Frankel Interactive

4 Easy Tips to Beat Google’s Mobile-First Index

Adam Frankel — 2016-12-19

Google's Mobile-First index can lead to a paradigm shift in the way indexing works. It necessitates mobile-friendly individual pages besides a mobile-friendly website.

Here’s a brief synopsis of mobile-first indexing:

What is it?

Up until the announcement, the desktop version of webpage’s content was Google’s indexing priority. But now the priority will be mobile-optimized pages. This change has come as a result of the large volume of users that have been migrating to handheld platforms and away from desktops.

Is this new?

Yes and no.

Smart businesses have been making their websites mobile-friendly for several years now. But never before has Google advised bringing such efforts to the granular level i.e. individual pages of a website.

Hence, outwardly there’s nothing‘new’ as Google will continue to have a unique indexing mechanism for both mobile and desktop versions of webpages. However, pages optimized for mobile devices will be the priority and that’s something new.

How should you adjust your webpages to accommodate the change in indexing? Read on to find answers:

Mobile-friendly configuration

Responsive design may be the holy grail of mobile-friendliness, but not the only one. There are other configuration methods such as dynamic serving and different URLs. I don’t suggest the latter because even though Google has an agnostic approach to separate URLs, visitors may get confused.

You can choose dynamic serving instead of responsive design. The URLs will be the same, but the HTML copy will change depending on the device being used. Dynamic serving comes with a few benefits. One of them, perhaps the most crucial one is fast loading time. As separate HTML versions are sent to users with separate devices, handheld users download a smaller version of the original content, which doesn’t take too much time to load.

On the flipside, dynamic serving is a bit hard to implement. Google has enlisted some mistakes that occur with dynamic serving. Besides, dynamic serving is either unidirectional or bidirectional redirecting. Mobile developers are cautioned against redirects. Other tips for mobile-friendly configuration include not using robots.txt file, signaling to Google that individual pages are optimized for mobile, and a rich user-experience.

Getting rid of clutter

Mobile design is often plagued by too muchclutter. Cluttercancome in all forms. At times, it’s difficult to identify whether an onpage element amounts to visual or technical distraction.

Here are some of the elements that mobile designers should get rid of:

#Pop-ups: Mobile users detest pop-ups more than their desktop counterparts. Because desktop screens are larger, it’s easy to click on the “X” and close the virtual pop-up bar. But mobile users tap instead of clicking and often face difficulty locating the close button icon.

#No flash: Why use flash when there’s Javascript and HTML5? The graph below shows the ever increasing popularity of HTML5. Take a look:

Source

Flash is old school and not conducive in terms of ROI. So, no Flash.

#Reduce accidental taps: Users feel very annoyed when they accidentally tap on an icon. Scrolling issues and crowded layouts are the culprits behind accidental taps. Fix scrolling shortcomings and make the layout simplistic.

#Large images: Large images can make the loading time slow. So use images that are not so large. Use compression software to resize the image.

#Codes and pages: The source code is what determines the functionality of a site. Examine it to remove the unnecessary codes. Also, get rid of doorway pages. Other than being redundant, such pages can trigger unnecessary redirects, which Google hates.

Getting rid of the above clutter can help you render a perfectly mobile-friendly website, optimized for Google’s mobile-first index.

Localization matters

When you are building a user-friendly mobile page, localization matters big time.

Why does it matter so much?

Because Google’s report on local search behavior reveals local searchers are more likely to pursue action compared to non-local searchers. The report reads “50 percent of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day, and 34 percent who searched on a computer/tablet did the same.”

To make mobile-optimized pages localized, you need to:

? Include the state, city and zip code info in the title tag. Google has started allowing site owners to increase the length of title tags for mobile. They have 78 characters - enough to add location specific details.

? Alt tags and all other meta tags should have city data.

? All pages should have contact details of the business such as physical address, phone, fax and email.

? The content needs to be the same for separate locations while the contact details must change.

None of these steps is difficult to implement. Along with these steps, a business can give users some location-specific incentives such helping them find certain places.

New snippets

Site owners often wonder whether mobile visitors have the patience to go through the entire onpage content. Such apprehensions are justified. Studies have found a mean decrease of 35% in app session length. Mobile visitors have a shorter attention span than desktop users.

Content, not detailed enough may not get a featured snippet. But mobile users prefer content that’s brief, concise and framed like a short answer. Does that mean featured snippet is obtainable only for desktop users?

No.

Jennifer Slegg of the SEM Post explained that Google is updating featured snippets and making them tailor-made for mobile users. Such snippets will be displayed against “Know-Queries” or simple queries. Such queries can be names of individuals or places. As a business, expect people search using names of areas and places. Optimize your site for such places to make it look mobile-friendly.

Featured snippets are more important for desktop users than mobile users, largely because answer to those snippets are detailed whereas answer to “Know-Queries” snippets are short and precise. So make sure that you have pages with long answer as well as pages with brief and quick answers.

Summing up

The mobile-first index creates new concepts for consideration when optimizing your website. Google hates nothing more than those that try to trick the system, so sticking with these tips will keep you safe and set you on your way for a properly mobile optimized site.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

Importance of Keyword Optimization and How to do It

Adam Frankel — 2016-11-30

Every digital marketing strategy that you create ultimately revolves around keywords. From content optimization, social media sharing, link building to directly emailing newsletters to the target audience right in their mail box…keywords are an essential tool that help you reach out to your audience. That’s why keyword optimization is a very important strategy that you just can’t ignore.

Keyword Optimization: An Important Piece of the Digital Marketing Puzzle

The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving and so do keywords. With the changes in trends, old keywords are soon replaced with new ones. Uncovering new keyword opportunities will help your business explore various verticals that are yet to be covered. Keyword optimization helps you constantly update your database with new keywords that will lead to increases in traffic, leads and sales.

What is Keyword Optimization?

Keyword optimization is a three stage process that can help a business target qualified leads and drive them from search engine results to its website. It’s a very important component for both paid and organic search strategies.

