

As a business owner, you can take SEO basics into your own hands. It’s possible to engineer a powerful SEO strategy on your own. You have to be in it for the long haul, though – good SEO doesn’t happen overnight.

1. Spend Time On Web Design

Optimizing your website makes your business more visible to a highly targeted group of searchers who want or need what you have to offer.

There’s one catch: Google is all about user experience, or U/X.

If you search Google and the results you get are consistently underwhelming, you’re going to switch to a different search engine. There are myriad reasons you could be displeased with the results, like:

The pages you get don’t answer your question
The website you land on is slow to load or uses outdated technology, graphics or design
The pages you click don’t render properly on your device

That means your site needs to feature responsive design that renders properly on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. It also needs to load quickly – within 3 to 5 seconds – and each page needs to answer a user’s specific query. You also need to provide users with:

Easy navigation
Interactive, intuitive content
A user-friendly interface

Before you can dive into SEO, your website needs to provide the U/X Google and its users demand. (Learn more about responsive, intuitive web design services here.)

2. Research Keywords

Keywords are central to any SEO campaign – and the most successful search engine optimization campaigns are data-driven.

Start by researching your competition. Note where your competitors rank on Google for keywords and phrases that also relate to your business.

Perform some organic searches for keywords you feel your users may use to find your business. Start with the basics, but don’t be afraid to try out long-tail keywords.

Examples of basic keywords:

Turkish restaurant
Bowling alley
How to knit
SEO basics

Examples of long-tail keywords:

Turkish restaurant in Dallas
Bowling alleys near me
How to knit baby booties
List of basic SEO techniques for beginners

You can use a variety of tools to plan your keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner is the most obvious choice, but it only offers broad data unless you’re paying for advertising. However, there are a number of free and paid services that allow you to research keywords relevant to your business. Some can become very expensive, so for most business owners, it makes sense to hire an SEO expert who already has access to the most effective tools.

Pro tip: Only use one keyword or phrase per page of content. Keywords must be distinct between pages.

3. Familiarize Yourself With Google’s Guidelines

Following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines helps ensure your pages are compliant with Google’s requirements. Spend some time learning best practices – and what not to do – before you begin.

If you violate any of Google’s terms, the search engine will penalize your site. Google may elect to exclude a few pages from its index or it may deindex your entire site, depending on the nature and severity of the violation.

4. Optimize Content

Content optimization is the most fundamental part of a basic SEO strategy. It involves choosing a keyword or phrase and building content around it naturally.

Googlebot is programmed to discover and index pages based on the text they contain. Google’s algorithm, Hummingbird, uses latent semantic indexing to determine a page’s purpose.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

Latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is the method Google’s algorithm uses to scan through data and identify relationships between words. This enables determine the context of a page and eliminates the need for keyword density.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density refers to the extremely outdated practice of using your keyword a certain number of times per 100 words. In the earliest days of search engine optimization, webmasters could stuff a page with keywords and rank well for the term. The result was generally useless spam that read like this:

Use each keyword naturally. Make sure that keywords appear in the page’s meta title, a heading or two, within the body of the content and in the meta description – but don’t “stuff” keywords in. The best way to incorporate a keyword is to write naturally, then revisit your content and ensure that it appears where it will help readers most. Because Hummingbird understands word groups (like the knitting example above), there’s no need to worry about keyword density.

Pro tip: Optimize image file names and alt text on images with your keyword.

If you use WordPress for your website, you can install a plugin that can help you with optimization, such as Yoast SEO or All-in-One SEO Pack. Just bear in mind that as of this writing, Yoast still considers keyword density a factor as it “grades” your content.

5. Consider Hiring Professionals

Successful SEO depends on link-building and dozens of other factors, including local optimization, getting reviews and establishing social media profiles.

