Search engine optimization is a great addition to any business’ digital marketing presence when done correctly. Taking the time to set it up properly can provide tons of high quality traffic to businesses with a relatively small financial outlay. While the time investment can be extensive, it can lead to massive ROI for any business looking to establish themselves as a force in their vertical online. This is particularly true for websites that have a lot of unique pages that feature different types of products.

In that spirit of websites that have lots of unique pages that feature different types of products or services, I’m proud to bring you our 1 Hour SEO Audit Challenge of this month, featuring high-performance audio product retailer, RBH Sound. Founded in 1976, RBH Sound is a manufacturer of high performance audio products for residential and commercial applications. The company offers products that include in-wall and in-ceiling speakers, on-wall speakers, freestanding speakers, and any other kind of audio solution that an individual or business would ever need.

We’ve made a slight change to how we calculate our speed grades – adding website optimization tool Dareboost to the mix to provide clearer insights on more precise steps businesses can take to improve their website from a speed standpoint. Otherwise, just like we’ve done for every “1 Hour SEO Audit Challenge”, we’ve based the grades given on the following categories:

• Content
• Schema
• Backlinks
• Site Speed
• Meta Tag Issues
• Title Tag Issues

Tools Used

• Ragepank
• Screaming Frog
• Mozbar
• Open Site Explorer
• Copyscape
• Microsoft IIS
• SEMRush
• GTMetrix
• Dareboost

Content

When it comes to the ideal website for search engine optimization purposes, content is one of the first and most important elements to look at. Not only does creating top-quality content help keep users on your website longer and help facilitate a higher conversion rate, it also allows your website to rank for relevant keywords if they are added to header text, body text, and a myriad of other places on a page of a website. With the recent uptick over the last few years when it comes to focusing on content marketing, it is more important than ever that businesses not only feature good written, image, and video content on their website, but that it is truly top-notch. Simply having content on a website is not enough – in order for it to make any sort of meaningful difference to your SEO it needs to be something that users love and naturally link to on their own websites or blogs.

From a technical standpoint RBH Sound actually does a seemingly okay job with their content marketing initiatives. Only .88% of the pages we crawled were considered “low content pages”, which is to say they had 300 words or less on them. That being said, the only section we found that could be considered a content section on their website was an events section that really only showed some pictures of their booths at the events they had attended. There was no blog, and no video section. In order for their content marketing efforts to get to the next level, these sections need to be added to the website – in the process they should be able to create a lot of great content that ranks for longtail keywords to generate traffic by talking about their products, how they work, and what people can do with them. There is so much cool stuff in the audio space that could be discussed, but in order for that conversation to begin the site needs the proper sections added.

Grade: D-

Schema

If there’s one section of these audits that has become increasingly depressing as we’ve looked at more and more websites it’s schema markup. As we’ve discussed in previous audits, as of April 2014, a measly 0.3% of websites featured any sort of schema markup on them – and the consistency with which websites we’ve audited are missing schema certainly supports those figures. This is particularly disturbing because schema can add so much to a website’s SEO – whether it’s getting images in the search engine results or providing business information like logos and location to search engines, having the correct schema can significantly increase the amounts of organic traffic a website receives when done correctly.

RBH Sound is another online presence that is right in line with 99.7% of the websites across the internet that have no schema at all. I’ve let this slide and pointed out other elements in the branded search that companies have done correctly in the past, but RBH really only has Sitelinks set up. A Google My Business page would be a nice addition, as would open graph tags for Facebook and Twitter – which are also missing from the site altogether. There is a lot of room for improvement here, and schema is a relatively straightforward add, so it should be done in the near future for as many variables as possible.

Grade: F

Backlinks

I’ve discussed at length the value of a properly constructed backlink profile – and when it comes to important aspects that will add to overall SEO success, having one that is built correctly is key. Having many equity-passing links and no-follow links that come from a variety of different relevant sources is one of the best ways to build a website’s domain authority while helping you to rank for new keywords on a page by page basis in the process. Having a number of different anchor texts is also key – something our previous audit, Breather, did quite well.

RBH Sound’s backlink profile has a platform from which to build off of – but needs a lot of work to get to the next level. With a domain authority of 42, and only 10 root domains providing 339 links to their website, there is a lot that can be done to take the site’s backlink profile to the next level. The most troubling thing is that there are only 10 root domains linking to the site – this means that if any of these websites were to be removed or suddenly decide to remove pages linking to RBH that roughly 10% of the site’s backlink profile would disappear overnight. RBH needs to focus on getting new links from new authoritative root domains as soon as possible to remedy this issue.

RBH Sound has a lot of branded anchor text in their inbound links at the moment. While there are a few terms scattered in there like “ep2 noise isolating earphones” which is great to see – there needs to be more product specific anchor text if the company wants to rank for more of their product offerings. There is also a lot of links that have no anchor text at all – this needs to be fixed immediately if possible as it is a lost opportunity to have descriptive anchor text.

Grade: B-

Site Speed

While some elements of SEO are extremely technical and don’t seem to directly offer much value to the average user as they scroll through a page, site speed is certainly an exception to this general rule. Particularly with recent Google algorithm updates to try and give more value to mobile-friendly sites, site speed is a very helpful factor to do correctly for both SEO and for users. While it might not play a huge role in overall SEO ranking right now, it’s increasingly important for business to take it seriously in order to get fast load times to keep users and search engine rankings happy.

RBH Sound Does a very good job with site speed – scoring an A rank PageSpeed Score and a B YSlow score. Their homepage has an average page load time of only 2 seconds, making their site one of the best ranked and fastest sites we’ve done so far in this series. While the homepage is a bit busy and dated in how it is presented, the speed is certainly helped by the fact that there aren’t any extremely fancy elements that need to load and imagery is kept to a relative minimum.

That being said, Dareboost found a couple of issues with the website that need to be addressed in order to increase site speed further. The first is that one of the few images that is actually being used by the homepage is a massive 1.24 MBs. This image needs to be optimized or compressed in some fashion so that users don’t have to wait for the image to load. The second problem that Dareboost identified is that the site is using some form of flash. We haven’t really covered this issue yet in our audits but this is a huge issue in terms of compatability (iPhones and iPads don’t support flash, for example), and should be transitioned over to HTML5 as soon as possible.

Grade: A-

Meta Tag Issues

A lot of businesses that are wary of all SEO practices purposefully ignore some of the elements that we look at on this audit. I totally understand the logic – you want to make sure the content you have is helpful for users first, and focusing on SEO elements can often lead to spammy content that is written for search engine crawlbots instead of for users. While I don’t agree with this logic, there is one element that this thought process can’t really rationally be applied to – meta descriptions.

Optimizing meta descriptions is an important step for both SEO-centric and user-centric thinkers, as it makes sure that users understand what the page is about so that proper expectations are set, while also increasing click through rate on meta descriptions that are optimized with relevant keywords. There is really no excuse for having meta descriptions that lack a call to action and/or some description about the page – you’ll get more traffic when it’s done correctly and it isn’t an element that you can keyword stuff or otherwise game to directly influence ranking (the clickthrough bonuses a good meta description provide is where ranking increases come from – so it’s an indirect relationship between meta description and rank increase).

RBH Sound falls really, really flat when it comes to meta descriptions. Out of the 32306 pages we crawled, only 92 had any meta description at all, and most were shorter than the recommended length of 150-160 characters. While the homepage had a meta description, there were some very important landing pages on the site that were missing them – including reviews, awards, inwall product pages, signature series product pages, and visage series product pages. These are pages that could potentially be showing up in a user’s search and should have meta descriptions that make people interested on clicking on the result. This should be rectified immediately, as adding a meta description for important pages should increase click-through rate and overall traffic (as well as search rankings as a result).

Grade: F

Title Tag Issues

There have been lots of Google algorithm changes over the last few years, but the fact of the matter is that on an individual page level the title tag continues to be one of the most important factors for good SEO and SERP rankings. Making sure to include a title tag that is optimized for relevant keywords at a range of 55-60 characters can often be the difference between a website generating very little organic traffic or attracting tons of qualified organic traffic to help a business generate lots of conversions online.

RBH Sounds does a significantly better job with their titles tags than they do with their meta descriptions. Our of the 32306 pages we crawled, 98.74% of pages had a page title of some sort. Only a little more than 1% of pages had character counts that had issues with the amount of characters included. The only real problem was the amount of user manual pages they have on the site – all of which feature the title tag “RBH Product Support Instruction/User Manuals”. These pages should either be gated, marked as nofollow, or have their title tags changed to reflect specific user manuals so that they rank appropriately in search engine results. This problem aside though, RBH Sound does a pretty decent job.

Grade: B+

General Suggestions

RBH Sound is one of the largest (if not the largest) site we’ve done on this series. They have tons and tons of pages, and so a lot of the SEO elements we look at in this series are going to be very difficult to implement. That being said, schema is a relatively straightforward sitewide addition that should be an easy add to the entire site as long as there is a CMS that the addition can be made on.

That being said, some of these edits are going to take a lot of time. Particularly with meta descriptions, it would definitely make a lot of sense to try and identify and address issues on key pages first and then go from there. Particularly on important product pages and other pages that are right off the main navigation, time needs to be spent to make sure that each page has a correct title tag, meta descriptions, and other on page elements like header 1 and header 2 tags.

You’ve just launched a new page on your website – great! Whether a revamped “About Us” page, a new services page, or even a fresh blog post, your next step should be focused around building your brand credibility and influence, ultimately resulting in high-quality, relevant links back to the new pages. In order to positively affect search engine visibility and increase the traffic to that page, you need to obtain links from authoritative websites. Rather than waiting to amass natural links or press mentions, employing a strategic digital public relations plan can help your new page achieve both positive search results and increased traffic flow.

While digital public relations outreach is traditionally known to garner links back to a website’s home page, there are a number of initiatives you can use to maximize visibility of these deeper pages.

1. Tailor Your Media Pitches with Relevant Keywords

While this may seem like a given, any media pitches you create should be as unique and well thought-out as each page and piece of content on your site. Be sure to have a solid understanding of the goal and purpose of the page before researching blogs, news outlets, and social influencers for your target audience. This audience may be vastly different than the audience of your website as a whole – don’t be afraid to capitalize on niche markets to maximize potential media exposure.

When it comes to crafting the pitch itself, utilize keywords found on the page you are trying to increase traffic to. Although these keywords are not guaranteed to appear in the final article or placement, including these buzzwords may influence your media contact’s writing focus to better reflect terms that are relevant to your page.

2. Position New Pages as Resources

Ideally, any specific pages you pitch out should include content that is both enriching and interesting. A new page featuring content that contributes to a greater dialogue is more likely to receive media traction than one that doesn’t, so focus your efforts on publicizing new pages that are rich in information and will establish your site and brand as a credible source.
In addition to conducting outreach with unique pitches, look for stories and blog posts on the page’s topic that already exist online. Identifying articles already written on the topic presents opportunities for your page to then be included in that story as a resource for additional information.

3. Leverage Social Media Influencers

A successful public relations campaign should include some form of a strategic social media component. When working on media research prior to pitching, a solid list of social influencers in the space your specific page or business covers should also be created. Building a relationship with important industry-relevant social tastemakers is key to increasing recognition, and while cultivating these relationships can be very time intensive, these influencers have the potential of becoming an ambassador for your site and brand.
Tapping social influencers with high follower counts not only increases visibility of your site and potentially increases traffic flow to the intended page. Use a tool such as Followerwonk to identify relevant influencers, and determine the social outreach plan for this initiative. Followerwonk allows you to search for keywords through Twitter bios, enabling you to discover which contacts are going to be most interested in what you’re trying to share with them.

4. Guest Posts

Whatever industry your business is part of, there’s a good chance you or your employees are experts within that field. Leverage your expertise to present yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and collaborate with various media outlets to contribute articles on topics that you can speak to. If you can offer readers value and have unique insights on a topic within your industry, reporters or editors will be eager to have you work with them. This presents many opportunities for you to promote your new page if you shape your article around content that is on that particular page.

In order to provide value to readers, you can’t arbitrarily insert a link to your new page if it isn’t relevant, and more likely than not, editors won’t allow that. Instead, take time to craft an outline of your article that is related to both your expertise, as well as your new page. With every guest post you contribute, you’ll be able to include a link, and encourage users to visit.

5. Get Creative

Is there anything about your page that makes it stand out? Maybe you have a new design feature that you want to bring attention to? Take the opportunity to pitch to design-specific resources. Don’t be afraid to think creatively and see if you can tap into a niche market rather than the usual broader ones. Branching out can give you a chance to grain traction from unexpected places.

