Why Content Marketing Is The Key To Success

If you are active in the internet marketing field then you know that content is king. What exactly does this mean? Well, content is the most important aspect of a website or drawing in traffic to a website. Of course this is true. Below we will explain why it is important to have well written, properly researched content and how this can bring in traffic and or business to your website.

Poorly written or incomplete content does not do well and will turn people away from your website.

Same goes for duplicate content. Search engines do not want to show the same result on multiple website. For example, if you are searching for tutorial on how to change your 2002 Ford Focus breaks you do not want the same tutorial showing up on the first page of the search results. You want to find ten unique pieces of content offering different ways to change your vehicle’s brakes. This means duplicate content is a big no-no. You always want original content. If you rehash an article in your own words it must be 100% unique (copyscape is a free plagiarism tool) otherwise it has no chance or ranking.

So why do you want to have unique, well written content for your website, which is content marketing, or third party sites? Simple, the better the content the better the chance it has of getting shared socially, ranking at the top of Google, and becoming an evergreen piece of content. Jumping into an article, video, press release, infographic, etc. is not the best strategy. Take your time and plan out the piece of content you plan on producing to have an outline and overall goal. Identify your target audience and make the content for them. Find a want / need and show how your knowledge can help alleviate this pain in their life.

When properly done the content piece will have taken five or more hours to create, but the time and effort will drastically pay off. Rather than writing a generic article you are offering a piece of content that surpasses everything currently out on the web. This entices other third party sites to re-share your content as well as the social factor, where it can potentially go viral.

Once a content piece becomes viral and gets shared around a lot people will begin to recognize it and the person / company that authored the piece will get recognition. This means if a content piece gets shared by a few influences in your industry the entire industry may know about you and your knowledge of that specific piece of content. SEO and a well planned content marketing strategy go hand-in-hand and nothing is going to change that, well at least not for the next few years.

Apart from that, content marketing becomes easier if you are well aware of the audience you want to target. Customer identity management tool is savior here that offers for the customer identification by collecting the reliable customer profile data while authentication process. Understanding the audience can make the process of content marketing easier and more effective.

Top 6 Customer Service Trends to Boost Online Sales

Do you own an e-commerce store? Do you want to know the secrets to boost online sales? Do you want to know about online customer service secrets to increase the conversion rate? Then you are certainly at the right place. Here we will reveal to you top 5 under-the-wrap secrets to boost online sales of your e-store.

1. Help them through effective communication channel

The first advice to increase conversion rate of your e-commerce store is to provide a quick and efficient channel of communication to your online customers. The goal should be to make it easy for the customers to contact you whenever they have a question regarding your product or services. Apart from the usual contact points such as email and phone, you should try to incorporate a live chat service in your website.

Most customers will not purchase a product unless they get complete information about the product. Therefore, it is important to let your customers contact you immediately at the time of need, and to be available when they do.

2. Make online shopping effortless

One of the major reasons for shopping cart abandonment includes filling out unnecessary documents and forms before check out. This makes shopping difficult for the customers. The website should be designed in such a way that makes it easy for the customers to purchase a product or service.

3. Start managing identities of your customers

 Customer identity management is another key trend that will help businesses to drive more sales, more engagement and more profit. Enabling of an efficient customer identity management solution

will help businesses not only to simplify authentication process, but also to gain reliable customer insights, single customer view and the better understanding of their customer base using tools like social login, single sign-on, etc.  

4. Try to emulate department and super stores

In designing an e-commerce website, you should take superstores such as Wal-Mart and Target as your role model. You will notice that on their websites, all the products are grouped together according to different categories.

Customers have been shopping in brick and mortar stores for decades. They expect that the online store should also offer similar level of ease and convenience in making a purchase. Therefore, if you want to boost your online sales, you should design the website in the same way. Products should be appropriately categorized according to their types. You should upload high quality images of the products. Finally, checking out should be simple requiring minimum clicks to make the purchase.

5. Utilize social media to talk with your customers

Social media has become an effective avenue to communicate with customers. Through social media, you can resolve problems customers may have through interactive conversations. Social media channels such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter cater to billions of people all over the world. These social media sites can serve as an effective tool to market your products and services. Not only that, but the social media sites can be used as a platform to maintain relationships with existing customers in order to make them loyal to your business.

6. Make your policies clear and comprehensive

Finally, you should make your policies clear and understandable for the customer. Important policies, especially those relating to shipping, tax, and returns, should be listed on every page. The elaborate policies should be written in a separate page in FAQ format. The shopping policy should be written in a simple language that a person could easily understand without much effort. This will save you lots of trouble later when customers demand additional service from you that is not included in your policy.

Major Social Media highlights for December

The world of social media is constantly evolving and it is getting harder day by day to keep track of all the regular updates and changes made by several social media platforms. To make it easy, here are top major social media highlights for December month.

1. Welcome to latest twitter app “Answers” :

The recently launched “Answers” app by Twitter allows users to track the conversion performance and offers precious insights. To get benefit of this app’s real time analytics, marketers will have to integrate Fabric in their apps. One can get conversion analytics for both paid as well as unpaid traffic with this app.

