Can Adding A Chat Function To Your Online Business Increase Revenues?

Marketing is becoming more innovative than ever thanks to the fast pace of technological advancements. You’re probably trying all kinds of different things to get your customers hooked, but have you ever considered using a chat service? Both Viber and Messenger can help companies simultaneously interact with members of their target audience and promote their products. If you use the chat feature well, your loyal customers could become the main providers of social proof for your company. 

Chat extensions increase your business website or app’s reach to a surprising degree. Messenger and Viber each have their own way of integrating things like videos, music, and fast action apps. Viber did it first, giving users access to gifs, Spotify, Vice, and more. Messenger followed suit a year afterward, employing chat extensions like Kayak and Swelly to increase reach and customer satisfaction. 

So how can you do the same? It’s certainly possible, as several other brands have done it. We’ll go over which companies have dipped their toes into the pool of chat marketing, as well as how they did it and the results they’re seeing from it. Prepare to find out what chat marketing can do for you.

Kayak followed in Viber’s footsteps with the Kayak Travel Planner on Messenger. It gives users the ability to organise trips by collecting possible dates, locations, accommodations, and rental services for travel, which users can then share with others to vote on. A final decision is made based on those votes. The great thing about Kayak’s chat feature is that it effortlessly immerses itself in the experience, maintaining a presence in the conversation without users consciously thinking about it. Kayak becomes part of the trip, and customers inherently trust the company more. 

Swelly is a social voting robot that users of either Viber or Messenger can use. Users can choose between two related photos and send their vote to their contacts to compare responses. The robot then tells the user how to make their own two-image Swells and directly receive the data they collect. With hundreds of original Swells circulating, users with similar interests can give and take recommendations on certain hotels, restaurants, products, and other commonly purchased goods and services. 

Booking has become an extremely active platform for travel-related reservations all over the world. The service is part of Viber’s chat extensions, which allows users to easily select hotel rooms and stay durations and book it as soon as they’ve confirmed the criteria. Booking’s good reputation has begun to take the power away from sites found in organic search results, directing customers towards a brand they know they can rely on. This has made it an unexpectedly influential brand. 

Messaging apps are the next big trend in marketing. Companies shouldn’t ignore it, either: in the era of social media, social proof is sought out and deeply trusted. We follow the advice of those we know and those who are similar to us. Find a way to get your company involved with messaging apps and app development services for greater success.

Source: http://unlimitedexposure.com/basic-digital-marketing/476-can-adding-a-chat-function-to-your-online-business-increase-revenues.html

SEO Ranking Factors That Don’t Involve Keywords

Although keywords are important for SEO, they’re not everything. Filling your content to the brim with keywords may help you rank a bit higher, but it won’t keep your customers interested in your content. It’s fairly obvious when articles are written solely to increase organic search visibility, after all. Instead, put the emphasis on quality. 

Why shouldn’t you put the majority of your effort into SEO keywords? Simple: keyword stuffing is unattractive, noticeable, and sometimes punishable. Your focus should be on the final product, not the parts that make it up. Customers like, share, and interact with well done content, all of which naturally bump up your search engine ranking through generating trust and authenticity. 

The best user experiences come from content that’s intriguing, valuable, applicable, and credible, according to Google. And Google is a great source, considering it’s the most widely used search engine in the world with more than 4.4 billion searches every day. The quality check team uses the data they collect to make suggestions to the rest of the organization about how search engine ranking can be improved. To pass the quality check team’s test, your content must include six main things: quantity, expertise, links, accuracy, contact information, and user experience. 

Meeting Google’s quantity standard means consistently creating content with at least 2,000 words. This content should clearly demonstrate an understanding of the topic it’s about, and should also include a good number of links to reputable websites. Putting your contact information wherever needed and updating it whenever necessary adds to your credibility and accessibility. The reader’s overall experience is dependent on the previous factors as well as business website theme, page layout, loading speed, and tab setup. Put time and effort into every facet of content writing to rank higher in Google search results. 

Something many companies that focus on machine-based SEO forget is the need for their content to be more useful to users than that of their competitors. Taking large chunks of a few different web sources to form a Frankenstein post is rarely effective. You need to add an element of uniqueness to your content if you want to beat out your rivals. Find satisfactory content, rewrite it with a few improvements, and seek out users to gain exposure. You can make content better by simply increasing its length, explaining things more clearly, and giving overt instructions that your readers can follow. 