Also, take the time to seek out organizations with a more targeted audience. Having links from reputable blogs and media outlets are wonderful, but sometimes their readers may not be seeking the information, products, and services that your site provides. Organizations that cater to a smaller industry demographic can lead to more relevant traffic, and hopefully, more conversions. The internet is full of websites that provide specific resources to users seeking references on specific subject matter. So don’t undervalue the potential benefit from taking the extra time to pitch to these outlets as well.

Using Digital PR to Increase Web Traffic To A New Page

When it comes to launching a new page on an existing website, you want to approach it with the same level of enthusiasm that you would with any other project. Analyze techniques that have worked for you in the past, and tap into some new ventures as well. Take advantage of the opportunity to utilize some unconventional ideas to draw in traffic! By brainstorming and putting in the effort to effectively draw attention to the new page, you will undoubtedly see noticable results.

There’s no question that producing a well strategized and maintained content stream is crucial for the success of any digital business. The benefits are numerous and include everything from an increase in visitor engagement onsite, improved search engine rankings through SEO, and if your content marketing initiatives are done correctly, the establishment of a “sticky” factor that keeps people coming back to your site.

The copywriting portion of content marketing is the fun part, but in order to truly get the most out the content you produce it’s vital that you begin thinking about how effective your content is analytically. A truly effective content marketer combines both the creative and analytical aspects of proper content marketing to produce engaging, hard-hitting copy that is backed by significant amounts of quantitative research to inform what is being discussed. The following are some of the most important elements of proper data driven content marketing to keep in mind to help give your content marketing program a substantial edge over your competition.

Before Posting:

Surf a Little
The key to ensuring that what you’re writing is engaging is making sure that you’re staying on top of trends in your industry, and being aware of what your audience finds valuable. A fairly simple way to do this is to monitor social media conversations on Twitter and Facebook to stay abreast of news and developments. Regularly check industry news outlets and the social profiles of industry influencers to see what “hot topics” are circulating amongst your audience. The content you create should offer some fresh perspective or an appropriate response/reaction to the particular topic.

Leverage Google Trends as a tool for your research efforts to see what terms and trends are significant in searches and just how many people are expressing interest in these terms. The tool also allows you to see a forecast for any given term and topic allowing you to gauge the projected amount of interest users will have in this subject as time progresses. Build this data into your planning phase so that you can identify which topics and subjects users are seeking to learn the most about, and ultimately allow it to help you define what your content should be related to and how effective it will be in providing value to readers.
The content you create should always be substantiated by correlating data so that you know your efforts aren’t going to be useless. To highlight the benefits of utilizing Google Trends, consider the idea of a relatively new subject within your space and perhaps there isn’t a lot of existing content on it. Take a look at Google Trends to see if this subject may gain traction within the next few months, allowing you and your organization to get an edge over competition, and be one of the first to provide insights on the topic of interest.

Keyword Research
Once you have a relevant topic, you’ll want to do your site a favor by ensuring that the final product benefits your search engine rankings and is easily accessible to users. To do this, create content that contains keywords appropriate to the article topic as well as your business’ products or service offerings. A great tool for this is Google Keyword Planner.
The goal here is to find keywords that have a high monthly search volume mixed with low competition, which greatly improves the chances of your content appearing prominently on the search results page when a user searches for the particular set of terms or keywords that you’ve identified. These keywords cannot simply be plugged into your content in any way possible, but instead should be naturally occurring in a way that provides an excellent and relevant user experience while simultaneously giving you as much SEO value as possible.

After Posting

Hopefully you’re using a tool like Google Analytics on your website to help you monitor your site’s performance. If so, allow a week or so to pass after posting your content to allow data about how users are interacting with your content to aggregate. Once you do, dig through the following metrics to analyze the performance of your content and it’s effectiveness in reaching the goal of the content. Identify what types of content is repeatedly producing the best results, and what content could use some improvements, is one of the best ways you can enhance your SEO by using data to drive your content marketing initiatives.

Key Metrics:

• Page Views:While it shouldn’t be the only metric that informs whether or not your content marketing initiatives are successful, page views are a solid metric that can be extremely helpful when it comes to comparing different pieces of content. It will inform you about what your audience is interested in and also help you identify what pieces of content are the most important on your site for generating traffic.
• Page Bounce Rate:You’ll want this as low as possible, as it indicates the content was engaging enough to send people elsewhere through the site. Remember that if you’re posting content on a blog a bounce rate at or just slightly below 90% is perfectly normal.
• Time on Page:These metrics are tied to bounce rate, and reiterates a visitor’s engagement with the content. The longer the average time is that users are interacting with your content the more likely they are to be finding that content helpful.
• Session Duration/Page Depth:Looking at these two metrics for the overall site will give you a good idea of how effective the content you’re producing is to the overall user experience, and how extensively users are engaging with your website as a whole as a result.
• Social Engagement:If you share your content on social media, monitor the traffic that comes through that source and how it behaves by utilizing UTM parameters that are linked to your analytics account. Keep track of how people are responding to your content by paying attention to audience follower growth and the amount of likes, shares, comments, and retweets on each of your pieces of content.

Data Driven Content Marketing Informs Success

With data backing what you produce, you can work on continual topic optimization and mold your content program into a tool that cannot only increase your business’ success in terms of online traffic and sales, but also position you and your team as thought leaders in your respective industries. By utilizing tools and programs that allow you to optimize your content, and then examining what’s working and what’s not, you can proactively develop a content program that is tailored to most closely fulfill the needs of your audience, and significantly improve rate that your business grows.

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Even though inbound marketing is not a relatively new concept, it is certainly being executed in a number of new ways. People often associate content marketing with blog posts and social outreach. However, restricting content to those parameters can lead to many overlooked opportunities. You want to make sure that your business doesn’t miss out on a chance to generate creative and engaging content throughout alternative sections of your website.

It is important to consider the marketing potential that lies within the content of your website’s “About Us” page. As one of the most visited locations on any given company’s site, the “About Us” page plays a large role in the first impression that you leave on a potential customer. This is where they come to learn more about your company and the people behind the brand. A customer looks here before they start to take your business (or the idea of collaborating with it) seriously.

Clearly “About Us” pages are important! That’s why, as we’ve mentioned in previous content marketing articles, you need to make sure the information on this page tells a compelling story.

But how do you that?

To make it easier, we’ve narrowed down 5 creative elements you must have for designing an inspiring “About Us” page:

• Company Vision & Philosophy

• Company Timeline

• Team Member Profiles

• Business Concept Visuals

• Multimedia Content

Now that we know what our page needs, how do we go about implementing these new ideas? Let’s take a look at some examples and see how different businesses are leading visitors to learn more about who they are and what they do.

1. Your Company’s Vision & Philosophy

You’re not like everyone else — so tell the world what makes you unique! Why should people choose you over your competitors?

Stand out with an “About Us” page that shows off who your company is and strongly conveys your brand’s voice. What brought your company together? What do you see as its future? Offer your visitors information that will make them interested in your business and the work that you do.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that an “About Us” page has to be very long. For example, Whoa Nelly gets the point across with a short and sweet presentation that communicates how they came to be, and what they offer.

By keeping their content concise and targeted, Whoa Nelly is able to captivate their audiences through the stunning visuals and engaging copy provided throughout their page.

Here are some other great Vision & Philosophy page examples:

• Harry’s
• Marmoset Music
• Frank & Oak

2. A Timeline of Your Company’s History

Over the last decade, Facebook has made the use of timelines a popular way to present information about yourself. So why not apply the same concept to your “About Us” page? Take visitors on a trip through your company’s history. You can show them where you started, how far you have come, and everything your business has accomplished along the way.

You can present visitors with relevant milestones and details about the business in a visually engaging way for your viewers to take in. Timelines allow you to display a large amount of information and detail in a format other than just text. The variety is something that potential customers will appreciate.

Take a look at Moz’s beautifully designed “About Us” page – a vertical timeline that pairs key moments, like the site’s launch in 2003, with fun company images and accomplishments.

Other great Timeline “About Us” page examples:

• Balzac & Brothers
• Spyder
• UGALLERY

3. Team Member Profiles

The “About Us” or “Our Story” page should be about the passion driving your vision and the people that make it happen. Contrary to popular belief, this page’s content doesn’t have to sound formal in order to gain credibility. Most people find it easier to connect with real human beings, so let the personality of your employees and the environment of your workplace shine through!

Nerdery does a great job of showcasing the people behind the company and making them seem approachable to audiences, giving a more human-like quality to the brand.

Note: Including a company dog automatically DOUBLES your website’s conversion rates (just kidding!).

You can even include Social Media profiles for each team member in order to make your business look approachable and engaging. If you are a company in the B2B sector, you can include LinkedIn badges with links to the individual profile of every member in the leadership team to help each member of your team have added credibility.

Other great Team Member Profiles page examples:

• Aldeiaco
• Giphy
• The Secret Handshake

4. An Infographic Visual to Present Your Business Concept

Sometimes well-designed graphics can help visitors understand your business concept better than a wordy explanation. After all, if people can’t figure out what you do, how will they know if they need your product or service?

So you can skip the industry jargon and use infographic visuals, like Ogilvy One Worldwide does on its Big Data page. This can be a great way to paint a clearer picture so that audiences can understand exactly what you do.

Other great Infographic -like “About Us” page examples:

• Rent the Runway
• Ipolecat
• Bellroy

5. Multimedia Content

Do you have a cool story about how your business was created? The classic saying “Show, Don’t Tell” can be beneficial and applicable to your website design. Why not make a video that tells your story and allow it to speak for itself?

Today’s web design technology allows for easy integration of video & multimedia elements to create a compelling visual story. By providing a mental picture to your visitors, it increases the chances of people seeing it, connecting with it, and sharing it.

Take a cue from Bench, an accounting service provider who needed to convey the benefits of their online product while stressing their personal experience. By using visuals and multimedia, Bench is able to create an effective “About Us” page that shows who they are and what they do instead of simply stating it to audiences through dull copy.

Other great multimedia content “About Us” page examples:

• GetFlyWheel
• Marmoset Music
• Grove Labs

There are many different and inspiring approaches that can be taken when designing your website’s “About Us” page. From very formal, to the fun and creative, it’s important to include content & design elements that fit the personality of your company.

For even more inspiring “About Us” pages I highly recommend that you check out this amazing website.

Online community management is not easy. With a laundry list of client feeds to monitor on a daily basis, having the right tools for the job is essential to prevent what we like to call, “social media meltdowns.”

social media meltdown

Pronounced: /kayy-(oss)/

noun/verb

1. a state of being in whence any marketing official can find their community manager sobbing uncontrollably in the fetal position on the conference room floor.

Fortunately, there are a plethora of resources to help. If you’re a community manager or actively involved in social media marketing, check out any of the following resources that are sure to help make your job a little bit easier:

Google Drive
Useful for any business? Of course, but when your job requires you to be plugged in to the social conversation 24/7, Google Drive is the perfect resource to keep all of your client documents, agreements, and schedules in one place, accessible from any device at any time. From spreadsheets and documents, to presentations, Google Drive allows you to compile everything in one organized location. You also have the option to let multiple people have access to editing these pages, allowing for easier collaboration and communication amongst team members. Need we say more?

Sprout Social

Without question, Sprout Social is one of our favorite monitoring and reporting tools. Not only is the platform easy to maneuver, (a plus for both community managers and clients alike) but its design is clean and pleasing to the eye. It gives you the opportunity to manage your social messages easily through a number of publishing and targeting options. You can schedule content across multiple platforms and analyze engagement through detailed reports, all while maintaining positive relationships with your clients through Sprout’s organized customer profiling system. Overall, it is an excellent one-stop resource for engagement, publishing, and analytics.

Hootsuite

While Sprout Social wins the award for well-designed user interface, we couldn’t live without Hootsuite. It is my platform of choice for scheduling multiple feeds. Hootsuite provides analytics for a detailed look at how well your social media efforts are performing, as well as an engagement breakdown of your network’s activity. It compiles all of your profiles onto one dashboard for a concise layout. However, an organized mind helps with this tool, as the lists and tabs can get quite extensive and jumbled if not cared for properly. Allowing multiple team members to collaborate can help alleviate this and balance the workload for you or your client.

Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics to measure the online traffic for our clients’ websites is absolutely essential to understanding how qualified the traffic we are driving from social is, and dedicating resources according to the levels of ROI each social outlet provides. These in-depth metrics provide valuable information that can help you make the most of your online efforts. You can have a solidified view of the journey your viewers take while on your website, and use the metrics provided to make changes to your marketing techniques as necessary. This tool is one of the most helpful for gathering data to make further improvements in all of your various advertising campaigns.