To know more about this app, click here.

2. Improved Facebook Searchability :

The latest released Facebook update allows users to search for posts, pictures, places, pages, people, companies, groups, events  and all other things using keywords. The graph search is no longer restricted to just people and companies. This Facebook updates implies the importance of keywords for marketers.

To know more about this update, read here.

3. New Youtube tool allow you to create GIF :

Thanks to the Youtube’s new GIF creation tool, users now can create GIF on youtube for some selected videos and channels. Though the tool comes with limited features now such as the restriction of time duration of 6 seconds, several updates and expansion to the tool can be expected very soon.

Get more details here.

4. Twitter and FourSquare coming together :

As per the rumours, two popular social media platforms, Twitter and FourSquare are planning to work together in the upcoming year. The intention behind this is to add location layer in tweets in order to enhance several location features.

Know more about this story here.

5. Youtube beats Facebook in the race of the biggest Social media network :

As per the recent research, Youtube has beaten Facebook in the race of the most visited social media network which is a good news for those who believe Youtube to be the true social media network. Thus Youtube has become the king for the most visited social media networks.

Know more about the facts here.

These are the few social media highlights mentioned here. To know more such highlights, read the complete blog here. 10 must-read social media stories for December

How registration forms are killing your website traffic?

Sign-up is an important process for a website. With sign-up businesses get connected with their audience, obtain useful information and make sure that users will keep coming back. One of the most traditional as well as widely used sign-up process is by asking users to fill and submit a lengthy time consuming registration form. 

But as per the research, 75% users leave the website on being asked to fill lengthy sign-up form which is obviously not a good sign.

Problems with User Registration Forms:

Typical registration forms are one of the most irritating experiences faced by online users almost every day. Here are some of the very common issues with traditional sign-up forms :

1. Endless fields of Sign-up forms :

A typical lengthy registration form which is asking users to fill up too many fields before letting them access your site is quite a turn off. Users want everything quick and easy and this traditional process is very time consuming thereby reducing signups.

2. CAPTCHA : 

CAPTCHA is another major issue which irritates online consumers. Every time they sign up to the website they need to decipher one CAPTCHA. Sometimes they are able to do it while sometimes they are trapped in it. Obviously, it is another turn off for your audience.

3. Validation email : Validation is one of the regular headaches for online users because sometimes visitors don’t get a validation mail, sometimes it is hidden in spam folder and above all, sometimes the link provided is not even valid. Quite a bad experience, isn’t it?

4. Troublesome Security Questions : Setting up several security questions is another complicated tasks. Security questions are being set so that even after forgetting their credentials, users can access the site. But many a times, users even forget the security questions too. So what’s the solution?

5. Password Fatigue : 

Last but definitely not the least, keeping track of different different usernames and passwords for all the different websites is not at all efficient. Many a times users forget their credentials just after the sign up. “Forgot password” process is another time consuming one. Study says 90% of users leave a website because they don’t remember their credentials.

How registration forms are hurting your business?

1. Low Conversion rates : 54 out of 100 users leave the site on being asked to fill time consuming sign-up form thereby increasing bounce rates and decreasing conversion rates.

2. Less Efficient decisions due to poor data : As per the survey 88% of users don’t fill the correct information in sign-up forms. What good it does if it is not accurate. Unreliable user data leads to poor business decisions.

3. Less Engaged Users : The ultimate goal of every business is to get engaged with the audience and keep them coming back but registration forms work as a big hurdle here. Even if users sign-up to your site, next time if they don’t remember their credentials they will go to your competitors thereby reducing traffic.

How to get rid of this problem?

Social Login is a great alternative of traditional sign-up process. With social login, you can allow your audience to sign-in using their already existing social media credentials thereby simplifying the complicated sign-up process and improving sign-up rates. By adding social login to websites, apps, etc businesses can get higher conversion rates along with useful user profile data. As per the survey 75% of social media fans prefer social login over traditional sign-up process. Social login is a great contributor in high conversion rates. Know more about social login feature here

To know more about how registration forms are killing your website traffic, read the detailed article here : Are typical registration processes causing you to lose users?

Maximize your business using Social Analytics

Monitoring the marketing campaigns and efforts is very important to achieve success in business. Social Analytics takes the user analytics to a whole new level. It tracks and analyzes user profile data gathered from several social media platforms, traffic sources, etc. 

When users login to a website using their social credentials, you can gain access to the precious user profile data. Social Analytics tracks online activities of users on several social media platforms and after in-depth analysis provides useful insights.

Social Analytics by LoginRadius :

One of the most popular Social Analytics feature provider is LoginRadius. LoginRadius offers businesses the most advance analytics dashboards. The prime components of the tracking capabilities of Social Analytics by LoginRadius consists of users social media network, demographics and social reach. With the help of several graphs and charts, this data is provided to businesses.

How is it beneficial for your business?