You can boost your credibility by properly utilizing links, source references, testimonials, and customer reviews. Although you want to be relatable, personal experience alone won’t keep your readers around. Pair it with up-to-date data as a form of proof to make yourself more believable. Combine data and experience in a way that helps and appeals to your customers. Use multiple sources and arrange the facts you’ve gathered from them in a sensible, cohesive manner. Consider adding visual information, like a photo or video related to the topic. If you have the right amount of facts, opinions, and eye candy, your post is likely to succeed. 

As we’ve touched on a bit in the previous paragraphs, each user’s overall experience is extremely important. If you have credentials relevant to the content you’re creating, place them in the appropriate spots to demonstrate your knowledge on the subject. In the case that you don’t have or need credentials, insert positive customer reviews and past situations that prove your point. 

Get your profile out there to have it seen by as many customers as possible and strengthen your role as an authority figure. You can also guest post on the websites of large corporations and influencers in your industry. Whatever you post, include at least one backlink in it. Your customers will trust you more if they have indirect confirmation from other sites that you’re legitimate. 

Accurate information and solid data are necessary inclusions if you want to bump up your SEO ranking, but don’t forget about how your readers will respond to consuming 2,000 words of just that. Add enjoyable visuals whenever applicable. Photos and videos are the most attractive kind of information to 21st century consumers because they’re so easy to take in. Finally, put a good amount of effort into your conclusion, and consider putting a thought-provoking question after it. Your audience will feel encouraged to interact with your content more. 

Don’t just drop your keywords into every open space of each post you create. Quality content has become the new SEO standard; keywords are only one element of it.

Getting to the Top of YouTube Search Results

While everyone is concerned with ranking first on Google’s search engine results page, it’s also important to give some thought on being among the first results on the YouTube search page. Video content is highly preferred among consumers so it needs to part of your online strategy. Through a month-long cohesive process, your company can rank number one in your YouTube keyword-related searches. Let’s take a look at how it’s done! 

Before you do anything else, go over your website’s best-performing pages. YouTube employs SEO strategies just as Google does, though these strategies are different. Choose a popular piece of content that could benefit from a few changes. You should also explore the page to determine if it could be successfully turned into a video, the subject’s videos on YouTube are viewed often, and the Google keyword search results for that subject turn up videos. 

Reviewing the high-ranking videos on Google and YouTube can help put your video in an ideal spot. Investigating the YouTube search results for one of your major keywords can give you an idea of how well your video would perform. Ten thousand views on the first few videos that show up is a good indication of your potential to create videos and rank high. 

In some cases, the view count of the video you’re looking at can be skewed. If a large company with many followers posts a video on a social media platform, it’s likely to blow up. To avoid basing your conclusion on an uncommon occurrence, examine the view counts of the first three to five videos related to the keyword you’ve searched. If the view count is high even after taking all factors into consideration, check to see if videos appear in the Google search results for your keyword. If yes, you can safely assume that a high-quality video you create would get attention and could be discovered through both YouTube search and Google search. 

The next step is planning your video. Considering you only have to base it on one source and that source is something you created, it shouldn’t be too difficult. But there are a few things you should keep in mind when converting written content to video format. Optimize your video by first developing an attention-grabbing, 15-second introduction. Make the video a good length to rank higher; YouTube tends to put shorter videos near the bottom of the search results. When your video is drawing to a close, wrap it up by encouraging viewers to like your video, subscribe to your YouTube channel, and follow your company on social media. Your audience will take more interest in you if you give them a handful of easy, low-commitment options. Hiring a video production company or videography company is always a safe bet and it will be well-worth the investment. 

Now that you’ve finished the creation process of your video, make a thumbnail with colours, fonts, and images that will intrigue your target audience. Insert the link to your video above your webpage’s fold so readers can find it and be rediregected to it quickly. If you do all of the things outlined above, your video will have a better chance of ranking high and being seen. 

For the best results, place the link to your video above your page’s fold, but below your article’s introduction. This is simply to give the viewers a bit of information about the topic before they jump right into a video about it. Providing context will help boost your view count, make more conversions, and keep your audience watching more of your video, if not the entire thing. 

If you’d prefer a different process for creating a video introduction, consider the three “P” framework: preview, proof, preview. Tell the viewer what the video will be about, explain how it works and will help them, and expand upon the video’s content. Better yet, you can covertly outdo your competitors by delivering more information than them, or simply by delivering it in a more comprehensible manner. A setup like this makes it difficult for viewers to turn away, as it’s brief, informative, and authoritative. Most will stay for a decent length of time upon seeing an introduction like this and will only navigate away from the page if the video is low-quality or uninteresting. A good thumbnail will only strengthen the effects of this second method. Go for something with a small amount of text, colours that will catch the eyes of your viewers, and a couple images that are relevant to the subject matter. 