Link-building is an important component of SEO. Google uses inbound links – links that lead into your site from other websites – as a measure of how valuable your website is. If already-reputable sites link to yours, it’s a strong signal that you have something to offer users. Conversely, if several spammy sites (like link directories) link into yours, Google can interpret that as a sign that your site is likely not worth much or that you’re trying to game search engine results.
Optimizing content for location-based searches, such as “Brooklyn bagels” or “Dallas roof repair” can help bring in local business. A good SEO strategy also includes using Google My Business and other tools that help establish your company as the local go-to when your potential clients are looking for help.
Many people trust independent online reviews as much as they’d trust a recommendation from a friend, so it’s important to build a presence on review sites like Google, Yelp and others. Building a presence includes responding to reviews (both positive and negative) and showing people who read them that your company is interested in maintaining a good reputation for customer service.
Establishing profiles on social media sites is a proven SEO strategy – not only because social signals are one of the ways Google determines how valuable your site is, but because social media itself can bring in targeted traffic. (You can learn about how social media plays a role in any good website strategy here.)

Business owners who want a complete SEO campaign often turn to professionals. At MarketCrest, for example, we assist our clients in all aspects of search engine marketing.

6. Track Performance

SEO is always evolving, and you need to know where your site stands on a day-to-day basis to ensure you stay on top. Use Google Analytics to track which pages people land on to enter your site, where your visitors are coming from and how long people spend on each page. You can also use paid tools, like Moz and SpyFu, or built-in tools that come with platforms such as Wix and Squarespace that track your site’s performance.

The most important thing you can do is monitor whether your efforts are paying off. That way, you can adjust your strategy and focus on the optimization techniques that are bringing you new business.

SEO Basics: Final Thoughts

Learning SEO basics can make a huge impact on how well your website performs. Used properly, SEO enables business owners to connect with larger audiences and increase profits.

Simply by familiarizing yourself with Google’s guidelines, researching keywords and investing in the right web design, you can boost your bottom line.

At MarketCrest, we love helping our clients take their digital marketing to the next level. Learn more about our award-winning work here – and when you’re ready for a free, one-hour consultation with a marketing expert, call us at 469-661-1040. We’re here to help.

Share this article:

Dallas Marketing Agency, MarketCrest, Experiencing Record Setting Start to 2018

May 28, 2018July 13, 2018MC blogger

2018 has been packed with excitement for the MarketCrest, LLC team. So far this year, the Dallas Marketing Agency has added valuable staff to the team, onboarded several new clients, won a number of awards, and had its President, Scott Berry, named as a grand jury panel member for The International Muse Creative Awards (MCA).

MarketCrest is a multi award winning, Dallas Marketing Agency (Consulting, Website, SEO, PPC & Social) located in the Historic Downtown McKinney Square in North Texas.

Since moving into the McKinney, Texas office in 2016, MarketCrest has experienced exponential growth. In January of 2018, MarketCrest received its first award for the year, a Gold Ava Digital Award for a Business to Consumer (B2C) website created for a Dallas roofing contractor.

Soon after, MarketCrest’s President, Scott Berry, was chosen for the Grand Jury Panel to judge the Muse Creative Awards. The competition seeks to recognize International talent and creativity in advertising, design & digital marketing.

With other judges scoring MarketCrest’s own submission, the agency was able to compete for a Muse Creative Award and was named a Rose Gold Winner for Website Home Pages and Landing Pages.

Finally, MarketCrest was recently awarded a Hermes Creative Award as a Gold Winner. The Hermes award was for Website Optimization and Conversion Results based on documented performance with a client in the legal industry.

There is still a lot to accomplish for this Dallas Marketing Agency in the second half of 2018!

To keep updated on MarketCrest happenings or get in contact with the firm, visit the website at https://marketcrest.com/ or call (469) 661-1040.

For a greater understanding of digital marketing and SEO, visit the MarketCrest blog: https://marketcrest.com/blog/

To get a first-hand look at MarketCrest’s award-winning work head to: https://marketcrest.com/about-us/award-winning-case-studies/

About MarketCrest,

MarketCrest, LLC is an award winning, Digital Marketing Consulting & Services firm specializing in client revenue growth. Simply, we exist to help our clients compete and grow… and we expect to be held accountable for their improved performance.

MarketCrest, LLC

105 S. Tennessee St. Suite 103

McKinney, TX 75069

https://marketcrest.com

Share this article:

The Ultimate Guide to the Best Website Marketing Strategies

May 15, 2018July 13, 2018MarketCrest

Running a business has always required a solid marketing strategy, but this is the Information Age – and now, marketing takes place on more levels than ever before. If you want your business to succeed, you need a strong online presence that follows the most cutting-edge website marketing strategies.