Flipboard
This app should definitely make it to the home screen of any community manager’s phone or tablet. It’s an excellent tool for collecting the news relevant to not only clients, but also what’s developing in the social realm of their industry. Flipboard curates your chosen news into customized magazines on any topic imaginable, making it the perfect all-in-one-place tool. Pick and choose the stories that you want to follow, and get a tailored look into the industries that matter the most to you. Through Flipboard’s curation and sharing capabilities, it serves as a great resource that can keep you informed and involved in the developments going on in your field.

Tweetdeck

Without Tweetdeck, I’d be lost. It is our go-to tool for monitoring the social conversation surrounding a brand. Tweetdeck, like Hootsuite, allows the user to create multiple tabs for channels, keywords, and news. It helps you manage your online communities by giving you complete control over more than one account. This includes features such as the scheduling of tweets, and real-time streams of emerging news or information surrounding your brand. You can track individual topics or hashtags with ease, and monitor multiple timelines all at once. Its simplicity allows for an easy introduction for new users, while appealing to seasoned professionals through its advanced monitoring capabilities.

Tweepi

Tweepi is the perfect tool for avoiding said “social media meltdowns” as mentioned above. It is great for cleaning up your Twitter feed, with my most favorite aspect of the tool being that you can force spammers to unfollow your account. It also makes finding and targeting influencers much easier with its fantastic search capabilities. These features allow you to search for, and target individuals who are interested in your services or industry, while connecting you with like-minded people along the way. Tweepi has a number of organizational options, like geolocation, to help you get a better look at specific activity within your audience based on region. It will be you Twitter account’s new best friend.

Bitly

Simple, but helpful, Bitly allows users to not only shorten links, but to see when the links were most popular and how often they’ve been clicked once posted. The upgrade is particularly useful to online community managers for creating customized keywords in short URLs for reporting, analytics, and SEO purposes. Being able to link to your work on Twitter makes Bitly a great resource, but getting to see how those links perform makes it even better.

Demographics Pro

Looking for an opportunity to “nerd out”? Demographics Pro is for you. It gives an amazing overview with deep insights into the consumers who follow your Twitter and Instagram accounts, allowing for an easy way to choose the proper message and campaigns for your social calendars. They are true to their name, providing detailed demographics and psychographics to see the behaviors of your audience in order to analyze, influence, and target online communities.

SimilarWeb
To get a better look at your competitor’s activity, and analysis of your audience’s behavior, SimilarWeb is a great tool. You can see the traffic statistics of other businesses in your industry to understand how your company measures up in comparison. As of July 2015, content discovery platform Swayy has joined SimilarWeb. Swayy was a metrics tool that helped businesses target content to their online communities based on behavioral analysis across millions of websites and apps. SimilarWeb has acquired Swayy’s talent and expertise as an effort to improve their existing content recognition programs. The acquisition allows these two channels to combine forces, providing deeper analysis of individual audience members, and improving the overall management of online communities.

When it comes to email marketing, there’s more than one way to measure success. A multitude of metrics can indicate overall performance and present areas for improvement after the launch of a campaign. Taking a look at click-through-rates or open rates, how conversion rate was impacted by a certain email, or how much website traffic is being generated can identify the effectiveness of this kind of marketing initiative. To be successful with email marketing, strategies should be focused on fostering brand engagement and minimizing unsubscribers, all while maintaining strong branding.

Accomplishing all of the above is definitely feasible if the right strategy is created. You need extensive research, sometimes a bit of trial and error, and a thorough understanding of the audience you’re delivering messaging to. However most importantly, you need to implement a series of best practices in order to develop a strategic approach that enables you to achieve your core objectives. Here are 5 elements of email marketing that will help you make sure you’re getting the results you want:

Timing and Frequency

The timing with which you’re sending your email campaigns is one of the most important elements to focus on in an email marketing strategy. You may be located in New York, but perhaps a large portion of your target demographic is in a different time zone. The time of day when users receive emails can directly contribute to performance indicators like open-rate and click-through-rate. You can’t send the same message at the same hour to a global or national audience and expect to reach everyone. Segment your email lists based on the time zone recipients live in so that they’re receiving your emails at an hour that is convenient and appropriate for them.

If you’re looking to maximize user engagement with your emails, but aren’t sure when to send, a good place to start is by considering three core time slots—during the morning once your users are commuting or arriving at work, during the early afternoon on their lunch break, or in the evening late night once they are back in their homes. From there, think about your specific audience’s lifestyle habits and when they would be most likely to give some attention to your email. If you’ve launched email campaigns in the past take a look at the statistics provided by your email platform. For example, in MailChimp, you can see the metrics from previous campaigns and identify what time the most users were reached.

Aside from just the timing of your email, the frequency at which you disseminate your messages plays a major role in performance. The age of email blasting is over. Users have increasing email fatigue these days and won’t even open your emails if they are inundated with a plethora of emails. As a result, it is often the case that the more messages you send the less effective they will be. While your emails may have a short “shelf life” this doesn’t mean you should be sending a new one each and every day—that’s how you’ll get a surge in unsubscribers. Instead, keep your emails at two per week at most to ensure that you’re still reaching users and cutting through the clutter of their inbox. Depending on industry, sometimes two per month is even more fitting.

Subject Lines

The importance of a terrific subject line cannot be stressed enough—it’s literally the first thing the user is reading and their first “personal” impression of your brand. An effective subject line sparks user interest and builds anticipation of what the email contains. You need just enough to get the user intrigued, while still staying true to your brand in under 60 characters. It’s okay to think a little outside the box and let some creativity flow with subject lines, but keep in mind that more often than not, simplicity works best. The best subject lines find a happy medium between oozing creativity and being straight to the point of why you’re emailing a user, and make sure that it also fits your company’s branding.

The goal of a subject line is to entice recipients to open the message, but to also click through the email. For that reason, consistency as you go from the subject line to the actual content of the email is crucial. You can’t say something “clickbaity” just so that users open the message, only to disappoint them upon finding no relevancy to what they originally saw in their inbox. This instills a poor sense of trust with your brand and almost guarantees that users won’t take a desired action.

If you have an idea for a subject line but are unsure if it’s fitting with your brand, never be afraid to ask others around you for feedback. Sometimes, an outsider’s perspective can shed some much needed light onto your ideas. Similarly, segmenting your lists into two groups and testing out different subject lines provides you with hard data about what which subject lines resonate best with users. Discovering what works best with the people whose opinions you value most (your users’) is incredibly important.

Content: Visuals and Copy

Images speak louder than words, and this holds true with any successful email marketing strategy. In general there should always be more visuals than copy in an email. Users don’t want too much to read, they want to be able to quickly skim easy-to-digest content and have a full understanding of the central messaging. If you have a lot of content to offer your audience surrounding a particular subject addressed in your email, direct users to a landing page on your website where they can read the rest or review the full article. Don’t contain it all in the message.

A good portion of the copy used in your emails should be in the CTA. In every email, there is an action that you want recipients to take. Whether it’s “Buy Now,” “Request A Quote,” “Download Now,” or “Read More,” if the messaging is too wordy, the CTA will get lost. Instead, make sure these buttons are vibrant and prominent in comparison to the rest of the message, while still fitting with the design theme. Any CTA is a major component of your core-messaging, so if you aren’t concise with the rest of your wording, it may go overlooked.

Since images are vital to the success of an email marketing campaign, you want to make sure they are loading appropriately and quickly for users. Use a file optimizing tool to ensure images load efficiently. If users are waiting for an image to load, they’ll likely skip to the next email or delete the message. That being said, sometimes technology is faulty or an email service provider requires users to choose to see images and as a result images may not load. If you include relevant image alt tags on the visuals you include, users will have at least some context as to what the visuals are intended to be if they aren’t appearing right away. This little effort can go a long way with providing a good user-experience for recipients.

Recently, more and more companies are experimenting with the inclusion of GIFs in their email campaigns. Sometimes, this can be a challenging feat because not all email platforms will load them correctly, or they will load only the frame of the GIF instead of providing users with the full effect. If you’re considering utilizing this type of visual in your emails, thoroughly test it on a variety of platforms, and if it’s going to be frozen on one particular frame, make sure it’s an image that’s able to stand alone and still give users a complete understanding of what the content is about.

Photo Credit: Jason Rodriguez

Optimization for All Devices

Long gone are the days where all users accessed their inbox from the same email platform on their desktops. Today users are connected to email through smartphones, tablets, desktops, with a wide range of devices to choose from within those general categories. The way one person views an email isn’t the same way another person does, so to ensure that accessibility isn’t jeopardized for any users, a responsive design email is typically the best solution. This way all recipients on nearly every device and platform imaginable have a user-friendly experience with your email and are able to view it as intended. If you aren’t using a responsive design, investigate what devices the majority of your users are on, and ensure that the email is tailored to those functionalities and set up for that platform.

In today’s era of being constantly connected to the internet, the majority of users are on mobile – regardless of vertical. This actively growing audience is on-the-go and expects the brands they engage with to understand that. Clickable items on a mobile device should be optimized for a touch screen thumb—not a mouse—and shouldn’t require the user to do any extra work (zooming in or zooming out) to view the images in the message.

While you can focus on a certain group of users, ideally, you should be optimizing your email campaigns for your entire audience—which means whatever device they are checking their mail on. Litmus is a tool that allows you to see how your email would render on multiple devices and platforms before you send it. Give it a look through before you launch any email campaign.

Personalization

Content you provide users with through email initiatives should be relevant and provide significant value. Marketing to the user as an individual and using personalization no longer needs to be exemplified by addressing them with first and last name. Similar to a conversion funnel, an email funnel allows you to target users with more specific content as they show signs of progressive interest and come closer to becoming a customer.

If a user is in your email database after signing up for your newsletter on a specific blog post, you can segment your lists based on relevant content that they have demonstrated interest in. By personalizing emails in a step-by-step process based on relevance, the effectiveness of your messages will be much greater as the content is related to what initially caused them to interact with your brand.

Perhaps you have a newsletter sign up on your blog, and after reading an article on email marketing the user provides you with their contact information. Sending them a follow up email that addresses logo design will not fulfill their needs, and will seem arbitrary given their reason for signing up. Instead, set up a specific email funnel for users within that group. Send them a whitepaper that goes into further detail about email marketing, and if they open email they move further down the funnel, where they’ll receive another email providing them with content that makes sense given their latest read.

Writing engaging content for a blog is great. But writing that content with a purpose is even better. You want your posts to be discovered, and in turn, lead that traffic to your company’s website. However, this doesn’t just happen – active steps need to be taken while writing your blog content to increase your chances of being ranked highly on search engines, in order to naturally bring visitors to your page.

We’ve compiled a list of 8 essential steps to take into consideration when trying to increase your blog content’s search rankings that often get overlooked during the process of writing posts. Each of these items can play a large role in the growth of your blog, and when done correctly, your business as well.

Check Title and h1 Tags

One of the big things to note when trying to increase search rankings is whether or not your title and h1 tags are targeting the keyword you’re trying to rank for. Whether it’s an exact match of a long tail keyword or a close variation, these tags should be keyword-rich. When possible, have titles and h1s that are slightly different, but still related to the overall content of the page. You want to make sure that when someone clicks on your result, you are not giving them a title that is entirely different from what they were searching. Don’t set an expectation, and then deliver something completely different. People will leave the page if they are not finding what they are looking for. You do want something in the h1 to be a little more user friendly, but for it to still have keywords.

Sometimes it is difficult to include your keyword, other secondary keywords, and other relevant information in your title tag while still having it make sense. The titles often end up relatively plain. The h1 gives you can opportunity to expand on the information your title already provides and engage your audience a little more, especially if they are coming from outlets other than search engines. Whether it’s from social, or referral sources, you want to make the h1 as enticing as possible for those visitors as well. Overall, these two tags are not that different from one another, but the h1 gives you slightly more leeway. You want to make sure they both have keywords when possible, and that they are both user friendly. When used strategically, they can have a positive impact on your rank.