There you have it: a guide to creating SEO YouTube videos. If you follow these guidelines, you’ll be happy to see how high your videos and any video content will rank in just one month. 

11 Ways to Improve your Email Marketing

Marketing emails are a great way to increase conversions, but they can be tricky to start. How do you know if you’re going about it in the right way or not? Sometimes, it’s not that obvious. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of ways to improve your email marketing campaign.

1. Before you do anything else, cut down your list. This might sound like marketing blasphemy, but a shorter list doesn’t mean less success; it means narrowing down your email recipients to those who truly want to purchase your products. Get rid of those who never open your emails, and allow those who’ve lost interest to unsubscribe efficiently. Additionally, deliver your emails during non-peak hours so your prospects can give you their undivided attention. 
2. Make your subject line brief and interesting. A long subject line can discourage even your most devoted subscribers from opening your latest email. Your email’s introduction should be a sentence that expands on the two- or three-word subject line and holds the reader’s attention. 
3. Putting the email recipient’s first name at the beginning of each message is more powerful than putting their full name, their name with an honourific, or no name at all. Address them the same way you would address a friend. Go one step further by making the words around the name - the ones that will be seen when unopened in the recipient’s inbox - more interesting. 
4. Never fake concern or care with well wishes. Most customers don’t believe what you’re saying, and you could be putting something much more useful for both you and your customer where that empty phrase went. Instead, make yourself stand out. Tell your potential clients why and how you’re different from your competitors. When they see the value in choosing you over someone else, they’ll be more willing to become a customer - perhaps even a loyal one. 
5. Let your clients know that this is about them, not you. Putting your company up on a pedestal will only exhaust them, or worse, drive them away. Give them the relevant information while centering the message around them. 
6. Don’t list product features in your marketing emails. Most of the time, your clients will research a product they like on their own time rather than taking the time to read your list of its capabilities and aesthetic qualities. Show a high-quality image of the product and perhaps one feature, nothing more. 
7. Be clear and simple in your message by avoiding fancy acronyms and complex terms. These words are usually meaningless to your target audience, so using basic language in a charming way will be more beneficial to you. While you’re at it, be realistic about what your product can do. Saying it makes things easier won’t interest many of your readers. Giving specific examples of how it makes things easier creates more sales in the end. 
8. Although you want to rise above the competition and prove yourself to your audience, don’t make impossible claims. Calling yourself number one in the biz might seem like a good idea, but your clients are less likely to trust you. Most consumers have been conditioned to associate impossible claims with arrogance and dishonesty, neither of which you’ll want your company to appear to have. 
9. Put yes-or-no questions into your marketing emails. Structure them in a way that doesn’t require your client to devote a great deal of time or energy to your cause. Make these questions intriguing and customer-centric. Better yet, use these questions to start a conversation. Generating natural back-and-forth exchanges gets your customers more involved in your business. 
10. Limit your calls-to-action to one per email. Slipping too many into one message can be frustrating or overwhelming for your client, so simply requesting a reply or a click on a link will suffice. Never give them off-hours tasks to complete; nobody likes homework. Asking your clients for too much decreases the probability of them doing what you want them to do. Make your requests simple and minimal. 

11. Once you’ve started implementing these strategies, experiment with them. Play around with your requests, word count, language use, text format, and visual information; then collect the open rates, response rates, and conversion rates of each version of your emails. There’s no magic formula, but one setup may work better than another. 

Email marketing becomes easy when you know what to do and what not to do. Be open to testing out different strategies, using our list as a guideline. With some practice, you’re bound to find the right format for you. 

How Small Businesses Should Tackle SEO

When more than 99% of companies are small ones, it’s hard for anyone to get a head start on the competition. And with the rising commonality of customers typing a new business into the search bar before visiting it, only 17% of companies put time, effort, and money into SEO to satisfy the needs of a staggering 80%. 

Skirting around SEO, or steering clear of learning about it altogether, can hinder the growth of your business to a surprising degree, especially if it’s a smaller, more recent entity. Bring yourself face-to-face with what SEO is and everything it entails; we’ll help you get started. 

The goal of SEO, or search engine optimization, is to make your company’s website and social media profiles more visible when customers search relevant words online. Why is this important if you have high-performing paid advertisements? Because these organic search results lead to more sales than those advertisements do. In fact, curious consumers opt for these results 95% of the time. 

Working on SEO means using a series of techniques to rank higher, or closer to the top, of the search engine results. Strategies like altering website structure, putting links into your content, promoting your company on social media, and focusing on content marketing are all great ways to improve your business’s SEO. 