The Ultimate Guide to the Best Website Marketing Strategies

Your digital marketing strategy starts with a highly engaging and functional website. You need to:

Get to know your ideal buyer persona
Develop your brand presentation
Provide a high-quality user experience online
Optimize your website
Strategically position your company on social media channels
Gather and maintain online reviews
Create and commit to an email marketing strategy
Track performance with powerful analytics

The following sections delves into each of these website marketing strategies, how you can implement them, and how they’ll help you.

Get to Know Your Ideal Buyer Persona

Before you start any website marketing strategy, get to know your ideal buyer persona. Identify the perfect customer for your product or service, and write down who he or she is – this information will inform every marketing decision you make, from content development to social media engagement.

Sample Buyer Persona #1

She’s between 25 and 40, and she knows exactly what she wants. She doesn’t spend a lot of time window-shopping – she goes directly to the department she needs and zeroes in on her favorite brands. Her salary as an emerging professional in her field ranges between $65,000 and $85,000 per year. She’s in command of her finances, her emotions and her decisions, but she always appreciates tongue-in-cheek humor and prides herself on her ability to choose quality home furnishings and décor.

Sample Buyer Persona #2

He’s a hard-working adventurer who’s always looking for an opportunity to escape to the lake, the woods or the mountains. Because he works so hard, he appreciates a great deal – but when he’s not working, you’ll catch him stepping into a canoe at 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning, packing his Jeep with gear for a weekend getaway or strapping on snowshoes and heading north. This all-around good guy earns between $45,000 and $75,000, and he’s always on the lookout for the latest outdoors gadgets.

Send out surveys and questionnaires to help zero in on your ideal buyer personas. You can use your existing opt-in email list or pose questions on social media. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers to inform your future marketing decisions.

Develop Your Brand Presentation

Once you identify your target market by creating buyer personas, figure out how to present your brand in the most effective ways.

Define your company’s values and mission, and translate them into language your ideal customer can understand and appreciate. How does your company meet your customers’ needs? How does your brand fit into and complement your customers’ lives?

Create a story around your brand. Follow it from its inception through today, focusing primarily on how you want your ideal customer to feel when he or she sees your logo, your company name or your products.

Pro tip: Use color psychology to match your brand to your buyer personas, and always keep your branding consistent across every channel.

Provide a High-Quality User Experience Online

Zero in on optimal website design so your users have the best possible experience when they find you online. You have to stand out with:

Fast, responsive design that renders exceptionally well on any device
Easy navigation between information and products or services
Great content that informs, inspires and encourages visitors to act

Good user experience, or UX, focuses on what users want – not on hard sales and self-promotion. For most business owners, consulting with a professional marketing agency to create a positive UX is absolutely essential.

Optimize Your Website

Your website is the connection between your company and its potential customers – and the best way to attract them is through search engine optimization, or SEO.

Sure, you can put up a dozen blog posts or promotional videos each day, but that’s not going to cut it. Your competitors are doing better, and you need to, too.

You need data-driven ideas that bring in search engine traffic and turn prospects into loyal customers.

Search engines crawl websites to rank and sort pages according to how useful they are to searchers. Search engine optimization allows your site to meet users’ needs so Google and other, less popular search engines can deliver it on the first page of results. For that reason, 61% of all marketers make SEO a top priority.

Strategically Position Your Company on Social Media Channels

Social media is your key to connecting with buyers where they’re most comfortable. Facebook dominates the U.S. market – 68 percent of adults in the U.S. actively use it. Here’s a quick run-down of other platforms:

35% of American adults use Instagram
29% are on Pinterest
27% are on Snapchat
25% are on LinkedIn
24% are on Twitter

Drilling down more, Americans aged 18 to 24 are primarily on Snapchat – 78 percent of them, in fact. Further, 71 percent use Instagram and 45 percent use Twitter.

Pro tip: Take note of your buyer personas and zero in on the sites that dominate those age groups to inform your social media strategies.

Social media marketing is about more than creating a few posts. It’s about engaging your customers and sharing content they really find useful – and that they know their friends and colleagues will also find useful.

You can’t afford to drop the ball when all your potential customers are watching from the sidelines, so it may be worth outsourcing social media development and maintenance to the pros.