Check h2 Tags

These are not as big of an indicator as title tags, but having keywords or relevant terms in h2 tags can be very helpful. We even have a few posts that rank for words within our h2’s, as well as the terms in the title itself. It’s really important that if you have sub headers, you’re marking them as h2s and h3s because they are a much powerful SEO indicator than simply larger or bolded text. It gives you an opportunity to rank for more of those longer tail keywords that are relevant to your topic, while giving your primary keyword a little boost. On the other hand, these should certainly not be keyword-stuffed, or presented in a way that would be frustrating for users to read through. Google recognizes these things, and frankly, it just doesn’t look good. Find a good balance, but definitely take advantage of these tags when you can.

Social Sharing

You want to give people the ability to share blog posts quickly and conveniently across many different platforms. For us, that means Google Plus, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Having social sharing signals for each can show how many individuals have already shared the post, giving other readers an indication of how authoritative the piece of content may be. Not only is the page ranking, but people are taking the time to share it as well. From a content standpoint, I don’t think there is any better trust indicator than social shares, so it is very important to make that opportunity available to your audience.

A lot of people overlook the small details, such as the pre-generated tweet that comes up when people choose to share a post. We have seen a boost in our social shares after we made the change to predefine our tweets with better copy than just a direct variation of our title tag. This may take a little extra work, but it gives you much more control and customization over what other people will share. The investment certainly pays off with the links back to your content through increased visibility from these social platforms.

Unique Images (When Possible)

This can be difficult for smaller businesses as you may not have a design team dedicated to creating original images for your website. However, if you have the means, it is something to think about quite seriously. Having a unique image on each post is a phenomenal advantage. Not only does it allow you to gain traffic through Google image search, but it also gives you the opportunity to have something that is sharable.

The greatest potential for this comes from infographics. Make sure that if you create one for a post that you give the option for the reader to share or download it. Not only do unique images serve as a good branding tool, but people tend to share content more often when there is an image that goes along with it. Also, when other people use images in their content, it provides the opportunity to get a link back to the original page that the image was published on. You want to encourage those who share the image to always link back to the source from which they found it, as this can be an incredible opportunity when your image is being found on authoritative sites. Like a domino effect, your images will lead to more links, and more links will lead to a better ranking.

Page Speed

When it comes to a blog, site speed can often be forgotten. Usually it’s the home page and landing pages that are the main focus for optimizing this feature because of their importance. However, if the same concern is used when creating a blog, it can have a tremendous impact on your rank. Little things like optimizing the file sizes of your images and videos can make a huge difference to the speed with which your page loads, and the overall user experience for your visitor.

When it comes to ranking first or second on Google’s front page, such a seemingly small change can sometimes be the determining factor. If it takes a short time for your page to load, it is more likely that people will stick around and check out more content – and as a result your bounce rate will decrease. It is good for your blog, and great for your brand.

Meta Description

There has been a lot of talk about how meta descriptions are not a direct factor when it comes to ranking. While that is true, they shouldn’t be overlooked or ignored. Meta descriptions play a large role in click through rate, and this is one of the indicators used by Google when determining where you should rank. A call to action and any keywords that you are trying to target should be included, as they will be bolded when they match the keyword searched.

You want to create meta descriptions that are engaging and will cause people to want to learn more. The copy needs to be 160 characters or less, which may not seem like much, but at least this give you more freedom for creativity than the title tag limit of 60 characters. Meta descriptions present an opportunity to elaborate on the title of the page itself, and give the reader a better indication of what they will find on your page. If you do not define a meta description yourself, Google will do it for you – which is not always ideal.

Internal Links

You have a lot of great content and that’s awesome, but if you do not link it to appropriate pages that are deeper in your site, you run the risk of those other pages not ranking well, as well as lowered conversions for your business because the potential customers were not led through your site’s conversion funnel properly. When possible, it is important to link to other relevant blog posts or pages. It will help funnel whatever link equity you may have for the page that is linking out, and will keep the audience reading relevant content throughout your site. You’re also able to define your own anchor text when doing internal linking, which is a great opportunity to take advantage of when looking for places to include keywords. Just make sure any words you decide to use as anchor text don’t disrupt a user’s reading experience and that they are relevant and fit in with the natural flow of your post.

Rewriting Old Content

A lot of general business websites that may have a blog don’t take advantage of their old content. It is important to rewrite your old work once in a while in order to update content that may still be bringing in traffic, but happens to be a little dated. This “evergreen” content is made of pages that may have been written 5 years ago, but still have useful and relevant information to someone who might be reading it today. “How To” guides, and annual lists are great contenders to be rewritten, while things like breaking news pieces are not. In order for this strategy to be effective you need to hit a threshold of 250-300 new characters for Google to consider your page rewritten – so keep that in mind. Also, make use of Google Webmaster Tools to re-index the page whenever it is updated. If you have a post that has done well, make sure you are adding technical SEO elements like header tags or image alt text when appropriate, but don’t get too carried away with it as you do not want to risk damaging the quality of the content for a better rank.

If you take the time to apply all of these things to your blog, you will most likely see an increase in rank, but certainly an increase in traffic. As always, it is important to think about the user first, but make sure that your page is structured in a way that makes sense for your overall SEO.

Many marketers including myself face tough questions about how their efforts are bringing ROI to a company. For some marketing channels like search engine marketing, email marketing, or SEO, this can be a relatively straightforward process. Simply go through Google Analytics, figure out what channel was responsible for an individual clicking on an RAQ or “buy now” button, and report that as a win for said channel. However, there is something fundamentally wrong with this – particularly in the B2B space. What if someone has come to your site 6 times – once from social media, once from search engine marketing, once from a display ad, twice from SEO, and once directly. What about the other five visits in this example – should they not get credit?

In my mind, the answer is unequivocally that all sources should get some sort of credit for the leads they are involved in regardless of where that is within a conversion funnel, and the reasoning is simple: just because a channel wasn’t responsible for the final visit that led to a conversion, doesn’t mean it isn’t providing any value to the company or not helping to close the lead. If we go back to the example above for instance, if I no longer spend marketing budget on social media because it was only the first touch point in a lead, who is to say whether or not that the lead ultimately even converts from a direct search 5 visits later?

While it might seem very difficult to solve this issue with multi-channel attribution, there is something you can do to make the value you assign to each of your marketing channels a bit more reflective of the role they actually played in generating a conversion – set up a multi-channel attribution model. Multi-channel attribution modeling is the process of understanding or assigning credit to each channel that played a role in helping a lead eventually generate a conversion for your business. Using an attribution model that reflects the various touch points a visitor makes when interacting with your business is a great way for a marketing team to allocate credit to the channels that preceded the final conversion during a customer’s buyer journey.

By looking not only at the last touchpoint before a conversion but at the entire sequence of events, it’s possible to better allocate credit between every channel and campaign. While taking the time to set up an attribution model obviously doesn’t increase the value of each of your marketing channels and touchpoints, it does allow you to spend your budget more effectively by ascertaining what each channel’s actual value is to every sale your business makes. The success of digital marketing to generate a lead is often attributed to one channel, when in reality there are many assists from other channels that need to be taken into account as well.

The purpose of attribution modeling should be to better understand the buying behavior of your website visitors. Any efficient attribution model you set up should be able to tell you why people buy from your website, what happens before they make a purchase, what prompted them to make the purchase in the first place, and what your most effective acquisition channels are so that you can properly invest in them moving forward.

Why Do You Need An Attribution Model?

Chances are that your business does currently have an attribution model. The problem is that your attribution model is most likely a first or last touch modeling, which is to say you’re only considering the first or last source that brings a user to your website before they make a sale. What most businesses need in order to take themselves to the next level is a multi-touch attribution model. While they aren’t perfect, multi-touch attribution models are infinitely more useful for a business than a simple last or first touch model. In fact, almost any type of multi-touch attribution model is preferable to a first or last-touch model in terms of getting your business one step closer to understanding marketing’s true impact on your bottom line.

Multi-touch is how actionable marketing impact modeling should be for any business moving forward. It is the only real way to gain visibility into a short time frame so that your business can make agile decisions around where to spend a marketing budget with the greatest ROI. With more and more budget moving into the digital landscape and tracking of real-time marketing getting more efficient, the need to for a model that is immediately actionable for a company is more important than ever before.

Challenges

While attribution modeling can be extremely helpful when set up correctly, there are a few challenges that marketers and business owners need to solve before they are ready to get a working attribution model in place. The first is to form a very simple understanding of the fact that consumer interest is influenced by your marketing efforts as a whole. This means that things like paid search and display impressions, social media engagement, and PR placements play a direct role in the success or failure of your business. While it is almost impossible to untangle the tangible value of these efforts from marketing efforts that create direct leads like email or search engine optimization, understanding that the role they play is paramount to creating an attribution model that accurately reflects how each marketing channel is bringing value to your business.

In addition to problems tracking impressions and engagement, companies also need to consider the existing brand equity that influences customer decisions, as well as offline marketing efforts that are difficult, if not impossible, to correctly track. While it is particularly challenging to factor these elements into an attribution model, marketers need to understand that while they might not see direct ROI elements like customer loyalty, offline efforts are certainly playing a role within their attribution funnel and should be included if possible.

Aside from elements of your marketing efforts that can’t be tracked or measured perfectly, marketers need to make sure that the attribution they currently have for their various marketing channels is correct. For most digital marketers this translates into making sure that your analytics are giving proper attribution and not attributing a visit or a lead to an incorrect channel. The best example of this is not correctly categorizing when traffic is coming from an email or a search engine and attributing it to direct marketing instead. This can cause serious issues for any business or marketing team because ROI is not correctly understood and mistakes are often made when trying to consider which marketing channels need more or less budget.

Attribution Models to Consider

There are many different attribution models to consider. When trying to figure out which one would make the most sense for your business it is important to think about how your sales process works – specifically which steps in the buyer process are the most important for generating actual sales. Each step in the buyer journey should be assigned credit for the work it did to close a lead – and the percentage assigned should be reflected of how much of a role they are playing in the conversion process.

Here are some the traditional models that you might consider as a baseline for starting to set up the attribution model for your business:

Last Interaction
As we discussed earlier, last interaction is the default model for most companies who have attribution modeling set up. This model gives all of the credit for a conversion to the last touch point or traffic source of a lead and totally ignores any previous visits or touch points that a lead might have had with your business. The shortcoming of this channel is fairly obvious – other channels that are involved with your lead should be getting some of the credit for their work as well, not just the last source a lead came from. Another issue is that standard last interaction modeling can’t take into account things like offline behavior or disconnected devices like mobile phones or tablets where behavior may continue before or after a lead has been created.

First Interaction
Although not as common as the last interaction attribution model, first interaction is a close second. This model gives all of the credit for a conversion to the first touch point or channel that brought a visitor to your site. This kind is best used if you suspect that a channel is undervalued because it is bringing a lot of visitors to your website, but few conversions. The obvious shortcomings of this model is that there is no consideration given to what channel is doing the work to actually close a lead and make it into a conversion and there is no way to measure how the channels between the first and last interaction are working to make sure that users are staying within the conversion funnel.

Linear
The linear attribution model takes an egalitarian approach to how each channel that was involved in a conversion receive credit, and gives equal value to each. So if you have a lead that came to your website 5 different times from 5 different sources, each source would receive 20% of the credit for closing the lead. While this model is a great way to evaluate the overall contribution of each of your channels, it doesn’t take into account their position within the conversion funnel. First and last interactions are weighed exactly the same as all other touchpoints.

Time Decay
The time decay attribution model takes into account how close to a conversion each interaction occurs and rewards appropriately. This means that the last interaction will get the largest percentage of credit, followed by the second to last interaction, etc. This might be helpful if you’re running a promotional giveaway or if you know that each interaction closer to a conversion is more important to get in the grand scheme of generating conversion for your business. This only drawback of this model is that it may undervalue earlier touchpoints if your business needs to play a large emphasis on generating an initial touchpoint with audiences.

Position-Based
The position-based attribution model is a variation we use at Web Designer Vip. This is because the model gives more credit to the first and last interactions with a business while equally distributing the rest of the credit to middle interactions. For us, this is the most accurate default marketing attribution model to start with, as getting the initial interest in our service and expertise and closing our leads are the most difficult and important things for us. The middle touchpoints are more or less equally important for us because we want to make sure that people are moving down our conversion funnel and not losing interest, but they aren’t as difficult or as important for us to get than the first and last touchpoints. The drawback to this model is if your business really needs a second or third touchpoint to close a sale for whatever reason – maybe you find that it is on second visits that people generally tend to so something important for you to turn that lead into a conversion further down the road, such as downloading a whitepaper or signing up for a newsletter.