If you still don’t think it’s worth your time, consider this: at least 70% of customers search the company they’re looking to purchase from before they complete that purchase to see if the company satisfies their needs. If your company can’t easily be found in the search results, you’ll lose customers to your better-equipped competitors. 

Search engine optimization is like competing for a spot in a phonebook that lists businesses by relevance instead of alphabetical order. Businesses should truly focus on SEO as soon as they begin creating their websites, but this is seldom the case. While larger businesses have the budget, and sometimes the exposure, to invest in effective marketing campaigns, businesses that are smaller and newer can safely rely on SEO. It’s not free, but it’s a lot cheaper than explicitly marketing yourself. 

So how do you get started? You’ll need to focus on tactics that increase your website traffic, acquire leads, and generate more sales. Both on-site and off-site SEO are important for your company’s online success. The former deals with keeping your text, image, and video content in line with the current search engine rules, while the latter refers to increasing your company’s presence in digital listings and directories mainly through influencer interaction. 

First, take the time to build your website. Use this as a draft and start working on improving your pages, focusing especially on keywords, the words your customers search that are relevant to your company. If you’re unsure what your keywords are, find out what your customers are searching and which keywords your competitors are using to rank higher. Keyword Planner is a good tool to use when completing this step, though there are other options available as well. 

Your next focus should be content marketing. Creating content of ideal length that is readable, keyword optimized, useful, and authoritative will boost your search engine ranking. The last of those elements is particularly significant, as making yourself an authority figure on a subject will keep your audience coming back to you for more information and naturally increase your SEO ranking. 

Incorporating links into your content can also make your company more visible online. Make sure, however, to only include links to legitimate, well-respected sources that your target audience would likely visit outside of your website. Link building in a sneaky, dishonest way or with untrustworthy sources can result in lost sales and business penalties. 

Of course, social media marketing is just as important as the aforementioned strategies. Most companies know that while a large amount of likes, comments, and shares doesn’t boost SEO ranking due to the risk of content being unfairly influenced or tampered with, having a presence on several different social media platforms brings traffic to your website. You can also give your customers more information about your company and learn more about what they like and dislike this way, making it easier to cater to their needs. 

Unlike a stellar marketing campaign, SEO can’t be done once and left alone forever afterwards. As consumers and search engine rules change, SEO must change to accommodate. It’s an ongoing commitment, especially for small businesses. But when it’s done right, it can really pay off. 

Increasing your Conversion Rate with Location Information

SEO is all the rage in the business world right now, but it doesn’t guarantee you success. Customers need to be able to both find your company easily online and find what they’re looking for on a straightforward, attractive template. The true key to increasing your conversions is company-to-consumer connection. 

Recent studies show that appearing local to your customers is the best way to connect with them. Landing pages, social media accounts, and local business associations have proven themselves to be effective in upping the amount of customer interaction a business receives. Furthermore, 83% of consumers will typically only travel to shop at stores 15 minutes away or less. Most consumers value location over product price, a surprising find considering how much emphasis is put on SEO for marketers. Most buyers do, however, value quality over location, meaning they’re often willing to travel further distances if the quality of a product is outstanding. 

If your business sells something that people buy consistently, such as food, gasoline, cigarettes, or bus tickets, consumers will seek out the location closest to them to make frequent purchasing easy. Customers prefer gas stations situated no further than 6 minutes away from their homes, grocery stores 9 minutes away, home, garden, and auto stores 14 minutes away, and clothing stores 20 minutes away. 

Having this information at your disposal is convenient, but using it is a bit tricky. There exist many dependent factors that determine just how far a customer is willing to go for a product or service, including method of transportation, access to highways, and traffic level. Converting travel times into distances using roadway routes with light traffic comes out to 2.2 miles every 6 minutes, 4.1 miles every 9 minutes, 4.9 miles every 12 minutes, and 9.3 miles every 20 minutes. 

Studies provided by Google and Access are too broad to use, citing that 80% of customer purchases are made within a 20 mile radius of home, and 72% of customers looking in their area choose a store no more than 5 miles away. With these newfound results, businesses can be confident that consumers visit grocery stores, cafes, pharmacies, post offices, and laundry service locations that are situated no more than 4 miles from their homes. 

Now that we know how powerful location is, how do we use it to turn consumers into customers? You’ll first have to make the location information of your business very accessible. It may seem more beneficial to advertise your products on every inch of your website that’s free, but this may end up driving your website’s visitors away, especially if it takes up an entire mobile phone screen. Include a Contact or Location section in your website’s tab collection and fill it with location photos, interactive maps, and nearby addresses to clearly highlight where your business is. 