The three stages of Keyword Optimization are:

Research
Analysis
Selection of the best keywords

Incorporating the right keywords does not only helps to improve your website traffic and conversion rate. Other benefits include helping you to –

Measure the potential traffic flow – Popular keyword analysis can help you to measure the actual size of your potential target market.
Understand the User Behavior – Keywords are like breadcrumbs. If you follow the trail, you will get an idea of what the needs of your target audience are.
Write Effective Content – Incorporating optimized keywords can improve your SERP visibility, ranking and drive more traffic to your website. The right keywords can help you directly address your customer’s needs and pain points.

Despite all these benefits, it may surprise you to learn that keyword optimization has been listed as one of the most annoying tasks of digital marketing.

The following chart breaks down what are considered to be the most annoying, challenging and time-consuming aspects of search marketing according to an opinion poll of typical search marketers –

Source

Keyword research is one of the top annoying tasks that account for about 32 percent. Another survey results chart below highlights the list of annoying things about keyword research as surveyed –

Source

Almost every aspect of keyword research seems to be something digital marketers wish they could avoid. The tasks that top the charts appear to be editing/updating keyword lists, keyword brainstorming and discovery, and organizing keyword lists.

The above survey based facts, however, ironically contrasts with the hundreds of articles that you’re going to find on the importance of keyword research in the search engine results page.

Having said that, you can’t ignore that keywords are one of, if not the most valuable and high returning tool that is required for any digital marketing strategy. Below are some valuable tips that you’ll find helpful in your keyword research, as well as optimization efforts going forward.

Keyword Optimization Tactics: The Best Ways to Identify and Use Keywords in Your Digital Marketing Campaign

#1 – Choosing the Right Keywords

Keyword optimization begins with using the right keywords. However, as already mentioned, figuring out which keywords to use, is pretty much the most dreaded task. It’s safe to say that when people don’t enjoy a task, they don’t put their best efforts into it. As it relates to your marketing efforts, that means your there’s a good chance the quality of your keyword selected could be affected..

The good news is that keyword-targeting tools exist to make the task less of a burden., such as:

Google AdKeyword Planner
Keyword Tool
SEMrush
Long Tail Pro
SpyFu
KeywordSpy
Bing Webmaster Tools and more

You can learn about these tools from Neil Patel’s blog on the 7 tools that new businesses can use to target the best keywords. Identifying the right keywords can help boost your chances of reaching your SEO-related goals and traffic.

Keyword research is, however, more than these tools. It involves in-depth market analysis and understanding keyword success – things that need to be done manually. You’ll probably find this article on the topic keyword research helpful.

#2 – Optimizing Your Business Website

Apart from the various technical tasks that your website has to cover when SEO optimizing your website (which you can learn about from Moz’s beginner's guide to SEO), how do you optimize your website using the right keyword or keyword phrase?

Where to Use Keyword-phrases on your Website and How to do it

Place the keyword only once in the title tag. Try putting the keyword close to the beginning of the title tag.
Use the keyword prominently on the top of the page.
Place the keyword (at least twice or three times) in the body copy. Try out variations of the same keyword to avoid stuffing your web page with excessive referrences .
Use your keyword at least once in the image alt attribute. This will help to make your web page visible not only in the web search but also in the image search
Do not forget to insert your keywords at least once in the meta description tag.

It must be noted that the meta description tag is used as the text snippet that is displayed on the results page by the search engine. So even if the meta description is not used by the search engine crawlers for ranking, this is the thing that helps to attract readers and generate clicks into your website.

#3 – Content Creation and Optimization

Whether you have content to write or a video to produce, you’ll want to do it based on the keywords that people are searching for.

You can optimize your content one of two ways –

You can first, compose your content and then optimize it using keywords that are popular in your industry.

Or,

You can research the keywords and then decide which ones would make great content that you can share online. If you are using Google Adwords Keyword Planner, you might get a total of 801 suggested keywords to start your research along with their estimated search volume.

You might want to take download the data and use in a source to generate future topics.

With this approach, you can create strong content strategies that will help you drive potential traffic to your website.

#4 - Social Media Optimization

Trying out new social media marketing tactics for your Facebook advertisements and Twitter campaigns can be great, but keyword optimization can help you from missing out on opportunities that may arise within the social network.

Key Elements to Optimize on Your Social Media Pages and Profiles with Targeted Keywords and Phrases

Make sure that you have a keyword phrase in the bio of your Twitter profile page
Check whether you have keywords in the Category, Long Description and Short Description pages of your Facebook profile. All of these pages can be edited from the ‘About You’ page tab.
For your Instagram profile, include the keyword phrase in the bio section.
For your Pinterest profile, make sure that there is a keyword phrase in the ‘About You’ box of your profile.
If you have a Google+ profile, then mention the keyword phrase in the tagline, introduction, occupation and skill section of your page. As for your Google+ pages, ensure that the keyword phrase has been placed in the introduction and the category section at least once.

When Optimizing Your Social Profiles with Keywords

Don’t overstuff your social profiles and pages with keywords. This can come across as ‘spammy’.

Add your keywords to your social media profiles and campaign pages in a natural way. If you are new to this, then try following the already existing social media profiles of your competittion. Analyze what they are doing to see how frequently used keyword phrases in their profiles and how they benefit from it.

Along with optimizing your social profiles and pages with targeted keywords, you can also optimize your social media updates so that they can appear on the search engine results page as well. In addition to improving the visibility of your social media page within the network, social media update optimization with proper keywords can give you wider exposure on the search engine results page.

You can start doing this by using them in your main status update. Here is an example of posts from Moz’s Facebook page had been indexed in the Google Search –

Source

#5 – Email Optimization of Subject Line

Stats show a good email subject line can lead to increased open rates. However, good keyword optimization can also improve your newsletter’s visibility.

There’s a good chance many recipients of your newsletter won’t be paying attention to the subject line when it enters their inboxes. However, emails are often searched for after the fact. In that case, wouldn’t you want your email newsletter to be quickly accessible? Of course!

An Important Tip for Optimizing Your Email Newsletter Subject Line

Never leave the important keyword(s) out of the email subject line.