Gather and Maintain Online Reviews

Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing campaign, but social proof is the glue that holds everything together. Your reputation is on the line with every order, every purchase and every delivery – and because 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as they trust a friend’s recommendation, it’s important that you’re proactive in managing yours.

Seek out favorable reviews, and when you get them, acknowledge and thank the people who leave them.

Pro tip: Promote favorable ratings by asking your webmaster to create code that incorporates Google’s star ratings in your search results. (Websites that feature Google’s aggregated star ratings get higher click-through rates than those without them.)

Create and Commit to an Email Marketing Strategy

Give your visitors an incentive to receive marketing emails from you. Maybe you’ll create an e-book packed with great tips, or perhaps you can send people exclusive access to members-only deals. You can use that valuable asset to encourage your customers to share their email address with you – and the best part is that they’re already interested in what you have to offer.

Creating an email marketing strategy helps you stay a step ahead of your competitors. Your customers are hearing from you, and you’re giving them something your competitors aren’t – your brand earns loyalty that way. Use your email campaigns to continue building that relationship with people who already trusted you enough to give you an email address.

Track Performance With Powerful Analytics

A professional gymnast watches his routine dozens of times to evaluate exactly where he slipped. An expert archer shoots thousands of arrows and scrutinizes each draw. A successful marketer does the same thing: carefully executes an informed, data-driven plan and watches its journey all the way back to the website.

Use powerful tools like Google Analytics, Moz, KISSmetrics or CrazyEgg – or another tool you’re comfortable with – to evaluate the life cycle of every piece of marketing material you use. You’ll be able to make more informed decisions and enjoy better results after every cycle.

Let’s Talk About Your Marketing Strategy

The internet isn’t going to stop evolving, and neither should your marketing strategy. Because you have other things to do – like run your business – it pays to learn from and work with the industry’s most trusted experts.

We invite you to read through our marketing blog for tips and tricks that help you stay on top.

When you’re ready, call us at 469-661-1040 or fill out the form below for a free, one-hour consultation with a marketing expert who can propel your company to the next level.

Share this article:

How to Get Started with Digital Marketing

April 15, 2018September 3, 2018MC blogger

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing encompasses a broad range of marketing strategies associated with the internet that are designed to target and engage specific consumers. Attention-grabbing websites uncovered during Google searches, customized email programs, and social media are becoming universal elements designed to engage existing customers and attract new ones. Unlike traditional mass marketing strategies like TV, radio, and newspapers, digital marketing attempts to focus messages to a population that is most likely to require the company’s goods or services in the near future.

As the population continues to spend more time online, creating a presence to connect with them is critical.

Effective digital or online marketing is essential in today’s business environment. According to an Adweek.com, 81% of shoppers conduct an online search before making any important purchasing decision.

Digital marketing, much of which is also termed Inbound Marketing, is designed to attract viewers’ attention with an exciting and pertinent website or other marketing devices that may include such tools as:

infographics
interest-catching blogs
online brochures
ebooks
details such as newly imagined logos and other branding assets.

Also, useful interactive tools are designed to engage consumers to linger and take notice as they speed through their internet searches.

As another important element, online consumer feedback and commentary are driving many of today’s purchases. Consumers seeking products to provide pleasure or to solve a problem usually rely on experiential input from online posts to guide their decisions. Effective digital marketers capitalize on positive feedback while minimizing negative feedback in timely ways.

Important disciplines to enhance your presence are:

Strategy building
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Content marketing
Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising
Social media management
Email marketing
Public relations
Consulting

Experienced professionals like MarketCrest in McKinney TX provide creative support to companies throughout the United States and key international markets.

Establishing Your Starting Point

MarketCrest offers a free one-hour consultation and discovery call for potential clients to discuss their current situation and identify strategies that may begin to build profitable new revenue and sustainable growth through digital marketing. Each professional at MarketCrest brings a unique set of skills and experience that will provide a holistic view of your brand and market building.

During the discovery phase of the free introductory consultation, the MarketCrest experts will address your current circumstances including:

How does your company work?
What are the ways you generate revenue?
What are your ongoing marketing initiatives?
What are your online marketing goals?

From the analysis of your current situation, the digital marketers can develop a customized strategy designed to drive the appropriate traffic that generates qualified leads and profitable revenue.