If your company has more than one location, you’ve probably already taken the time to create a page on your website with the addresses and hours of each store. Although this is useful, don’t stop there; create a landing page for each store as well. If you don’t think that’s worth the effort, at the very least, create a Facebook page, Yelp listing, or Google My Business profile for every location. Your audience will then have all the information about your stores at their fingertips, more easily turning casual site visitors into loyal customers. 

Your store’s address may be all your customers need, but if your location is unusual or hidden away, descriptions of the space around the store are extremely useful for newcomers looking for it. Add information about nearby buildings, stores, and intersections to make the process of locating your store easier. A collection of photos from different angles can also help consumers coming from a different direction recognize your store. 

To accommodate customers traveling to your store from more than 10 minutes away, mention well-known landmarks that the building is near. Describing your store’s location in relation to a popular plaza, highway, or department store will almost guarantee that no consumer seeking out your store will get lost on the way there. People from out of town will especially appreciate your efforts. Even though your location doesn’t move, change its description depending on who you’re targeting, using words each audience will recognize. 

Location plays an unexpectedly big role in customer acquisition, and should therefore never be neglected. Give your audience the location information they need, and they’ll give you the conversions you want. 

The Pros and Cons of Influencer Marketing

There are few tactics in modern-day advertising that are as effective as influencer marketing. Even though it’s over a decade old, influencer marketing has only become commonplace recently, approaching an impressive $2 billion in revenue last year alone. It then comes as no surprise that 41% of marketers had a greater impact on consumers when using influencer marketing than when using other methods of advertising. Additionally, 32% of marketers claimed influencer marketing was necessary for the success of their campaigns.

If influencer marketing is so great, why don’t all marketers use it? The main reason many companies still avoid it is the challenges it comes with. It can be difficult to tell regular content apart from sponsored content in some cases, and the metrics it produces aren’t always clear. But the biggest problem that influencer marketing users experience is fraud.

Dishonest companies using influencer marketing as their main advertising strategy will pay consumers to like, comment on, follow, and promote their brand on popular social media platforms. Most of the time, these consumers haven’t tried the company’s products or services and are simply saying exactly what the company tells them to say. For a strategy that thrives on genuine recommendations of a brand, this is very harmful.

Fraud in influencer marketing happens more often than you may think. We forget that failing to clearly label sponsored content is also considered fraud, and over 100 large companies have been guilty of it in the recent past. To curb the incidents, the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to those companies and created stricter rules about sponsored content. Smaller companies aren’t exempt from these rules, of course, but it’s much easier for them to break them without suffering any immediate consequences.

Incentives for advertisers may help decrease the frequency at which this problem occurs. Allowing compliant brands to access advanced analytics to see the effects of their marketing efforts or giving them the option to push overtly labeled sponsored ads to the top of user feeds could be a better way of encouraging everyone to follow the rules. Instagram has already begun to test out this strategy, offering a Paid Partnership tag that gives marketers access to the advertisement’s reach and interaction data.

Follower fraud is harder to identify than unlabeled sponsored content. Both individual users and active companies on social media can enlist the help of an autobot for a fairly low price. This autobot selects a series of fake accounts to follow the user’s account, making them appear more popular than they really are. Unfortunately, this sneaky strategy is happening more and more as social media becomes the centre of the advertising universe. Although it’s difficult to spot, it can be identified by closely examining follower numbers in relation to content interaction rates and unusual comment patterns. Companies that are caught in the act are blacklisted by the platform’s advertisement administrators.

All marketers should be aware that while their competitors may appear to have a plethora of followers, there aren’t enough policing systems within social media yet to quickly spot fraud, meaning those followers could be paid for or part of a pod. A pod is formed when influencers team up and interact with each other’s content. The algorithm for Instagram in particular will favour this activity and show it to more users.

Pods aren’t all bad, but they can pose problems to companies that are looking for organic results. Their partners could be commenting on their posts to increase their own reach without necessarily approving of or agreeing with the content. This can lead to a change in the company’s audience type and greater costs associated with the pod partnership. If you choose to use a pod, be sure to carefully monitor the amount and quality of comments you give and receive to avoid skewing your results.

Although pods and autobots are not as easily tackled as missing sponsored content tags are, a few organizations have been trying. Fohr Card, for instance, created a follower health tool that skims through an influencer’s followers and labels them as active users, lurking users, or autobots. That way, companies wanting to team up with an influencer can avoid fraudulent ones outright. Though this tool helps, most fraud analysis still needs to be completed manually.

Until the fraud issues are dealt with, businesses can use different marketing strategies and consumers can keep an eye out for insincere companies. If you choose influencer marketing despite its downfalls, play it safe and aim for authenticity.