There are countless emails that a person receives in his/her mailbox. Your email might get opened and read. If it's good, it might convert and if it's not that good, it might be forgotten about but left in the inbox if not deleted altogether. So suddenly, one day, the recipient remembers seeing something of interest in your newsletter and later searches for it. The keywords you Included in your subject line makes it easily accessible to the reader. Do you optimize your email subject line?

Keywords – The Fundamental Key to Every Optimization Strategy

Whatever your digital marketing strategy may be, keywords form the fundamental basis that can’t be ignored. While it may be ‘annoying’, do your keyword research. This will help you work out the rest of your strategies.

Images Courtesy: searchengineland.com

Online Marketing Consulting: Why do you need this?

Adam Frankel — 2016-09-30

When was the last time you got constructive feedbacks about your marketing plans and actions? How often do people around you suggest new marketing ideas that are worth implementing? Are your marketing inputs and actions limited to short boardroom meetings?

What if your customer or partner asks you about your marketing roadmap – both for short-term and long-term business goals? Do you have specialists that constantly evaluate your marketing actions against that of your competitors?

These questions are self-explanatory and could be eye-openers for you.

Unless you implement continuous feedback generating mechanisms, competitive benchmarking of your brand building activities is not possible. Internal strategies and decisions, if not properly researched and validated by experts, may lead to marketing failure.

Do marketing automation tools work?

Unfortunately, there are no automated marketing tools or copybook techniques to help you with predictive marketing metrics. A tool can certainly help you collect data for making decisions but it cannot tell you what to do, when, how, and why?

Ideas, executions, and decisions are human elements

Online marketing is a dynamic and specialized field. It demands human intelligence, analytical power and decision-making ability, which a tool cannot provide. There are practitioners who understand the subject well and can execute based on essential marketing metrics.

Consultations with experts are of great help

Bringing marketing thoughts into reality is all about how well you source, execute, and monitor them in a timely manner. Doing all these require marketing expertise and confidence. For a business owner, having relevant domain knowledge and on-job marketing experience, are certainly not the priorities.

It is wise to seek help from reliable online marketing practitioners. Proper guidance from a team of experts can not only improve your competitive positions but also secure your marketing goals for future benefits.

Below are the top 10 ways marketing geeks can help you get started with your online marketing initiatives.

1. First, the consultants will review your existing marketing plans, goals and the list of on-going promotional activities through personalized discussions and team meetings. This may involve QA sessions and quick demonstrations.

2. Next, they will conduct group meetings to understand your short-term and long-term business goals. This includes your marketing expectations in terms of annual sales revenue from marketing effort, the number of new customer acquisitions, repeat sales, brand equity, and social acceptance over the internet.

3. Competitor studies and industry benchmarking are the next steps for defining realistic marketing goals. Marketing consultants do SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis of your company against top competitors. They define what could be achieved, what not, and what does not require any marketing effort.

4. Once the annual marketing goals are set and aligned with your business objectives, the consultants will break them into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily targets. Those targets are optimistic and challenging but achievable.

5. Upon target setting, the consultants will explore and analyze every possible marketing avenue and action that would drive successful campaigns. The list could be exhaustive, and may include experimental decisions. In most cases, the actions items are geared towards holistic as well as result-oriented goals.

6. Next, it comes to the job of creating scope of work (SOW) documentation. Here marketing strategists enlist the Do’s and Don’ts for every executable marketing activity. The list contains high-level as well as micro-level tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. They set specific timelines for task completions and ensure they are accomplished as planned.

7. Once the execution starts, marketing analysts capture, review, monitor and record performance metrics using varied marketing tools. These tools are of different types and for different purposes. Online marketing consists of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click ad campaign, video marketing, blog writing, social media promotion, etc. There are specialized tools for data mining, data filtering, analytical observations, trend chart preparation and custom reporting.

8. In the next step, marketing analysts scrutinize tool derived data at both micro and macro level. This is a continuous monitoring process that requires careful observations and real-time reporting. The objective is to learn what caused positive and negative results for a particular time span. This is a critical stage as experts analyze every bit of available data to formulate next course of actions.

9. Once the list of filtered marketing action items is ready, the next step is to follow the execution cycle. Marketing firms do employ people with specialized skill sets who know how to achieve quality output in due time. They are the experts in defining workarounds and can deliver even at difficult times.

10. The final step is to re-validate all approved marketing actions on a monthly and quarterly basis. Your account manager will periodically weigh the balance between your expectations and the final outcomes. He or she may suggest you some new strategies based on how existing plans perform.

It is important that you have both protective and aggressive marketing plans handy. If plan A does not work, you should have plan B or plan C ready to be implemented. Consultants provide detailed guidelines about executing every plan with estimated effort and expected outcomes.

If you want to learn the subject of online marketing and know what specialty a consultant can bring to your table, it is worth asking for a personalized demonstration. You will also know if today’s investment can really ensure higher returns in the future. For additional help, we are just a call away!

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

5 Infographic Design Tips that Marketers Need to Follow

Adam Frankel — 2016-09-26

There are many marketing techniques that become all the rage for a while only to slip away into oblivion after a while. Then there are the few that stick, and become a mainstay in every professional’s marketing tool kit.

The Infographic is one technique that has definitely has stood out.

Now some may say that infographic are a content format and not a ‘technique’.

While it’s indeed a content format on its own, it is also the backdrop of the visual web and its gradual emergence. Text-visual combo formats like infographics are nothing short of a technique that can change many equations.

Below we’ll briefly discuss infographics and their benefits, and discuss the best practices to create them.

Why infographics?

Because more than 90% information transmitted to and processed by the human brain is visual. In the era of auto-play videos, push notification, and all things social media, our attention spans are becoming shroter and shorter. This means when sending information it needs to be attention grabbing, and that means visuals. Chances are, a visual message is going to be noticed whereas your non-visual messaging has a good chance of not being received at all.

We know social media is has become the lifeline of digital marketing. On social media, infographics are three times more likely to be shared than non-visual content. The CMO council’s research which predicted the use of infographic will increase in 2016. In short, infographic is an attention-grabber and adds value to information.