Customize
While selecting the attribution model that most accurately reflects what your business looks for within your sales cycle is a good start, there should be customization around what kind of attribution each channel gets. Chances are, none of these attribution models really correctly or exactly capture what your brand needs from an attribution model, and they should be tweaked accordingly. For example, our position based model is slightly customized to reflect a sort of “W” attribution model that gives the most value to our first, middle, and last touch points. It is important for us that people come back in the middle of the conversion funnel so that we don’t lose the lead’s attention, and we make sure to result that step in the conversion process accordingly.

Attribution Isn’t Perfect

When thinking about adding marketing attribution for your business it is important to remember that no matter what attribution model you pick, it won’t give you perfect data. However, position-based, time delay and other customized variations that more accurately reflect the value that each touchpoint a customer has with your business will provide more actionable insights for your business than a simple last-click attribution. None of these models will give you an exact picture so understanding what model is as good as it will possible get is the sweet spot you’re looking to achieve. Your model should provide you with more insights than you would have otherwise and allow you the confidence to spend your marketing channel in line with what your attribution model tells you. That being said, remember to not sideline attribution models after picking one – continuously test as you’re able and go with the model that you find gives you the most actionable data.

In a few short years YouTube has gone from being an entertaining curiosity filled with funny videos to the world’s second largest search engine. During that span the company (along with Google) managed to harness its initial popularity to create an increasingly lucrative marketing hub as more viewers and advertisers migrated from television to the digital platform.

No longer strictly the domain of film geeks and funny video aficionados, the network, which boasts more than 2 billion video views monetized per week, can also provide a low-cost to no-cost way to create a social marketing channel for your business.

If you aren’t effectively leveraging the network, you’re missing the viral video boat. However, as with most things in life, success isn’t often attained with a haphazard, slapdash effort. Being successful on YouTube takes planning.

These 10 easy steps are a good place to start.

1. Know what “success” means.

What are you trying to achieve?

• Video views– Do you just want a lot of people to see your video?
• Conversions– Do you need people to click through to another website and complete an action?
• Deeper engagement with your brand– Do you need to use your video to provide potential customers with more opportunities to interact with your brand?

2. Research keywords.

Just like when you are creating content for your website, in order to be discovered on the second largest search engine, you will need to know what people are looking for. Use YouTube’s Keyword Tool to find popular searches within your space. Optimizing your digital media content for search is just as important as it is for your written content on a blog or website. You have to be strategic, do your research, and know who you want to target. Google includes YouTube videos in their search results, so cross-referencing your Google keyword research with the research you did for YouTube, can be an important step to take in the planning process.

3. Know your competition.

Search on YouTube to find other videos that already rank well for the keywords that you would like to rank for. See what it is that you are up against and seek out strategies to out-do them. This phase should also help you in your keyword research. Use this research to look into some opportunities that your competitors may not be taking advantage of. Are there any keywords that receive a lot of traffic that could possibly be easier to rank for than the ones you were initially looking into? Are there any long tail keywords you could target that might cater to some more specific questions a viewer has?

4. Create a kick-ass video.

You don’t just create viral content because you want to. Viral content – unless it happens by chance – must be well thought-out and gripping! The most sharable content happens naturally, not intentionally. This may sound counterintuitive, but sticking true to your brand and designing digital content that has a purpose for your specific audience will be informative and engaging. It may not reach millions of viewers, but it will reach the RIGHT viewers. No one is going to pass on a video to their friend(s) if they don’t really care for it themselves. Here are a couple of ideas.

5. Fill-out your video details.

Always keep in mind your standard SEO practices when it comes to posting your finished product. Make sure all of the necessary fields are filled and focused on the targeted keywords. Put important keywords at the front of your video titles, and include them in your description and tags. Do not over-do it, just put keywords that are relevant and are backed up by your research. Keep important information above YouTube’s “Show More” fold so that users don’t have to undertake extra navigation to see necessary details. Allow your videos to be embedded. Otherwise, viewers won’t be able to share them on their websites, and the videos will only be able to be seen on YouTube. Again, it all comes back to what you know about SEO; if there is any part of the navigation that disrupts the user experience, you could lose your audience, as well as your ranking.

6. Use the “Featured Videos” section.

If you are certain that your video will be a major hit, use YouTube’s paid “Featured Videos” service to get your video seen by many people in a short amount of time. Once the video takes off, your organic traffic will usually out-do your paid traffic. Just as you can pay to increase your chances of coming up when people search for you on Google, you can up your odds with your videos as well.

7. Insert links in your videos.

Use annotations to insert links to other videos to maximize every viewer. These can pop up throughout the video and lead audiences to another video, or even your website and blog. However, do not over-do this either. Make sure that annotations do not impede the viewing experience. If you have one video that you want to concentrate driving views to, use YouTube’s InVideo Programming to add a featured video overlay. Also make sure to include a branding watermark so that people can easily navigate to your YouTube page. There is a lot of potential that lies within just one video when it comes to additional navigation options. Analyze which ones would make the most sense for your business, and be sure to take advantage of them.

8. Interact with high value users.

Find users on YouTube who are active and adding value through their participation in the social network. Get your video in front of them – without spamming so that they can do part of the work for you. Your video will also benefit with more traffic thanks to increased comments. YouTube will be soon be implementing new features to increase the amount of social interaction on the website (for example by making it easier to find your friends).

9. Use social media.

With built-up and relevant social media accounts, get your video seen by more people. By “relevant” I mean that your friends and your user history should be somehow related to the topic of your video for it to get more qualified traffic. My favorite sites for video sharing are Digg, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. Now that Google+ is integrated into YouTube it is a fairly simple to reach out to people who might enjoy your content.

10. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Go back and start over. Look at what you can improve about your video production and continue to keep your video channel page fresh with more videos!

We all know how the realm of digital marketing is rapidly changing, especially in relation to the growing popularity of mobile apps. Search engines are regularly updating their algorithms, prompting marketers to adjust their practices, make changes to their paid media strategies, and stay up-to-date on the latest platforms, products, and software that are being introduced into the market.

With all of these constant changes, eCommerce apps specifically can find it hard to keep up with the other competitors within the industry. How do you read out the noise, from all of the new advancements that will actually drive results for your company? No matter what new techniques you are integrating into your marketing strategies, it’s important to maintain some basic best practices when it comes to your eCommerce mobile platforms.

Below we discuss several channels that we believe to be consistently effective ways to generate leads for your mobile business. We discuss not only the importance of using these techniques, but the most strategic ways to practice them in order to make the most out of your marketing tactics.

1. SEO

Increasing your search ranking doesn’t happen overnight. We know that it takes months of diligent work to start seeing results when optimizing your digital platform. So how does this correlate to marketing a mobile app? While the concept is still the same, there are a few differences in making the most of your SEO efforts.

Searches for your app are great, if audiences know what they are searching for. However, how can they search for it if they don’t know what your app is yet? Marketing for mobile apps has to start long before the launch of the actual platform. It needs to gain traction and a following of customers anticipating its release. Your ranking within app stores is reliant on the number of downloads you app receives on a daily basis once it goes live, and the reviews that customers give it based on their experiences. You need to maintain the relevancy of your app, by encouraging these downloads and reaching new audiences.

Downloads
The number of daily downloads needed for your app to rank vary by specific category. Free gaming apps are more competitive to rank for, while some medical, finance, and travel apps are much easier. Regardless of industry, you want to maintain not only the quantity, but consistency amongst your downloads. Having an initial reaction with a large amount of downloads is great, but it won’t keep you ranking for long unless that traffic remains consistent.

Reviews
The best way to maintain the relevancy of your app is to keep up with competitors within the market. This is reliant on regular updates to improve functionality and usability of your platform, and valuing the input of your users while incorporating their reviews into how your app works. The app stores pay attention to the reviews and rankings that apps receive, and that can play a large role into how visible your app will be to potential customers. Listen to the feedback your receive from audiences and make sure that your app is always functioning properly, with a simple navigation for users to accomplish what they need to as seamlessly as possible. Encourage your users to leave reviews by prompting them with an added plug in to your app. However, be sure to time it properly as to not interrupt their experience of navigation.

Half of the marketing for your mobile app is simply through maintaining its development. If you keep your customers engaged and happy with your product, its popularity and influence throughout the eCommerce market will grow.

2. Paid Advertising

Google is working hard to make paid advertising on mobile more efficient. Recently, they have been offering a lot of above the fold real estate in search engine results to paid ads, resulting in a huge increase in click through rates. However, advertising on desktops is very different from advertising on mobile. Mobile requires much more image-heavy ads, while desktop allows for more flexibility with text and content.

Search
Paid search advertising like PPC allows you to bid on keywords that your audience is searching for, and having a better chance of your ads appearing for them. Regardless of industry, but especially for eCommerce, you can implement some specific features into your PPC ads to make the most out of your campaigns. For example, you can incorporate a direct-to-download button for an app that will take audiences directly to the iOS store to download your platform.

While PPC is getting more and more expensive as people flock to online marketing platforms as a result of customers going online to search, there is a real benefit in this advertising tactic. There is no way to customize your ad at that level in regular search results. This is a helpful tool with a unique advantage that SEO, PR, and location-based targeting can’t do.

Display
When it comes to display ads on mobile devices, you need to keep the user experience in mind at all times. You may create an ad that works well on a desktop, but does it do the same on mobile? For most AdWord display campaigns, there are a number of different banner sizes that are supported, and you will see these ads in locations like YouTube videos, various websites, and sidebars. AdWords automatically resizes these ads, making them supported on mobile as well as desktop. This is convenient if you want to hit both audiences, but you need to keep this in mind during the design process. What will you ad look like once it is shrunk? Images and text are all resize along with the actual ad itself.

Sometimes it makes sense to create two different campaigns; one for desktop and one for mobile. This allows you to be more text-heavy on the desktop ad, while making the mobile one more visually based. You want to make sure your call to action button is bigger on mobile and easy for users to see on their device. At the very least, this will help your branding because audiences can see what you are advertising, even if they don’t immediately turn into a conversion.

3. Social Media

Social Media is an outlet that we are currently watching grow when it comes to advertisements. Visually-based platforms are offering a lot of purchasing options now businesses as well as mobile apps. Social media is becoming an extension of an existing business, and mobile apps are getting brought into the mix along with it. Stores from Victoria’s Secret and Free People, to online vendors like Amazon and Ebay, all have mobile apps now in which customers can make purchases. They are leveraging social media to direct customers from their profiles, to their mobile platforms, to ultimately their shopping carts.

Companies have incorporated Like2Buy into a lot of their Instagram profiles. Like2Buy compiles all of the companies social posts on a mobile webpage, at which point customers can scroll through previous images with products on them, click on them, and it will take the customer to their mobile website at which point they can purchase the item they were viewing. It is a great tool to integrate your social campaigns into your existing marketing practices, while creating a seamless shopping experience for your audience.

4. Geotargeting

Accessing your customers by knowing where they are located is a strategic mobile marketing technique. If you know where they are going to be based on region or an event, you can use that to your advantage and implement some location-based marketing practices into your existing strategies.

Geolocation
Location based marketing is a great opportunity for eCommerce mobile marketing. You have a number of options when it comes to who and what you want to target, and the way in which you want to implement it. Platforms like Mosaic allow you to target specific locations like an office, home, shop, or city block. You could focus on a trade show that is centered around your industry or relevant to your business and have ads being presented to people on their mobile devices in those locations.

Opportunities like this are a great way to tie in mobile with real world marketing. You can target locations that are relative to your competitors as a way to access potential clients that are interested in the products and services within your industry. This can be a very powerful tool to combine marketing tactics, and drive more qualified traffic through focusing on pre-specified areas.

Geofencing
Geofencing is an AdWords based tool in which you can target a more general area. This can be a zip code, a neighborhood, or an area surrounding your store. It is broader, but it can be used strategically if there is a general location where your customers will be that you wish to target. You could focus on places of interest such as airports, but you are limited to how specific you can be with your preferences. While this allows you to reach a much larger group of people, it is not always the right group of people necessarily.

Marketing for your eCommerce business on mobile devices can be challenging. Keeping up with the regular changes in technology and practices alone can be a daunting task. However, it is not necessarily the amount of marketing campaigns you execute, but the manner in which you do it. Strategically leveraging just a few of these platforms can make a real difference in your business, and the growth of your presence online.

– See more at: http://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/four-marketing-tips-to-improve-your-ecommerce-mobile-app/#sthash.Mghk8pq5.dpuf

Marketing as a whole is a vast industry, full of various platforms and communication channels that connect a company’s messaging with their targeted audience. Whether it is email, paid advertising, social media, or a website design these channels are capable of performing well independently, however for most brands to foster significant results both online and offline, the use of integrated marketing channels is key.