Once initial objectives are established, the process of further evaluation and strategy development begins. The three core categories for consideration are:

Website Design and Development: Evaluate the current design and adjust to meet the new objectives. Such issues as visual appeal, user experience, mobile readiness, and page load speed will be analyzed for acceptability. If tweaks or significant changes are needed, this will be the time to do so.
Content Optimization: Evaluation of success rate of your landing pages is essential. With ongoing, real-time analysis of your content, MarketCrest professionals can determine if you are developing trust, establishing credibility, and enhancing the image of your company. Content should be engaging and include relevant keywords that increase search engine optimization. Other data tools can be added to track demographic and geographic interest.
Conversion Optimization: How many visits you successfully convert may depend on a variety of elements in your content. Continual monitoring and adjustment where needed can improve conversion rates.

MarketCrest’s Digital Marketing Process

The MarketCrest Process consists of four steps from the initial discussion to the goal of sustained revenue development.

Strategy Development is a result of website analysis, traffic analysis, keyword research, competitive analysis, campaign planning.
Traffic Creation will stem from initiatives that include organic and paid searches, display advertising, online directories, social media, public relations, and blogs.
Lead Generation is output resulting from improved landing pages, enhanced content, online calls to action, conversion forms, and email marketing, for example.
Sales Conversion strategies utilize ongoing analytics, A/B testing (comparing two web pages or other variables), CRM (customer relationship management) integration, lead scoring, and customer nurturing strategies.

Managing the Strategic Campaign

Once the newly designed digital marketing campaign is in place, MarketCrest will monitor traffic and impact generated by strategies that include SEO activities, content, Pay-per-Click (PPC), web optimization, automation, social network interaction, and more. By monitoring and analyzing real-time data, the firm will actively manage your campaigns, deliver daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual summaries depending on your plan preference. From continuous data, the strategies can be reinforced and refined to ensure optimal results.

Sign Up for a Free Consultation with the MarketCrest Professionals

Situated in downtown McKinney, Texas, MarketCrest, LLC, is an award-winning digital marketing agency committed to helping companies generate more revenue through new business. The firm offers a team of experienced, talented people and proven technologies to attack your market, transform your business, and build market share.

MarketCrest believes that for each dollar spent on online or digital marketing, you should reap at least 2-3 times your investment in meaningful revenue. Contact the experts in driving online leads and successful conversions through well-designed digital marketing campaigns. The firm offers four different levels of ongoing digital marketing support or a specially customized program that meets your objectives.

Visit the MarketCrest website to learn more about our capability and sign up for a free one-hour discovery consultation to learn more about digital marketing strategies that can move your business to the next level.

Share this article:

Free Tips From a Digital Marketing Consultant

April 15, 2018July 13, 2018MC blogger

Best Digital Marketing Techniques: Free Tips From a Digital Marketing Consultant

Learning about the best online marketing techniques doesn’t have to be expensive. These free tips from a professional consultant can help you get started.

In today’s digital world, you have to keep on top of different digital marketing techniques to stay relevant and reach out to your target audience.

Expert digital marketing consultants project Google to have a 32.4% market share of the net digital ad revenue worldwide in 2018. It remains the biggest search engine in the industry. With the digital age, it’s important to always be refining your marketing strategy to fit the internet landscape.

The majority of consumers today spend a lot of time online. It’s important to use digital marketing techniques that drive more people to your website and convert this traffic into qualified leads.

The best way to grow your business is to hire an SEO agency. These digital marketing consultants have the know-how when it comes to digital marketing techniques. There are some things you can do on your own, especially if you’re starting to apply digital marketing techniques to your strategies.

Here are some tips to get you operating like a professional digital marketing consultant:

Keep Up With the Upcoming Digital Marketing Trends

Of all the techniques you can use for digital marketing, “trend hijacking” is useful and proves successful when content marketing. It’s best if you put your brand out there, especially on the World Wide Web. There are likely a number of trends going on in the digital world related to your brand that can help you gain a massive number of online audiences.

The best marketing techniques you can use to capitalize on this is to use tools like Google Trends to help identify ongoing trends. If you have the right set of tools and the passion to stay ahead, you can strive and gain knowledge about your customer base. This can help you surpass your competitors and make your way to the top.