Infographic best practices

By following best practices, you add value to the infographic. The infographic scores high in the virality chart, receives more attention and gets more likes and shares on social media. The best practices include:

Avoid the temptation

You might feel tempted to add flashy design elements to the infographic. Don’t. Not only will it result in visual clutter, but also go against the tenets of minimalism, a principle that designers revere these days.

A survey done on 3000 people by Siegel + Gale revealed they prefer simple design than complex design. Keep the infographic simplistic to garner a high rate of user-engagement.

Remember, the graphic elements you are adding are supposed to serve a purpose. The purpose is to accompany the texts in the infographic. Hence, only add relevant graphics. A simple graphic is a clean graphic, and cleanliness is next to godliness.

Dig into big data

There’s a huge difference between ordinary data and big data. Big data boils down to detecting pattern. The marketing world is fond of big data because it can unearth valuable insights for them.

An enterprise can use big data analytics tools and pull its internal workflow management data, client communication data, previous sales data, data related to customer satisfaction level, etc, discover pattern in them and use the pattern in an infographic.

Such an infographic can inform industry insiders as well as the outsiders about how the business/the industry is going. The infographic needs to present the data in an entertaining manner. It’s easy to separate a data-rich infographic from a data-scarce infographic. A data-rich infographic has numbers, stat figures, embedded graphs whereas an infographic lacking data only has texts. See the infographic below:

You can only see numbers, and quickly grab useful information. Now see the infographic below:

There’s information, but no numbers. There’s no pattern, only some behavior related details. The difference between the two infographics is evident. Hence, harness big data so that your infographics command more authority.

Color selection

Color selection is important for infographic design. Let’s say you go for monochromatic color scheme where one color is dominant and other colors are its shades. If the subject of the infographic is such that information is more important than graphics, or if you are designing the infographic for an audience who you know would be indifferent to colors, such as C-suite executives of a business firm, go for this color scheme.

There should be a consistency between the level of content and the color you select. Alongside consistency, contrast is also important. Some colors create a nice contrast with each other while some colors don’t. Choose the contrasting colors to bring a contrast, but don’t overdo it. The background color should never be deep, it should always be pale. Another important thing to keep in mind is the color you select should match the typeface.

Attention-grabbing words

Content is king. The texts in the infographic should be catchy enough to validate this aphorism and grab the attention of the onlookers. An infographic doesn’t need too much texts. The volume of texts is 15-200 max.

Make sure not a single word is unnecessary. Give special attention to the headline. A good and powerful headline doesn’t stop after capturing one’s attention. It describes the whole infographic with brevity. The ideal length of the headline is 80 characters or less.

The flow is pivotal. If some phrases are punchy type while other phrases are mundane, then that would hurt the flow. So make sure there’s a perfect harmony of each line and most importantly, the message is not simply thrown at them but delivered in a smooth manner, and only after they make progress in the thought process, prompted by the infographic.

Brand message

Even though information is at the core of an infographic, you can’t wrap things up after putting too much information into it. The infographic needs to touch on the crucial aspects pertaining to your brand and drive home that they should purchase from you, though in a subtle manner.

Charts, data sheet, etc should be insightful alongside being visually compelling. The key takeaways should be highlighted to guarantee a comprehensive understanding. And all these should be done for only one purpose - making it easy for users to digest your brand’s message.

The message is important, and so is how you plant it in the infographic. If you add the message using quality content and rich graphics and images, then users will have an easy time getting it and decrypting it.

Images Courtesy: pixabay.com

7 Automation Trends for Digital Marketers to Follow

Adam Frankel — 2016-09-07

The online marketing industry is increasingly relying with automation to manage their campaigns, and their successes validate the shift. Success in online marketing depends on:

How much time one spends
How much effort he puts in

Marketing automation tools are a benefit to inbound marketers. Using such tools saves time, simplifies the work process and reduces errors.

Here’s how digital marketing agencies are levaeraging the automated functionality now available to them.

Managing multiple accounts

Digital marketers have multiple social media accounts. It’s difficult to manage all these accounts individually. You either need increased manpower or a centralized access point from where you can manage these accounts.

The former is more expensive than the latter. The latter, although less expensive, is a bit challenging.

To overcome the challenge, marketers can leverage automation platforms. SMM tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, Viralheat and SproutSocial ease basic operations as well as complex tasks such as user demographic monitoring, online reputation management, measuring virality score, etc.

The biggest benefit of SM account management automation is single platform. Once you log into Buffer or Hootsuite, you can access your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts. From a single custom dashboard, you can view how each network is performing. Such dashboards fetch social analytics from different networks and suggest future strategies.

Prospect tracking

Via social media, brands gain access to prospects. There are plenty of relevant and qualified social prospects out there and they are highly likely to turn into leads. But tracking them is challenging.

Marketing automation allows you to evaluate them, weigh the likelihood of their becoming your customers.

Automation and analytics tools enable you to track the activities of social prospects and optimize your social presence for them. Brands fail to engage with prospects for the below-mentioned reasons:

Not communicating regularly with them
Not making the interaction meaningful
Not gauging their lead score

Automated tools like Quintly or Socedo remove communication bottlenecks, make interaction with prospects meaningful and assign lead score to prospects, thereby making it easy for brands to decide which of them are to target. Prospect tracking eventually paves the roads for

Engagement with prospects

Cutting-edge tools have smart approval system, which works like a filter. Prospects are given approval or disapproval based on the lead score assigned to them, for further interaction.

Engagement initiating signals are

Facebook like, comment and share and comment length
Retweet, Twitter follow backs and direct messages
Repin on Pinterest
Like, comment and share on LinkedIn along with hashtag use

You don’t have to bother. The automation tool you use will intercept all these signals, analyze them and sort the prospect list to find the most likely candidates for conversion pitch.

Your job is to tune the engagement pitch. The pitch should be in accordance with the likes and dislikes, fancies and whims of the prospects. Of course, there will be holistic analysis in the background done by the tool, taking into account link-click through, follow-backs, replies, private messages, upvotes/downvotes and plenty other engagement metrics, making engagement easy.