Integrated marketing campaigns include a combination of marketing channels being utilized and supporting one another to reach a common, shared goal. For most businesses to achieve their outlined business objective there needs to be cross-channel collaboration with consistent messaging that is reinforced through each platform initiative, expanding the reach and resonation with the targeted users.

Client Needs & Goals

PEX Card is the leading prepaid business debit card service that helps companies save time and money by providing real-time control over employee spending. PEX Card is a powerful alternative to petty cash, business credit cards, and reimbursement because it provides a better way for employees to make company purchases with controls to ensure funds are spent correctly, and only when necessary. Account holders can fund their team’s PEX Cards with the amount each individual needs, and restrict purchasing to specific merchant categories. Dollar amounts on each card and spending categories can be easily changed in real-time, 24/7.

PEX Card came to Web Designer Vip to create an integrated marketing campaign, with both online and offline elements, in preparation for an annual training conference with QuickBooks ProAdvisors, a major group within PEX Card’s target audience. They wanted to generate awareness that PEX Card was present at the conference in partnership with Tallie, an expense report software company, and create brand awareness for PEX Card + Tallie as the ultimate expense management solution for QuickBooks ProAdvisors. Lastly, the company wanted to collect email addresses from attendees at the conference for application to PEX Card’s ProAdvisor Ambassador Program.

Challenges

Certain challenges existed throughout the campaign that needed to be addressed in order to achieve the outlined goals. There needed to be promotion of two brands simultaneously, while clearly communicating the benefits of how they work together in a compelling way. Multiple campaign phases existed, and as in best practices for event marketing, the campaign was broken down into three distinct phases, requiring there be different assets and promotion for each. Lastly, a tight timeline for Web Designer Vip meant that there were only 5 weeks to execute on the full strategy once it was defined.

Strategic Approach

To achieve the objectives outlined by PEX Card, Web Designer Vip developed a three phase strategy that was broken down with tactics to implement before the conference, during the conference, and after the conference.

Building Pre-Conference Awareness
The initial strategy created was built around the idea of generating pre-conference awareness among the Quickbooks ProAdvisors about PEX Card + Tallie’s joint offering, and that they would be participating at the “Scaling New Heights” conference.

To achieve this, messaging was developed that would speak to the audience’s pain points, along with the campaign tagline “Your Paperless Pals” and headline “Don’t Get Buried in a Pile of Receipts.” A cohesive landing page was created that included central campaign messaging as well as relevant conference details. Our social media experts identified LinkedIn as a viable option for pre-conference social media advertising and created a series of LinkedIn advertisements that would be targeted to Quickbooks ProAdvisor groups on the platform, familiarizing potential customers with the service and how it could work for their organizations.

A media buy was activated with Intuitive Accountant, a news source that targets accountants and bookkeepers. Email banner ads were disseminated through their newsletter to recipients that were likely to be attending the conference, fostering some brand recognition before the event even began.

Conference Activities and Branded Collateral
During the conference, a memorable experience with user incentive had to be created so that potential customers would not only want to visit the PEX Card + Tallie booth, but so that they would want to submit their email address and learn more about the Ambassador Program. Web Designer Vip developed the idea to create a jointly branded PEX Card + Tallie cash cube, where ProAdvisors could win up to $250. This idea was a fun link to the brands’ association with money and led to a long line of excited participants.

Post-Conference Nurturing
To complete the integrated marketing campaign and help round out the progress that had been made before and during the conference, we created an email marketing series that followed up with conference attendees to keep the brand top of mind and further drive sign-ups for the ProAdvisor Ambassador Program.

The email series was implemented for booth visitors, driving traffic to the PDF explaining the program in detail, and the landing page where users could sign up. Furthermore, a separate nurturing series was sent to non-booth visitors encouraging their participation as well. Our design team updated the Tallie landing page to remove the conference messaging and make it timely and relevant to users now that the event was over. Lastly, a post-conference LinkedIn campaign was activated to once again support the other marketing efforts our team was implementing, and build branding that would be seamlessly consistent as users went from one platform to another.

Results

Within a one month timeframe, the results of this integrated marketing campaign were positive across all channels and provided growth opportunities for PEX Card. Traffic to the landing page was 283% higher than the overall site average. The LinkedIn campaign click-through-rate hit 0.36%, higher than the goal click-through rate initially required for the campaign to be considered a success. The post-conference email nurturing series yielded over 32% open rate and over 5% click through rate. Ambassador sign-ups and client referrals also started strong in month one, which is of course the ultimate goal of the integrated marketing campaign.

To garner the highest ROI when implementing both online and offline initiatives, PEX Card + Tallie’s integrated marketing campaign needed to reinforce central messaging in order to maximize the collaborative performance of all channels. Brand awareness and having each marketing channel play a greater role in their presence before, during, and after the conference directly contributed to the growth of PEX Card’s client and referral base.

With January almost at a close, if your business hasn’t spent the time to update its existing strategies already, it definitely should be at the top of your task list for the rest of the month. One of the key areas that every business needs to take a hard look at when it comes to marketing strategy in 2016 is how they are handling mobile marketing efforts. Having a responsive website is an absolutely essential first step, but this year it’s going to take a look more than the basics of mobile marketing to get ahead of competition that spent a lot of last year worrying about Google’s widely publicized but seemingly irrelevant “mobilegeddon” changes.

We’ve already covered the B2B marketing trends that will define 2016, now it’s time to turn our attention towards five mobile trends your strategies need to incorporate in the new year in order to stay ahead of the competition and get the best marketing ROI possible in one of the fastest growing digital channels in the marketplace.

Mobile Payments

Technology research firm, Gartner, predicts that by 2017, 50% of all U.S. digital ecommerce revenue will come from mobile. A big part of this increase will be directly affected by mobile payments and platforms such as Apple Pay, Google’s Android Pay, and Samsung Pay. Although many of these mobile payment options are just now entering the public conscience of consumers, eMarketer forecasts that in 2016, mobile payments on platforms like these will triple and grow by 210%.

When Apple, Google, Samsung, and even Facebook are all getting behind mobile wallets, it isn’t too farfetched to think that this will become a standard payment option, and it is no surprise that many new smartphones in the coming year will have the mobile wallets pre- installed. Helping this trend is the fact that in October 2015, many merchants were even made to switch their payment terminals from swipe and-sign to chip-and-pin machines, which will be compatible with mobile payments. With 37.5 million U.S. mobile wallet users in 2016, and multiple options to cater to different devices, mobile wallets, and the payments made using them increasing in size in the next year is looking likely.

With 37.5 million U.S. mobile wallet users in 2016, look for mobile wallets to enjoy increased usage and average payment size. While medium-priced purchases of $20-100 accounted for 45.5% of all mobile payments in 2015, eMarketer predicts that by 2018, the percentage will jump up to 63.9%.

App Indexing and Deep Links in Apps

2015 was an unbelievable year for mobile, with Google rolling out “Mobilegeddon” in April, and their announcement that the United States and 9 other countries had more Google searches on mobile devices than on desktops.

Google announced the ability to index apps back in 2013, but only recent developments in the past year have really caught the attention of marketers. Besides the huge announcement about the rollout of their mobile-friendly algorithm update on April 21 of this year, Google also said that indexed apps would be playing a larger ranking factor and show up more prominently in mobile searches. Other developments this year, like Google expanding their results to include apps that were not installed on phones, app indexing for iOS (not just Android) apps in Google search, and the latest news that Safari on iOS 9 would also support Google search’s app indexing have also forced marketers to take note and shift their strategies accordingly.

The mobile internet in 2016 will rapidly grow to include more and more content from deep links within indexed apps. It won’t be enough to just create an app anymore. In order to increase discoverability, downloads, and engagement, marketers will have to start indexing their app and its content with deep links. Mobile search will continue to outpace desktop search in 2016, and the ability for apps to be indexed with deep links on not just Google, but on other platforms as well, will allow forward-thinking companies to expand their online presence in the increasingly competitive mobile space.

Google is not the only platform implementing and encouraging app indexing. Bing, Apple, and even Facebook are starting to invest in app indexing to compete with the ever growing mobile audience. Likewise, marketers would be wise to deep link content and index their apps in 2016 if they aren’t already.

Mobile Buying Through Social Buy Buttons

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram have influenced many online purchases in the past several years, and they’re also extremely popular mobile apps. Out of established social media networks like Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram,only Pinterest is not in the top 15 smartphone apps in a June 2015 survey. The general consensus when it comes to using mobile devices for buying online is that users will do everything on their devices except actual buying. This is especially prevalent in the post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping season as users will check for sales, compare prices, and read product reviews, but make the actual purchase on a desktop.

With the rise of mobile commerce increasing 32.2% in 2015, it only makes sense that the next step for social media platforms in 2016 is to leverage their countless mobile users by creating a more seamless shopping experience for brands to take advantage. It’s not a particularly new concept, as ecommerce third party platforms such as Shopify and Curalate’s Like2Buy are already making a name for themselves on Facebook and Instagram with companies such as Gap and Target utilizing them to increase their online sales via social.

This isn’t the first go-around with these third party platforms, and they will continue to be modified and perfected for each platform alongside each social media platform’s own offerings. As social networks provide statistics for Likes, Clicks, and Shares, look for ecommerce platforms to provide extensive acquisition, conversion, and retention metrics for companies willing to add an ecommerce features on their social accounts. 72% of retailers in a May 2015 survey said they already had social ecommerce factored into their overall digital marketing strategy. The same survey found that 40% of retailers expected at least half of their sales to come from social media by 2018.

Buying on mobile is not the same experience as purchasing on desktop, however with the rise of all things mobile in 2016, look for social media networks and their constantly improving ecommerce features, to be a driving force for mobile buying. As social media platforms begin to incorporate more ecommerce capabilities on their platforms, look to see more mobile buying instead of just browsing in 2016.

Snapchat Marketing

Snapchat has been around since 2011, and historically has been comparatively unknown when compared to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that are traditionally better known in the social media marketplace. Ever since its release, Snapchat gravitated towards millennials – as 71% of its U.S. users are between the ages of 18-29.

In January 2015, Snapchat caught the attention of advertisers with the rollout and success of its “Discover” feature. Essentially a “Snapchat for companies”, the Discover feature lets users access and view photos and videos from major brands, and by swiping up or down on these photos or videos, users are able to access more content and articles that are uniquely curated and presented for Snapchat.

Starting off with only a handful of companies, Snapchat Discover has since expanded and now includes a variety of major brands such as ESPN, BuzzFeed, CNN, iHeartRadio, and the Food Network – with more companies eager to test out how Snapchat will perform for them. iHeartRadio broadcast its 2-day music festival on the mobile app in September and was able to gather an impressive 340 million impressions. Digiday reports that Cosmopolitan, another Snapchat Discover brand, gets an average of 3 million views per day. Snapchat receives 4 billion video views a day on its platform (which is the same as Facebook), so it’s little wonder that companies are finding opportunities to get more of these video views for themselves.

What will truly make it a major marketing platform in the coming year is how organic, creative, and behind-the-scenes the branded content on Discover is compared to the advertising options on other social media networks. Even though reports indicate that Snapchat is asking for a steep price of up to $700,000 a day for their ads, major brands will be more than willing to pay up in 2016 if the results continue to trend upwards.

In 2016, Snapchat will grow to finally be on the same playing field in terms of established social media marketing platforms as the other major platforms as long as it can find a way to channel the initial of success of its “Discover” feature into a viable option for smaller businesses.

Apps to Rival Mobile Websites

While it might sound like an outrageous claim, in 2016, mobile apps will outpace mobile site growth and start to become a key player in mobile marketing. There is data to back this claim up. A 2015 study found that smartphone and tablet users spent the majority of their time on apps (75% and 81%, respectively). Another study found that big brands like Apple, eBay, Amazon, Target, Macy’s, and Walmart largely interact with their mobile customers through apps instead of mobile sites.

When asked why they prefer mobile apps over mobile sites, smartphone users 18 years and older responded by saying that apps are more convenient (64% of respondents) and easier to use (62%). 19% of users also said that mobile sites don’t look good or render correctly on their smartphones. Besides just the hassle of going on your mobile browser, the added benefits of an app include but are not limited to:

• Push notifications
• Cloud integration
• Offline/online access
• Enhanced security
• Branding freedom
• More personalization for users

Mobile users are already spending the majority of their time on apps, and with the capabilities of app indexing and setting up deep links that will eventually lead to seamless integration between apps and SEO, business owners will start to focus on creating and maintaining apps for their businesses instead of simply improving their mobile sites during the coming year.