Use Marketing Automation

The digital marketing world is fast-paced and ever-changing. If you want to stay on top of your competitors, one of the best marketing techniques is to get into marketing automation. It’s the best method if your marketing strategy involves result-driven approaches.

Market automation apps can help fill up knowledge gaps your business might have. There are a lot of apps out there that automate the promotion of your business. Some of these apps can do:

Automated e-mail marketing
Automatic Twitter tweet posting
Automatic Facebook feed posting

To test its degree of success, you need to observe the engagement and responses from your target audience. Some people prefer “real people” engaging them in your social media channels. However, there are chatbots out there that can simulate an almost human-like conversation, so you can look for that if you want to get the very most out of automation.

Optimize Your Marketing Techniques for Mobile Devices

A mobile-optimized strategy delivers tons of value for businesses, especially local ones. This is because mobile-responsive websites convert more people on higher resolution screens compared to the lower ones.

Google still keeps its mobile-first stance on the situation, but it’s undeniable that a large chunk of people online use desktops, laptops, and tablets for their online business transactions. If you want to optimize your marketing strategy for mobile, keep these factors in mind. Build mobile-responsive websites that have relevant and engaging content, call-to-actions, and faster load times.

Use Social Media Marketing More

This marketing strategy is one of the newest approaches you can use to gain a massive audience for your brand. With large subscriber base, social media networks like Facebook serve as one of your primary channels for brand promotion. Facebook, for example, influences 52% of consumers’ online and offline purchases.

You can use social media trends to position your brand for all subscribers to see. Recent changes to social network policies now make them more viable advertising platforms.

Social media marketing does come with a price, since you need to pay these platforms to advertise. The price is worth paying if your target audience is online. SImply target your ads to specific audiences that are more likely to support your brand.

Optimize Your Conversion Rate Through Your Website

When talking about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), it involves steps that help make your brand more attractive to your audience. It’s a systematic way of expanding your customer base, helps you get found online, increases your conversion rate and helps to reduce the bounce rate of your website pages.

The simple things like filling out forms, subscribing to your blog, clicking on a call to action, and other similar tactics can help convert your site visitors by steering them into performing a specific action. Testing CRO can help you get more understanding about your website visitors’ behaviors and how to best adapt to it.

Make Your Brand Appear in Search Engine Results with SEO

You can use SEO marketing services to focus on expanding your brand’s visibility on the search engine results without paying for the ads. This is called organic traffic.

You need to have an effective SEO strategy and take technical steps to help boost your rankings, drive more website traffic, and increase the search engines’ recognition for your brand. There are a lot of aspects you need to consider when it comes to SEO, from the optimal word count to how other websites link to you online.

The main objective of an SEO strategy is to make search engines prioritize your site over your competitors. That way, you can get more customers and let your business flourish in this digital landscape.

It is recommended to hire an expert digital marketing consultant to assist you with this, as SEO is complicated and needs to be managed correctly.

Don’t be Afraid to Use Paid Marketing and Campaigns

Despite having an attached price tag, paid marketing (PPC) is one of the most effective means for you to use search engines for paid ads. When you pay for Google or Yahoo advertisements, your website becomes visible at the top of the search results with the “Ad” label. There is a lot of research supporting the fact that online users click more on paid search results than other forms of online advertisements.

Paid advertisements also add another layer of legitimacy to your website, since people will acknowledge the money you shell out to advertise your brand. It’s one of the better marketing techniques to partner with your SEO efforts.

Familiarize Yourself with Influencer Marketing for PR

Influencer marketing means that you promote your brand with the use of experts, influencers, popular figures, and other celebrities. These people have followers that can change what people consider for buying. It’s categorized under word-of-mouth marketing, which has the potential to spread faster, especially when your influencer has at least a million followers.

Reveal the Power of Partnership with Affiliate Marketing

This is another of the many great digital marketing techniques you can use to market your brand online. This type of marketing has a lot of similarities with commission-based marketing, where you pay your affiliate based on how they perform. When you engage in affiliate marketing, you only pay your affiliate if they’re successful at selling your brand to people.

There are a lot of companies that use affiliate marketing today, like:

Banks
Finance Companies
Travel agencies

Most of these companies report a successful campaign through this strategy. You can try it out and see if it works out for you.