Facilitate conversion

Engagement with prospects leads to conversion. Automated tools monitor the conversion process, inform marketers about possible errors and offer them other actionable insights throughout the conversion process.

The factors that are critical to sales conversion include

Marketing campaign scaling
Strong customer relationship
Competitive edge

And here’s what automation can do:

According to Gartner Research, by 2020, automation will greatly eliminate the need for human interaction. Automation tools can initiate dialogues with new prospects and reengage with existing prospects in the most opportune time, which boosts conversion. The state of the art analytics allow them.

Unable to scale hinders conversion. Automation streamlines the business process and reduces clutters.

Gaining competitive advantage is tough unless a business adopts automation. What separates automation users from non-users is they report when competitors outgrow them. What follows is tracking competitors to get a sense of the edge that can outbalance the scenario. Once again, only automation tools can achieve this.

Better CRM ROI

Automation platforms integrate CRM tools. This not only connects the marketing and sales team better but tracks CRM. A lot of CRM data go to waste because enterprises don’t automate CRM.

If they use an automation platform that has an integrated CRM, then campaign ROI reporting would be easier, and so would be tracking and increasing revenue.

Automation software allow for CRM-level bi-directional syncing.

What benefits does that yield?

A loop originates and the campaigns created by the platform remains within it. The reporting capability enhances as revenue, marketing speed and marketing decisions map back to the CRM.

A study by Pardot shows buyers want targeted content. The more targeted your marketing messages, the better the outcome is. Without CRM integration, it’s impossible to deliver targeted messages as marketers don’t get a granular view of customer behavior.

Behavioral marketing

I mentioned above about customer behavior. It’s a crucial factor. Marketing around customer behavior yields profitable outcomes. Automation increases its effectiveness.

Here’s what the sales cycle looks like:

Customers browse the features → Read blogs → Check and compare the pricing → Purchase.

Some customers leave after browsing the features. Some leave after viewing the price. Some leave when they don’t find the suitable payment option.

Automation platforms monitor and keep a track of all these touch points. When enterprises obtain the analytics details, they compare the touch points and speculate the reasons behind cart abandonment.

They make changes on their site accordingly.

Email marketing automation

A report shows a staggering 61% of marketers in the US rely on blast emails for lead generation. Less than 5% use automation solution. Automation connects email marketing to behavioral marketing, we’ve just discussed.

Some automation platforms are so advanced that they allow for real-time marketing based on CRM data and customer tracking info. But real-time marketing is not a walk in the park. It requires the sales rep to be street smart. Once you activate drip campaign, emails are automatically sent to customers based on the same data, but in the right time. This way, the email open rate improves, and so does the reply rate.

Summary

The wave of automation is sweeping off the digital marketing industry. Automation is impacting every marketing touchpoint. A marketer can manage multiple accounts, track a prospect, monitor his behavior, make a sales pitch in real time or run a drip campaign. This way, he can grow his business using automation solutions.

It’s impossible to prevent automation from taking over the digital marketing industry. What you can do is to embrace it, understand it and follow the tips shared here. Doing so will increase your odds of success.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

5 Useful Slideshare Marketing Strategies for Inbound Marketers

Adam Frankel — 2016-09-05

Paid tools come with features that are more robust than those coming with free tools. Marketers have a predilection for paid tools. But some free tools are as good as paid tools. One of them is slideshare.

Nearly 70 million people use Slideshare, some for marketing, some for other reasons. It’s importance in marketing cannot be ignored.

Because a slide presentation has only few lines instead of big chunks of texts, people pay attention to them. The visuals accompanying the texts articulate the message.

Let’s have a look at Slideshare best practices:

Catchy title

Your slide presentation can be very high in quality. Your audience may still ignore it if they don’t find the title and the short description interesting. The outline view shows titles. Make sure the title is interesting enough to seize an viewer’s attention when glancing at it.

A mistake made by many is they don’t put titles in every slide. Individual slides need to have titles in them. Readers may not have the time to read the entire content. In that case, they can get the gist of it from the title. Aside from that, titles give a short introduction to the rest of the content.

The wiki style display in the beginning is what users prefer - sort of a preface of a book, appearing at the start of the slide presentation. Slideshare is so user-friendly that you don’t need the tooltip feature of Microsoft Powerpoint. Just hovering your cursor along the progress bar at the bottom will show you all of the individual slides along with their titles.

That means you can use Openoffice Impress or similar tools.

Typography elements matter

I already mentioned that individual slides should ideally have fewer words in them. To entice the audience, work on your typography. The key elements are:

Fonts
Kerning
lColor contrast

Font size should be appropriate. The font shouldn’t be too big or too small. Kerning is very important, yet often an underrated element in typography. Feel free to tinker with these elements and even create custom font.

Color contrast is crucial. Use light or strong colors but maintain a parity between them. If the background is dark-colored, the fonts should be light-colored and so on.

If you are designing custom fonts, give special attention to spacing and margin. Poor spacing and unequal side-wise white space can amount to poor user-experience.

Work on visuals

Font and color are among the key visual elements. Images are important too; they are even more important than color and font. That’s chiefly because people cannot separately identify font or colors. They do notice them but identify them as part of the overall content.

But they can single out images. When adding images to a slide, consider all the following:

The image should be relevant as well as eye-catching
The image should fit well with the background color as well as with the font color
You don’t have to add images to every slide, but first few slides must have images

What happens when an image doesn’t blend well with the background and font color? The slide presentation appears cluttered. You don’t want that, do you? Hence, maintain consistency between all visual elements.

Add URLs

Don’t forget to add URLs from your site.

The reason behind creating the slide presentation is to spread words about your business. If you don’t put your site URLs into the slide, then that purpose won’t be achieved and you’ll miss out on potential traffic.

How should you add links?

Should you only add your homepage link? Or should you add other URLs too? Should you randomly select any deep link or should you carefully select a link and then add?

Follow these rules at the time of adding link to your slide presentation:

Add the most important link/s to the first few slides. People tend to lose attention as they progress reading. If they notice the link/s in the beginning, the likelihood of clicking on those links would be high.
Homepage links should be added in the end.
When you add deep links, make sure the content on the page and the content in the slide where you are adding the link are relevant to each other.