Mobile Marketing Matters in 2016

Perhaps the biggest mobile-wide trend that we expect to see in 2016 is more purchases right on a user’s mobile device. Whether that is through a mobile payment solution, a mobile app or a social buy button, brands should be positioning themselves in such a way digitally that it is easy for customers to purchase on their mobile devices if they so please. Furthermore, making sure these apps and social presences are prominent through app indexing, deep links, and leveraging exiting social media platforms that are native to mobile like Snapchat is going to be a key any business that hopes to execute mobile campaigns properly. Brands that execute and evolve their digital strategies to include mobile in a prominent way will be ahead of the competition and can expect to cash in accordingly as mobile devices become a viable device to research and finalize a purchase on.

The digital world and the customers in it are changing, and no one knows this more than a company’s marketing department. Marketers now require solidified skills and understanding of the digital world more than ever before, and senior managers in growing companies need to surround themselves with advanced digital expertise. For a corporation with a robust marketing department, or existing branding and creative efforts through an ad agency, it’s hard to imagine where a digital agency might fit in.

While incorporating an agency into your practices may be an option you have already considered, it can be a difficult decision for a large business with an existing marketing process to casually act upon. However, there are many different aspects to an agency that can be beneficial to your company. From strategists and analysts, to designers and developers, there are a lot of roles that a digital agency can play in the growth of your established brand. Below are just a few examples of what a digital agency can do for you.

Data Analysis

When the word on the street is all about Big Data, the people in the C Suite are waking up and paying close attention. While companies have spent years placing the people, infrastructure and most importantly, the processes in place to read relevant data on sales and product trends, the data analysis behind digital behavior is often sorely lacking. Which customers are purchasing products online; and how are they behaving? It’s not enough to have an e-commerce site: It’s time to understand how it is performing by putting the people with the expertise to read, analyze, and optimize the website into place.

Going over sales data was once the Friday afternoon activity in any company. It’s time to expand that to digital data, to learn how the customers are behaving, and what can be done by your business in order to cater towards their wants and needs. Monitoring e-commerce data goes beyond reviewing the sales numbers and associated costs – it is about understanding what the data tells us about our customers, and how we can modify the online experience to maximize sales. Which pages are they visiting throughout their path to purchase? Did they come to the site multiple times before finally buying an item? Tracking their behavior along the way can help you make educated decisions about what changes or alterations need to be made to your site. This information can be used to increase the user experience, and optimize your conversion rate in return.

Quick Monitoring and Insights

With digital we can find out more about our consumers and competitors than ever before. Responding quickly by understanding what your competitors are doing through monitoring and insights, and learning how your consumer behavior might be changing is paramount.

Imagine having the ability to review the exact pattern of how customers walked around your store, engaged with your salespeople, or tested a product: digital tracking tools provide that visibility, and your digital agency’s experts are there to help you read it. Forget visiting every competing store in the mall: Your digital marketing agency will provide a competitive analysis to determine what is going on in your industry, and what your company needs to do in order to rise above the other options within your market.

With monitoring tools on different social media platforms, you can watch what is happening elsewhere, the numbers behind it, and how audiences are responding to it. Your digital agency can provide you with data like the chart below – telling you precisely when a brand’s audience is the most active on social networks and therefore the most attentive to listen to a business’ deals or giveaways. It is another opportunity to strategize your content, and determine when the best time to reach your customers is.

For an offline example: say a competitor places a billboard on the highway, and suddenly their store at the local mall is inundated with sales. In the past, gathering data may have taken weeks to surmise. However in the digital world, we are immediately notified of competitor activity. Analysis, tools, and data help us to see the effectiveness of their behavior, and allow marketers to quickly make educated and responsive decisions to further their own company’s branding efforts.

Creative Thinking

Traditionally, marketing research; product development and R&D departments have lived by monitoring trends and incorporating them into ongoing strategy. As social networking becomes a primary activity for all ages — not just young people— it’s time to use creative thinking to expand research and garner greater shopper insights. Digital agencies are able to incorporate technological trends into creative strategy, whether it’s adding mobile experiences for older shoppers or incorporating a social networking community for an ageing population.

The thorough analysis of your market, competitors, and target audience, allows strategists to think outside of the box and determine new ways to make your business stand out. They can collaborate with you in order to maintain your branding efforts while positioning your company for online growth and success.

Content Repositioning

Advertising agencies have long lived by the adage of shiny, well-branded sales copy: “This car is sleek, goes fast, will get you women.” While this traditional model may continue to work when an extensive ad budget is focused on video, it’s important to expand the focus to digital trends in the industry. Search trends can provide valuable metrics into the content consumers are looking for, or the type of entertainment they’re likely to engage with.

For example, if you had a digital agency that took a look at what copy would best sell cars between being sleek, going fast, and getting women you’d know that, surprisingly, being “sleek” is currently more interesting to consumers than getting women or going fast:

Channel-specific ad strategies that focus on interactive media beyond a 30 second ad clip can provide experiences that are native to digital and provide an added layer of excitement to your product that would never have been conveyed on the TV screen. Use your digital agency’s expertise to understand how a standard creative ad campaign can be repositioned and realigned to cater to a targeted audience on specific digital platforms.

Digital Optimizations

It’s not just enough to take your ad and slap it up in the digital space. A billboard that works on the highway won’t work the same on social media or the homepage of a major website. Just as a brochure that works great when handed to customers won’t have the same impact if it’s a simple downloadable pdf on microsite. Digital experts can help you optimize your ad campaigns according to the outlet you want to pursue, while tailoring the digital media to succeed in its new online habitat.

Including relevant calls-to-action can encourage visitors to become a part of your online community and draw them towards your business in a way that a billboard or a commercial can’t do. Asking for email signups and social follows, while making sure your microsites and landing pages follow SEO best practices can go a long way in terms of creating a brand identity for your company online. Keep your content updated, current, and most importantly, shareable, and integrate your campaigns across social networks in tandem with print and television. Your digital agency is there to work alongside any existing creative efforts in order to optimize the perfect digital campaign.

Complement Internal Resources

A digital agency isn’t here to replace your internal team, we’re here to partner with you and supplement your efforts. Sales and marketing experts with decades of experience in the industry might be perfect for facilitating an online Q&A that will help you sell your business online, but it’s up to your agency to help you make sure the event is marketed so that potential customers actually show up.

Taking your business online goes beyond a simple website or Facebook page. For a correctly optimized digital presence, integrating every aspect of your sales cycle, your product development process, and your customer service management into your digital strategy needs to take place. Digital agencies are partners in progress as businesses navigate an increasingly complex landscape. It is time to stop thinking of digital agencies and internal marketing teams as two forces that don’t mix. Instead, think of them as two different but essential parts of any effective online marketing effort.

November is important for many reasons: Thanksgiving, the beginning of the holiday season, Black Friday, and to a somewhat lesser degree, the whole month is “No Shave November”. In honor of the “Movember” movement that seeks to solve men’s health issues like Prostate Cancer, Testicular Cancer, poor mental health, and physical inactivity, many men grow mustaches in a show of solidarity and in an effort to raise money. If you haven’t given already this year, you can do so here.

The month of November is quickly coming to an end, and for those us (myself included, for as long as my facial hair would allow) who have spent November growing out a mustache it’s time to consider trimming things back a bit – but that can be easier said than done. Between finding a razor that can handle your new, bushy moustache and making sure that it isn’t a low quality model that will leave you with permanent scars all over you your face, shaving correctly can be surprisingly tricky.

Enter Dollar Shave Club. For just a few dollars a month they will send you everything you need for a great shave right to your door. The business has been around since 2012 and is still flourishing – recently raising an additional 15 million in funding. Known predominantly for their attention-grabbing video advertising creative, their website is their main hub of business and seeks to get new users to sign up for their service.

For many who are getting ready to trim down their facial hair as December quickly approaches and are looking for solutions online, there’s no doubt that the website is beautifully designed, but how does it stack up in terms of search engine optimization? Just like every other “1 Hour SEO Audit Challenge” we’ve completed, we took a look to find out by grading their SEO efforts with our usual tools and the following key categories:

• Content
• Schema and SERP Friendliness
• Backlinks
• Site Speed
• Meta Tag Issues
• Title Tag Issues

Tools Used

• Ragepank
• Screaming Frog
• Mozbar
• Open Site Explorer
• Copyscape
• Microsoft IIS
• SEMRush
• GTMetrix
• Dareboost

Content

Although a lot of the focus in the SEO world is on backlinks right now with Google recently releasing a copy of their search quality rating guidelines and talk of the new Penguin update being released before the end of the year, it is important to not forget about how essential content is to a good SEO strategy.

Creating high quality content across your website is a great way to keep visitors engaged with your website and coming back time and time again to look at anything new you’ve added since their last visit. It also provides your website with a vehicle with which it can rank for relevant keywords that are added to the header tags, body text, and other important sections of your content. For more tips on things you can do to optimize the content of your blog specifically, check out my recent blog post.

So how does Dollar Shave Club stack up in the world of content marketing? As it turns out, phenomenally well. You’ve probably seen their video advertising below, which is quite memorable and is employed throughout their site, but more importantly they have a top-notch blog called “The Bathroom Minutes” that is updated just about every two days with new content that includes unique images and helpful how-to guides on shaving. It is one of the best examples of content marketing on a blog we’ve seen in this series so far, and is really quite impressive.

As if that wasn’t enough, the icing on the cake is that the blog content is repurposed as an offline magazine that ships with the razors. This is the first use of an offline/online content marketing campaign we’ve seen in this series, and it is a brilliant idea, considering users are spending a lot of time in their bathrooms and are likely to actually take the time to read the included magazine.

The only minor issue is a missed opportunity with all the image content that Dollar Shave Club creates. Of the 96 images we were able to crawl on the site, more than half (57 to be exact) were missing image alt text. This should be added so that people looking for the phenomenal images they create for their blog posts can be easily found from a Google search.

Grade: A+

Schema and SERP Friendliness

I’ve said it countless times on this series, but if there’s one section that continually is underwhelming it has been our ongoing search for a site that does schema correctly. Doing schema well can be a huge benefit for any business, and websites really need to start taking it more seriously in order to gain additional real estate in the search results for their pages, whether that is images of logos, location information, or review data on an individual product.

Last month we expanded this section to include other things that make a website more accessible on search engines, including sitelinks and Google My Business data, because realistically the goal here is to increase CTR on organic search results and these elements help achieve that goal.

So is Dollar Shave Club finally going to be the business that does everything perfectly? Almost. They’ve done a fantastic job with their branded SERP – it has Wikipedia information and other brand info pulling in the top right hand corner, and they also have sitelinks defined in order to help funnel traffic directly to their most important pages. They also have basic schema mark-up on their blog, which is fantastic.

However, I couldn’t find schema on their product pages or (in a lot of ways more importantly) on their review page. Both of these pages are designed impeccably and the review page in particular offers lots of great content that could benefit from schema markup, even though the reviews are more analytical than an actual value or # of stars.

Grade: B+

Backlinks

As I mentioned in the “content” section, links and a website’s backlink profile in general is currently the focus for a good % of SEO professionals. With news that Google is about to roll out Penguin 4.0, their update for deciding where a website deserves to rank based on the links it has amassed, there has even been speculation that this update will be the last of it’s kind – with rolling updates to replace it in the near future.

This is bad news for sites that are sticking their toes into the dark world of bad (or “Black Hat”) SEO, and a wake up call for business to get their link profiles in order before the end of the year. While these updates historically have only affected rankings in 1-3% of Google search queries, depending on what kind of links a site has amassed and where they are coming from, websites could find themselves losing significant levels of organic traffic in the not-so-distant future.

Does Dollar Shave Club have anything to worry about with this upcoming update? The short answer is no, not at all. With a domain authority of 63 and 7,004 total links coming from 1,701 root domains, Dollar Shave Club clearly has a natural and authoritative backlink profile. With less than 7 links coming to their sites from each domain that links to them, there are clearly no spammy link building practices going on, and the links they do have in their backlink profile are impressive – ranging from CNN and the Wall Street Journal to Wired.

The only drawback I’m seeing is that there is almost no product-specific anchor text. Natural anchor text should certainly be the bread and butter with a major of a domain’s inbound links, but getting a bit of keyword-rich anchor text like “razor” and “blades” would definitely be a good addition.