Identify Your Goals to Know the Tools You’ll Need

Your marketing strategy should always tie in with your business goals. No matter what kind of goal your company has, you need to know the methods necessary to measure it. The method you’ll use to measure success depends on the kind of business you have, as well as the goals you set for yourself.

The metrics that you use can help you adjust the strategy based on whether goals are being met. Knowing the areas where improvements are needed can help ensure that your business strategy is sound and adaptable as the digital marketing landscape continues to change.

Get More Digital Marketing Help Today

There are a ton of great marketing strategies out there that you can use depending on the type of business you have. Knowing what works can take a lot of trial and error on your part, especially if you’re doing it on your own. If you want a more efficient way to implement your online marketing strategy, hiring a digital marketing consultant is the best way to go.

If you need assistance with your marketing strategy, MarketCrest can help. We have years of experience working with various brands across many industries. We can determine the right tools to use to ensure that your business thrives in the digital landscape.

Share this article:

8 Content Marketing Ideas for Busy Professionals

Content Marketing Idea #1: Official Months

Content Marketing Idea #2: Follow a Timeline

Content Marketing Idea #3: Feature Good Deeds

Content Marketing Idea #4: How-To Videos

Content Marketing Idea #5: Turn Your Top Posts Into a Video or Slideshare

Content Marketing Idea #6: Work on Listicles

Content Marketing Idea #7: Answer Your Customers’ Questions

Content Marketing Idea #8: Interview Other Industry Experts

How to Pull Off a Content Marketing Strategy

Define Your Process

Assign Teammate Roles

Create an Editorial Calendar

Use Visuals

Ready to Implement Your Content Marketing Ideas?

Inbound Marketing

How Inbound Marketing Brings in Consumers

Outbound Marketing

The Differences Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing Uses Owned and Earned Media

Outbound Marketing Uses Paid Media

Benefits of an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Increased Trust

Quality Traffic From Many Channels

Return on Investment

Adopt a Long-Term Inbound Marketing Strategy

Examples of Long-Term Inbound Marketing

Should You Use Inbound or Outbound Marketing?

A Word on Targeted Online Ads

Let’s Talk About Your New Marketing Strategy

10 Tips From SEO Experts You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Secret SEO Tip #1: Craft Killer Content

Secret SEO Tip #2: Be Consistent

Secret SEO Tip #3: Make Your Site User-Friendly

Secret SEO Tip #4: Speed Up Your Site

Secret SEO Tip #5: Answer People’s Questions

A Word on Keywords

Secret SEO Tip #6: Take Advantage of SEO Tools and Reports

Secret SEO Tip #7: Zoom in on Local Search

Secret SEO Tip #8: Structure Your Content Properly

Secret SEO Tip #9: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Secret SEO Tip #10: Build Backlinks

Putting All the Secret SEO Tips Together

Keep Up With the Upcoming Digital Marketing Trends

Use Automation Apps

Optimize Your Marketing Techniques for Mobile Devices

Use Social Media Marketing More

Optimize Your Conversion Rate Through Your Website

Make Your Brand Appear in Search Engine Results with SEO

Don’t be Afraid to Use Paid Marketing and Campaigns

Familiarize Yourself with Influencer Marketing for PR

Reveal the Power of Partnership with Affiliate Marketing

Identify Your Goals to Know the Tools You’ll Need

Get More Digital Marketing Techniques Today!

5 Website Strategies for Better Results

What is Website Traffic, Anyway?

1. Go Mobile

2. Harness the Power of Content

What About Video Content?

3. Use Calls-to-Action Wisely

What About Email Lists?

4. Be Social

5. Pay Attention to Your Competitors

Implementing Winning Website Strategies

Tell Us About Your Company

Verification

SEO Basics: What You Need to Know About Optimization

What is SEO?

How to Implement SEO Basics

1. Spend Time On Web Design

2. Research Keywords

3. Familiarize Yourself With Google’s Guidelines

4. Optimize Content

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

What is Keyword Density?

5. Consider Hiring Professionals

6. Track Performance

SEO Basics: Final Thoughts

The Ultimate Guide to the Best Website Marketing Strategies

Get to Know Your Ideal Buyer Persona