Follow these three rules to see people landing on your pages from the slide presentation.

Add video

Multimedia content is slowly taking over the digital marketing industry. Short-duration multimedia content is better than its long-duration counterpart. It brings visitors and retains them.

It’s very useful for a slide presentation. Slide presentations are short. If the videos are long, then audiences will lose interest in them.

You’ve probably gathered that it is possible to add videos to Slideshare.

Yes, Slideshare allows its users to add videos. But here’s what you need to know:

You can add videos only in the beginning of a slide or at the end.
If you are going to add the video in the beginning, make sure it has an introductory tone. If you are adding it at the end, make it a summary-type one.

Some important information you need to know is that there’s no video upload option on Slideshare when you first upload your slide presentation. After uploading the slides, you need to go to the Edit Presentation section. There you’ll find the option to upload videos from YouTube.

There are various hosting sites. But Slideshare only allows YouTube videos.

Conclusion

The five tips discussed here can help you put Slideshare marketing on the right track. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, Slideshare has a lot of potential. The strategies discussed here can enable you to harness all those potentials and grow your brand.

Image Courtesy: www.slideshare.net

5 Tips for SMBs to Select Useful Business Intelligence Software

Adam Frankel — 2016-08-26

The ever-increasing demand for automation has resulted in industry-wide adoption of business intelligence (BI) software. BI software is a bit different from mainstream automation tools.

While typical automation solutions reduce the workflow volume, minimize the need for human intervention and lower the operating expenses, business intelligence software serve only one purpose - help corporate managers make more informed decisions.

Business intelligence for SMBs

The business intelligence vertical poses challenges for SMBs. From selecting the right tool, to train the employees how to use the tool - a small or medium size business can face a number of challenges.

Below is some advice on what to look for in business intelligence software options and what to consider when making a decision.

Self-service meaning

In the software industry, the term self-service refers to agent-side automation. Many BI vendors use the term “self-service” to describe their product. But they don’t go deep into it and explain what they mean by self-service.

Before buying any “self-service” software, a small or medium sized company must understand in which of these two following senses, the term was used:

#Ease of use: The software has a simple interface. It guides users through every phase. Most importantly, a novice user who is not an expert can operate the software.

#Assisting the experts: In this sense, the person handling the software is an expert. He analyzes data and statistical models. The software only makes his work easier by performing tough and time-consuming calculations.

Any BI software belonging in the first category would be expensive. The second type of tools may not be as expensive, but would require an expert. SMBs need to know in which sense the term “self-service” is used, before buying the software. Knowing this will help in deciding whether the software fits their needs.

Understanding subscription model

SMBs expect business intelligence software to be available at a fixed price. But different vendors have different licensing models. SMBs often incorrectly choose a model that doesn’t suit their interest.

What mistake do they commit?

Vendors want to make profit, simple. The one-time subscription model is less profitable compared to a model in which the user subscribes several times and for several reasons.

Vendors know that. And that’s why, they make the subscription model feature/service-based. In this model, an enterprise pays for bundled services. If he pays more, new items gets added to the package. An example can explain it better:

Let’s say you need BI software for the following reasons:

Digging into complex data analytics
Applying time-series zooming when scanning large data sets
Adding meta data layer for a better flow of information
Personalize real-time data for key business people

You find a software with two fee structures. The first structure allows you to all of the features but for a limited number of users. In the second fee structure, the software performs any one or two of these tasks, but all your employees can access it.

Once you understand the fee structure, you can decide which of these two models would suit you best.

Data integration model

Data integration is a key area of business intelligence. We know data warehousing is critical to business decisions. According to research, data integration accounts for 80% of data warehousing.

Business intelligence software options differ from each other in regard to data integration model. SMBs need to identify their needs and select a model accordingly. They need to carefully observe how the software loads, cleanses and maintains data sources.

Below are some popular communication architectures:

Canonical data model: It’s a design pattern, which is used in enterprise atmosphere for the purpose of communication between data formats (mostly XML-based).
Connector-based model: In this model, a connector communicates between the application and centralized broker for the integration of a wide variety of information.
Centralized system: In this model, a centralized system handles everything including communication and security. If it’s a service-oriented architecture, it involves the enterprise service bus (ESB) model for communication.

SMBs need to clearly ask vendors about the communication architecture of the software and select or reject it based on that.

SaaS BI

Enterprises of all scales are leveraging the ‘cloud’. That’s because it simplifies business operations and reduces the budget.

Observing that, many BI vendors have switched their software to a cloud-hosting network. But some vendors still follow the archaic hosting model where the software is hosted on a physical machine.

How to know whether the BI software is cloud-based?

Simple. Ask the vendor if the software delivery model is SaaS. SaaS is different from on-premise access. In case of SaaS, SMBs pay for software license and support.

What are the benefits of SaaS BI software?

Agility, scalability, deployment speed and accessibility. Unlike on-premise BI, cloud applications can be quickly scaled to meet the changing needs of an organization. Cloud doesn’t require any additional hardware or software, accounting for rapid and trouble-free deployment. Cloud applications come with mobility - one can access them on the go and from all types of devices.

Depth of analytics

For SMBs, big data analytics is the way to go forward. At the core of business intelligence is business analytics. Data warehousing, enterprise information management architecture, KPIs and performance management are all part of business analytics. If the analytics is of subpar quality, then the intelligence output would be poor.

High-quality analytics gives you answer to the following questions:

What has happened to your business?
Why has it happened?
What you should know about your competitors, customers and partners?

When you have answers to these questions, you can strategize better; that’s precisely what business intelligence (BI) strives to achieve - it enables you to take better and more informed business decisions. Future of business intelligence is attainable insight and big data analytics is its leverage.

SMBs shouldn’t just select any BI software. Before selecting the software, they must make sure the software offers state-of-the-art analytics.