Importance of data lies on just one fact “How efficiently it is utilized by businesses and how it boosts sales and profit?” With the help of Social Analytics, you are offered useful insights which help you to understand user behavior. It provides precious information about the user base of your business and their activities on several social media platforms. If used efficiently, social analytics can be a strong base of all your marketing decisions and help you to make more user oriented business strategies.

Conclusion :

Analytics holds great importance in achieving the intended conversion rates for your business. Social Analytics is no exception which deeply analyzes the social aspect of user base and is the one of the key factors to a successful business.

To know more about how social analytics help your business, read the complete article here : http://blog.loginradius.com/2014/04/how-to-maximize-the-power-of-social-analytics/

Top Digital Marketing trends to survive in 2015

The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving. In order to help marketers do advance preparation, here is the list of top digital marketing trends which will help your business to survive in 2015.

1. Social Signals and content marketing will rule the SEO world :

With the drastic evolution Social Media has seen in the past few years, it has become the next big thing for marketers. Google has taken several social signals like Facebook posts, +1s, tweets, etc into consideration as ranking factors. With all this going on, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that in the upcoming years SEO and Social media will work in a parallel way.

2. Too pushy Facebook pages will be degraded :

As per the recent Facebook algorithm update, Facebook is going to change the way businesses stories are seen in the news feed. It is going to reduce the chances of overly promotional pages being seen in the news feed. This algorithm update will enforce businesses to reconsider their Facebook marketing strategies and will provide users better experience along with creative content.

3. Integration of Social media in websites :

Adding social media to websites will help businesses with improved conversion rates, high social reach and increased traffic. Features like social login and social sharing if added to your website, benefit you with improved user engagement thereby driving more traffic. Considering the importance of Social media, it will become very essential to make your website social in the upcoming year. Many big organizations like Forbes, Mercedes and Nike have already started enjoying the success with these features.

4. Importance of mobile friendly websites will see new heights :

As per a recent report published by Marketing Land, “Social Sharing on Mobile devices increased by 30% in the second quarter of 2014 alone.” It clearly narrates the importance of a mobile friendly website. If your website is not optimized for mobile, then it’s high time to put some serious efforts in this direction. Mobile is the future and 2015 will make marketers put more efforts to make their website more mobile friendly.

These are the few digital marketing predictions listed here for the upcoming year. To know more digital marketing predictions, read the complete article here : 10 Digital marketing predictions for 2015

Drive Referral Traffic Using Social Sharing

Referral traffic hold great importance to any business. Getting desired referral traffic is the ultimate goal of an effective marketing campaign. The significance of referral traffic lies in the fact that the visitors coming through referral traffic are already interested in your business. Specially traffic coming from social sharing visit your website on a purpose. All these factors speak the importance of referral traffic for your business.

How adding Social Sharing buttons drive Referral Traffic :

Slowly and steadily social sharing buttons have turned out to be a great way of driving referral traffic for a website. Social Sharing buttons can be found everywhere from home pages to the content feeds to the blog posts. From small start-ups to large well set multi-national organization, everyone is taking social sharing into consideration in order to boost referral traffic to their website. Reason being social sharing makes it very easy to for users to share  your web content and product information within their social network thus improving social reach.

Social Sharing buttons can be added to several places including :

1. On Content like blog posts, e-books, images and videos.
2. On Landing pages.
3. In email campaigns.
4. In admin section for the registered users for the website.

It is very wise choice to include social sharing in the marketing strategies for landing pages, Infographics, Press Release, Emaill Signature, Guest Blogging, etc.

Location of the Social Sharing buttons matter :

To enhance user experience, sharing process must be easy and quick. These buttons should be added to the place which is easy to locate. Some wise suggestions about the placement of social sharing factors are as below :

1. The social sharing buttons can be added below the content such as blogs posts, landing page, etc.
2. Adding social sharing buttons to the left side of the content is also a wise choice which ensures that that the sharing functionality is available everywhere.
3. One can also add social sharing buttons near the Title post, in the top right side of the page.
4. Last one is the most popular option now a days which allows you to add social sharing widgets in the content section.

How to maximize the Social Sharing benefits :

Adding social sharing buttons to your website delivers value but without proper optimization, all goes in vain. So here are some points that must be kept in mind while using Social Sharing features in order to get the best out of it :

1. Display social sharing buttons to the noticeable places.
2. Let users understand the difference between follow and share.
3. Ask your users to share your content by mentioning “Share with friends” or “Like it?? Share with friends”
4. Last but not the least, add only those social media networks which are most preferred by your target audience.
   

Find out about the Social Media driving the most referral traffic :

The key to success using Social Sharing buttons is to identify the social networks which are driving the maximum traffic to your business and then focus on them. By focusing your efforts on these social networks will result in great referral traffic.

Some of the most popular social media networks which contribute in driving referral traffic are Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. Focusing on these networks will help in driving referral traffic to the website thereby allowing businesses to meet their return on investment.

Conclusion :

Social sharing plays an important role in driving referral traffic to a website. It converts your users into brand ambassadors and when used efficiently, turns out to be one of the best ways of boosting referral traffic.

To know more about it, read the complete article here : How to Drive Referral Traffic with Social Sharing