Summing up

The five tips shared here are tailor-made for small and medium sized businesses. So, if you run a small or medium enterprise, follow these tips, select a useful BI software to take right decisions and propel your business.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

4 Digital Marketing Trends Every B2B Enterprise Should Watch

Adam Frankel — 2016-06-17

To be successful in marketing, a brand needs to stay fresh and relevant, as well as stay up-to-date on current trends in the marketplace. If not, it isn’t going to see the next thing coming and will fail to deal with it accordingly.

Here we are in the middle of 2016 and it seems digital marketing has inherited some new traits. The B2C industries catches up quickly with new trends. But the players in B2B are notoriously slow in adopting current trends.

Here are some of the visible trends that B2B brands should take note of:

Visual content marketing

B2B brands have been predicted to increase their content marketing budget in the upcoming years. Many B2B enterprises have taken this forecast seriously and defined their budget for content marketing.

A big problem for many of them is what there idea of content marketing consists of.. Many don’t realize that solely text-based content will eventually become extinct. Extinction may sound like a strong word, especially because text-based content still exists. However, it’s a deal-breaker when it comes to conversion. The biggest advantage of visual content is it sends a message, that can be compare hended by visitors in less than 8 seconds.

Why 8 seconds is the threshold?

That’s because average human attention span has now reduced to only 8 seconds. Only visual content can entice and inform audiences within this time frame. Believe it or not, YouTube is the second most sought after search engine after Google and brand promotion on YouTube is dependent entirely on audio-visual content.

So being a B2B brand, you should pour the lion share of your money into hiring skilled designers, graphic artists, video editors and sound recorders alongside content developers and editors.

Personalization prevails

B2B clients crave for personalized treatment. This might come as a shocker, but it’s the truth; it’s been revealed by study after study. One done by SAP Hybris and Accenture Digital revealed B2B clients expect the same level of personalization, which their B2C counterparts are accustomed to.

Another study revealed that in 2015, over 60% B2B clients downloaded work related videos on their Smartphones. That’s hard to believe because Smart devices are mostly used for entertainment purpose and rarely for work purpose.

Personalization has started to creep into the B2B framework and B2B firms need to belly up to it. Visual content marketing, mentioned already, can help a brand offer a personalized experience to its audiences.

Improving customer service is another way to stay on top of the game. Customer service reps can protect your brand’s reputation against negative remarks or reviews online. And they are the ones that can also be responsible for tarnishing a brand’s image. A lot depends on how they interact with customers, whether they can personalize the experience while being polite without being overly chatty, condescending or rude..

Influencer marketing

It marks a new era in marketing. Influencers are perceived as people who have a lot of knowledge about an industry. They analyze the present trends, anticipate the future trends and offer useful advice.

The B2B spectrum is well-suited to develop influencer marketing strategies. B2B marketers are prone to form networking ties with each other. Such ties are incredibly useful for influencer marketing.

The key strategies to make influencer marketing successful include

Identifying influencers from your industry and rating them. Tier 1 influencers are those who are revered by everyone in the industry. Tier 2 influencers are less-known but offer helpful advice nonetheless.
According to Michael Brito, an influencer is one with social capital. He has plenty of social media followers, RSS feed and newsletter subscribers. His fans listen to him and take his advice seriously. An influencer promoting your brand means it is getting a pat on the back.
Supply them information about your brand - its ups and downs - if possible, then case studies. If an influencer references your brand while analyzing the industry details, it’d invite rewarding outcomes for you.

Influencer marketing blends personalization and promotional content. What the influencer needs is access to enterprise data.

Programmatic advertising

Last year, the Internet grew 18% as an advertising medium. Unlike traditional advertising, programmatic advertising is an automated process. B2B brands should be welcoming this new trend with open arms. The benefits include

#Cost saving: Manual advertising requires a significant amount of money to be poured into its operational budget. You not only pay for buying slots offered by the ad networks, but also to the strategists, who negotiate with those networks on behalf of you. With programmatic ads, you don’t need them and hence, you can reduce spending.

#ROI tracking: Because programmatic ad buying is automated, it assesses the ROI better and even improves it. Some programmatic ad software are so sophisticated that they can show you possible ROI outcomes for each strategy.

#Cross-device intelligence: With programmatic advertising, you don’t have to devise separate strategies for separate devices. Most programmatic ad platforms are equipped to meet the requirements of a multi-screen environment.

#Advanced reporting: Programmatic ad software packages are good at reporting. The users get access to a dashboard where they can see all the stats and engagement metrics. It helps them better formulate their strategies.

The scale at which programmatic ad buying is growing indicates it will eventually replace conventional advertising. As a B2B brand manager/owner, you should give it serious thought if you want to stay ahead of things.

Uniqueness of B2B sales

In the B2B sales process, customers buy after rounds of negotiation. The strategies should be crafted keeping that in mind. The trends discussed here cover crucial aspects of the B2B industry.

Programmatic advertising can get your brand the most targeted segment of clients while personalization and visual content marketing can help you persuade them so they buy from you.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

What Should Marketers Learn from the “Keywords are Dead” Debate?

Adam Frankel — 2016-03-28

Is the death of keywords a rumor? Or is it real? In my opinion, the answer isn’t black and white, but more shades of gray. There a number of facets to keywords and even if we consider them all, the answer may not be all that cut and dry. Let’s have a look at some of these facets.

Ranking factor

Whether someone admits it or not, keywords are still the most crucial ranking factor. When we think of ranking, we think of ranking against keywords. If there are no keywords, there’s no ranking.

Those, who espouse the death of keywords should put this in perspective. One can only wonder how they pitch SEO services to their clients, because in the absence of keywords, ranking itself becomes impossible.

PPC campaigns

Can you think of running a PPC campaign without using keywords? You can’t. PPC is all about clicks and impressions, and none is possible unless keywords are used. In fact, brands literally fight with each other to get the top rank against competitive keywords and they are ready to shell out millions for this.

Those in favor of the “keywords are dead” speculation may argue that keywords are no longer important for organic results, but not for paid results. Would they be right in their view? Before we decide that, let’s look at the conclusion that follows:

Why the search box?

Users type queries in a search box, which means the search box has no functionality in the absence of keywords. Right? It appears so if by keyword, we mean anything used in a search query.

But some proponents of the “keywords are dead” theory clarified that by keywords they meant campaign keywords, not random search queries. Marketers charge their clients for selecting competitive queries and then do their best to bring client’s sites in top search engine ranking.

These marketers are of the opinion that search queries will continue to exist. The search box will continue to be relevant. Only, picking selective key-phrases and marketing around them may stop.

Are they right in holding this view?

Change in search pattern

The search pattern is changing. The need to broaden the space for natural language queries as opposed to the campaign keywords is the cause behind this change. Back in 2014, Google announced that it is improving its mobile apps by integrating them with a cutting edge version of conversational search.

In case you don’t know what conversational search is, it allows users to interact with the search engine. The feature has the icon of a microphone and it was first unveiled in 2013 Google I/O. The smart search feature pulls more information and it tries to understand the intent of a searcher by basing itself on semantic model of searching.

This is by far one of the most interesting developments of 2015. But the question remains how conversational search affects keywords. Conversational search puts voice search to use.

Voice search is interactive

The voice search feature reveals how smart Google has become. If you ask Google a specific question like “What is Barack Obama’s age, Google reveals how old the US president Mr. Barack Obama is. Then if you ask “How tall is he?” Google shows his height.

What’s interesting here is Google can relate “he” to Obama in the second search query. This indicates the search interface has become quite advanced and there’s plenty of scope for future innovations. Keyword-driven search is old-fashioned compared to this new and smart way of searching.

In my opinion, desktop computers are the bastion of keyword-based search. But if the report from Smart Insights is to be given any thought, then handheld devices are on their way to replace desktop devices. When that happens, suggesting campaign keywords to prospective clients may stop once and for all.

Traffic and conversion

Another angle to look at the whole thing is considering the new age SEO practices, which prioritize getting traffic and conversion, instead of ranking. B2B clients have wised up to understand a first page ranking alone does absolutely no good to their sites.

What they need is traffic and a decent conversion rate. Ranking is not necessary for any of these, especially in the handheld domain because app marketing, and visual marketing using social media, something that’s leveraged on the mobile platform can offset the need for a high Google ranking. If ranking is unnecessary, so are keywords.

The future of keywords

Maybe “Keywords are dead” is hyperbole, but as we’ve seen here, there’s some truth in it. In the future, developments in the handheld and associated technological segments will lower the importance of keywords further, if not kill them off.

Image Courtesy: www.careerealism.com

Fact Packed Insights to Shape Your Marketing Strategy for 2016

Adam Frankel — 2016-03-17

Information aids in strategizing. The more information one receives, the better strategies he/she devises. 'Marketing insights' is information obtained by processing raw data. Such information is extremely useful to marketers.

The Advertising Age has released the 2016 Marketing Fact Pack, which delivers valuable insights to marketers around the world. Some of the findings in the pack are hard to believe while some others fall in line with predictions made earlier.

Internet as advertising medium

It’s no secret that the internet is a place for doing business. The fact pack shows the Internet as an advertising medium has grown over 18% in 2015. If you haven’t included in the list of the existing ad mediums, then you are missing out on potential leads as well as on resulting sales.

Offline medium are alive

The Fact Pack shows more than 52% marketers are using print and other offline platforms as ad mediums. Not everyone is online, especially in countries with emerging economies. Global brands use newspaper and billboard ads to reach out to those people. The wise thing for brands is to include online, as well as offline ad mediums in their campaigns.

Content marketing

2016 is believed to be the year of content marketing. But the fact pack shows neither B2B marketers nor B2C marketers are taking it seriously. In 2015, content marketing accounted for 1-9% of a company’s marketing budget.

This is difficult to believe in the face of content marketing’s emerging importance, but the Fact Pack shows this to be the case. Spending more on content marketing can secure a business a rock-solid footing because its competitors are undermining content.

B2B social channels

It’s hardly surprising that LinkedIn is the most prevalent social channels used by B2B marketers. LinkedIn is a den of B2B clients. What I found surprising is Slideshare is nowhere among the top B2B social channels.

Slideshare has been a medium where B2B marketers can upload their presentations and inform potential leads what they can offer. YouTube is there in the list, and that’s quite expected. The explainer videos hosted on YouTube can be used to raise brand awareness. Twitter is also in the list.

Increased B2B spending

The Fact Pack hints at an imminent increase of B2B spending. Among the B2B marketers, 48% said they will increase spending on digital advertising and marketing in 2016.

While B2Cs have readily embraced digital media, B2Bs are far behind. The interaction between two companies still takes place in old-fashioned ways. The visiting cards, the telephone calls and the closed-door meetings still get the job done. But hopefully, as the stat pack shows, the B2B’s approach will change and within next few year, we’ll see them prioritizing digital channels more than anything.

Google as ad seller

We all know that Google provides the biggest advertising platform. The Fact Pack points out that Google’s dominance in the ad selling space remains intact when the device changes from desktop to handheld. Google’s AdMob is the mobile equivalent to AdSense. In 2015, this ad interface has fetched Google more than $10 billion as revenue from advertisement.

This finding is undoubtedly important but before a brand jumps on to put ads on AdMob, it needs to remember that app market is a rough terrain. SEO pundit Rand Fishkin explained why the app marketing vertical is lopsided. According to him, top twenty-five to fifty apps get almost 80-90% of traffic. Unless an app is high quality, there’s no point marketing it.

Top B2B priorities

The Fact Pack came up with an interesting finding. The top three online marketing priorities for 2016 among the B2B companies are content marketing, social media marketing and branding. It seems B2B brands have wised up to understand the value of content and social media marketing.

What they are yet to understand is the blend between social media and content marketing is more effective than any of these two in isolation. A study done by BuzzSumo and Moz revealed 50% of all articles on the web get eight social shares or less. Writing quality articles is not enough, people across social channels need to share it as well, informing Google that it’s a quality article.

Apply them

The findings give you all the relevant insights you need. It’s up to you how best you can apply the insights. To get a handsome ROI, you need to create an executable plan involving content and social media marketing - a plan that appeals to its audiences and give them a captivating brand experience, so they become your customers.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com