Grade: A-

Site Speed

While it doesn’t get much fanfare and is often considered one of the less sexy SEO elements of a website, site speed is quietly a cornerstone of good website keyword rankings. Good site speed not only provides a great user experience that decreases bounce rate and increases time on site on a website on both desktop and mobile devices, it is also a technical element that Google weighs when considering how to a rank an individual page. Thankfully, site speed is also one of the easiest elements to fix through things like image optimization and quicker hosting solutions – so there are very few excuses if your website is loading slowly.

Dollar Shave Club’s site speed is by no means poor, but there are some easy fixes they could do to increase it further. The first, and most obvious (according to both GTMetrix and Dareboost) revolves around images on the homepage. Dareboost calls for image compression on four image files, while GTMetrix suggests specifying height/width image dimensions within code for faster load times. Both of these fixes should be relatively simple and could improve load times dramatically for users and search engine crawl bots alike.

Grade: B

Meta Tag Issues

Meta tag issues are widespread in this series, particularly when it comes to meta descriptions. Partly because they don’t play a direct role in how Google ranks its results, many businesses that we’ve looked at on this series fall short when it comes to defining them. Many businesses opt to willfully ignore meta descriptions and just let Google pull the first text they find on a page in order to populate the field.

While this ensures that you don’t have a search result with no description text, it is still a huge mistake. Businesses should be defining meta descriptions themselves in order to dictate how their search results appear, as it is important to make description text that entices users to click on a result through descriptive and engaging calls to action right on the search engine results page.

When it comes to meta descriptions and meta keywords, Dollar Shave Club falls a bit short. While they do have a variation of different meta descriptions on their pages, we were only able to find 10 unique variations for the 88 different pages that had descriptions defined. This isn’t ideal, as each page should have a unique meta description assigned to it that tells searchers exactly what they can expect from the page as opposed to a broadly used meta description across multiple different pages. Furthermore, 15 pages were missing meta descriptions altogether, including the very important “gift” and “join our team” pages. This should be fixed as it could conceivably be lowering the click through on those pages from organic searches.

While the issues Dollar Shave Club has with meta descriptions are a bit troubling, issues with meta keywords are much more problematic. Google has expressly stated that they don’t want websites to define meta keywords, and as a result websites should remove them from their meta tags immediately. Despite this, Dollar Shave Club features them on 60.23% of their site (53 pages out of the 88 we crawled). While it’s good to see that they want to rank for “buy razor blades”, “buy razors”, “mens razors”, and other keywords, this is not a good tactic, and could actually be hurting them more than it helps.

Grade: C+

Title Tag Issues

It goes without saying that title tags are the reigning king of on-site SEO elements. It has been that way for a long time and there are no signs that any other on-site element will usurp the title tag for this honor. This isn’t particularly surprising as a title tag is the first thing a user sees and clicks on when browsing through the search engine results page. As a result, making sure that your title tag is optimized for targeted keywords and range in character length from 55-60 characters is an important step for any online business that is trying to attract new sources of website traffic from Google searches.

Dollar Shave Club has a decent amount of work to do with their title tags, but the good news is that the fixes are relatively minor and could help them substantially increase their online traffic. While the site is not missing title tags on any of their pages, it suffers from a number of different duplicate title tags that appear site wide, and this should be addressed so that each page has a unique title tag that has a bit more keyword targeting for the individual page.

This is particularly true on the homepage, which should have something beyond just “Dollar Shave Club” as it’s title tag. As it stands, that’s only 17 characters – leaving plenty of space to include some of the meta keywords we identified in the “Meta Tag Issues” section after the branded term. This will drastically help the website rank better for some high-volume organic keywords that drive qualified traffic to the website.

Grade: B-

General Suggestions

Dollar Shave Club does a lot of things really well. In general, their content and branding was some of the best we’ve ever seen on this series, and for that they deserve a ton of credit. Their naturally amassed, authoritative backlink profile reflects just how strong their branding and content is, and is a great example of link building done right.

However, they fall short in some of the more technical elements, such as meta tags, title tags, and a few basic elements that can help improve site speed. These should be fixed as soon as possible, with a priority given to including more keywords in title tags and removing meta keyword tags.

Some other elements that we didn’t touch on that should be addressed as well are: missing canonical tags (57.95%) – which should be added to negate the odds that someone steals their content with a scraping tool to post elsewhere without giving them getting some sort of credit, a number of duplicative H1 tags across multiple pages – which should be fixed to be more in line with the keyword targeting that should happen with title tags moving forwards, and 3 pages that are currently 404ing.

Overall, Dollar Shave club is a phenomenally strong brand with fantastic content, good SERP visibility, and a robust backlink profile. If they can manage to do some of the very slight tweaks with their technical SEO, they will become an even greater force in their industry and are sure to capture massive amounts of online traffic moving forward.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…for email marketing. With Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday barely behind us, the holiday shopping season has officially kicked off. When we weren’t cashing in on our favorite deals this past weekend, we were keeping track of some of the greatest email marketing campaigns that filled up our inboxes.

Take a look at the brands that we thought were winners this week, and the techniques they used to help their campaigns stand out amongst the busiest time of the year for both our inbox, and our wallet.

1. Vibrant Imagery: American Eagle

Rather than displaying all of their products and prices in the body of their emails, American Eagle went purely for aesthetics. Their stunning imagery illustrates what the holiday season is all about; Christmas lights, log cabins, food, and friends. Every email throughout the weekend started with a unique, yet cohesive image followed by more specific products and pricing information as a reader continued to scroll down the message. Together they told the story of the perfect holiday weekend, and through the simple design, they subtly let their readers know what they could save by shopping now.

Congested emails and busy layouts can be overwhelming and turn customers away rather than capturing their interest. If you can find a balance between detailed content, and striking imagery, it is likely your emails will be the ones that stand out amongst the other noise of the holiday shopper’s inbox. There is a reason they say “less is more,” and American Eagle’s numerous email campaigns throughout Thanksgiving weekend exemplify that mantra.

2. Storyline: Uber

Although the importance of storytelling has never been understated, now more than ever brands are creating campaigns with a narrative. On November 30, Uber began its “5 Days of Giving.” Partnering with luxury brands like L’Occitane and Diane von Furstenberg, drivers will deliver free gifts to riders in New York City who enter the code ‘TAPGETGIVE’ through the Uber app, with Uber announcing every day which brand’s gifts will be available. They are also launching Uber (RED) in conjunction with World AIDS Day on December 1st where riders can select this option and donate $5 on top of their fare to help fight AIDS around the world.

Since Uber isn’t necessarily trying to sell a product, they want readers to engage with their brand and use their app throughout the coming holidays. This campaign is telling a story to readers that will keep them coming back every day to see what prizes they can win, while also presenting them with the chance to give back. The narrative balances the theme of the gifting season by letting users have a chance to win luxury items, without losing sight on what the holidays are really about; giving back. It is a great email campaign to keep their users engaged throughout the rest of the week, and the end of the year.

3. Subject Line

The very first thing your audience will see is your subject line, and it is what determines whether or not someone even takes the time to open your email or hit the “delete” button. While some companies get right to the point and put their deals and discounts prominently in there, hoping to bring in shoppers, others have gotten a little more creative with this element of the email campaign.

Creative: Target

Target hit the bullseye quite literally this weekend. They included a little Target icon in the subject line of their email for a subtle, yet significant way to get their messages to stand out in each recipient’s inbox. Throughout the year, we have seen similar trends with companies including small illustrations like stars and snowflakes in their headings in order to draw in customers. Especially during this major shopping weekend, this extra touch can certainly help those emails make an impression.

Target’s use of the little bullseye not only captures the reader’s attention, but it helps the potential customer easily find that email again when digging back through their messages. It is very similar to Target’s own logo, making it easy for people to associate with the company. Readers will remember that, and know what to look for in their inbox when it comes time to make a purchase. Cute and creative, nice job Target!

Compelling: Madewell

Returning to work after a holiday weekend is always a challenge. However, when that first Monday back happens to be Cyber Monday, sitting at your desk in front of a computer all day might not be so bad. Madewell helps alleviate any guilt you have over online shopping on-the-clock with their subject line assuring you that “Your boss is shopping today too.” It’s funny, it’s compelling, and it’s true.

The short message quickly captures the attention of the reader and prompts them to not only open the email, but make their way to the website to start shopping. A subject line as simple as this can strongly stand out amongst the other deals that clog up an inbox throughout Thanksgiving weekend.

4. Gif: Brooks Brothers

Thanks to Internet powerhouses like Buzzfeed, GIFs are the language of choice for any millennial wanting to express their ‘feels’. Of late, marketers are capitalizing on the increasingly popular storytelling tool, as the file format proves to be an amazing tool in capturing the recipient’s attention in ways static images cannot.

Animated GIFs help provide valuable content to readers, while allowing companies to stand out from the competition – a winning combination that entices potential customers to open and read your email, and engage with your business. However, GIFs have to do more than just look pretty – they have to convert customers.

Brooks Brothers, a company that dates back almost two centuries, has increasingly been maximizing their modern marketing efforts to attract a younger audience, and it’s working. Brooks Brother’s combination of Cyber Monday-esque design and strong messaging bolsters it as our top email campaign with a GIF. It’s simple, yet entertaining, and presents the reader with all of the information they need to start shopping.

Several marketing studies have shown that using a GIF, in comparison to using static images, can increase the CTR and conversion rates of an email campaign. Brooks Brothers drew attention to the most important element of their email, the CTA, by having it light up at the very end of the animation. A GIF is a great way to increase both email engagement and revenue to the business. Utilizing this during the weekend of Black Friday definitely helped their message stand out.

5. Unique CTA: Alessandro International

A call to action – it tells visitors what to do, where they should click, and what to buy.

Although I’m sure we don’t need to describe the importance of including a call-to-action (CTA), creating an effective CTA might be harder than you think, especially during the madness of Black Friday. Strong messaging, evoking emotion, and sustaining the focus of the reader are key elements of a high-performing CTA, so we have to admit – we were a little disappointed to see ‘Shop Now’ in almost every email this year.

Marketers are constantly looking for new ways to convert readers, and with the volume an inbox sees during the holidays, a creative CTA is now vital. A great example of this was Allessandro International’s Cyber Monday campaign, prompting readers in a refreshingly unique way with their “I WANT IT” CTA.

“I WANT IT”. Not only is it short and clear, but it’s simply different from everything else we typically see. The use of urgent language encourages immediate action and proves extremely effective in prompting readers to click through. The copy also persuades customers to shop for themselves, not just the people on their list. It works in conjunction with their ‘treat yourself to…’ attitude, and let’s be honest, it’s ok to admit that Cyber Monday shopping is mostly for yourself.

With the volume of emails that fill an inbox during the holidays, its easy to lose sight of what strategies to employ to your own campaigns. However, creativity can go a long way this time of year, and there are always new techniques to try out in order to make the most of your email marketing efforts.

Designing a mobile app and designing a mobile website can have some overlapping similarities. A lot of the best practices such as usability, cohesiveness, and conciseness are all still incredibly important, and companies should be employing them regardless of the platform they are creating. However, there are still some important design elements that stand out when creating a mobile app. Here are some of the most important design and development features that will create an optimal experience for your users, and continued success for your business.

Consider Operating Systems

Designing the functionality of a mobile app will largely depend on the operating system you choose to build it on. Each mobile user has their own device of choice that they prefer to use, so each mobile app has to be adaptable to various operating systems. When you think about programs like Gmail or Instagram, they appear slightly differently depending if you’re accessing the apps from an Android device or from an iPhone. That being said, the overall feel shouldn’t be drastically different, but it should appeal to the unique features that those devices may have. Certain navigational patterns are native to certain devices. For example, if you’re trying to delete something on an iPhone, the natural instinct is generally to slide your finger across the screen. Think about what’s intuitive for each device as far as general actions that the user needs to take while using your app. Whatever those actions may be, the design of them should reflect the intuitive action that is associated with that operation system.

Optimize Interaction for Touch

Keep in mind that users will be interacting with your app on a mobile device, not a desktop. This requires taking steps to optimize the platform for touch rather than a mouse. You want to limit the amount of hand movements and actions a user has to go through in order to accomplish a task or find information. You also want to prevent them from having to use two hands at any point in the navigation. Consider this when determining button placement, and creating long and scrollable pages instead of burying content deep within a bunch of tabs. Using “hamburger menus” can be a useful technique to organize content in a way that is recognizable to app users. You want your app to be an easy experience for your audience, and consolidating your information will prevent them from having to switch hands too often, or get distract from what the app is actually offering.

Battery Life

You always want to be considerate of how much your mobile app is going to cost a user in terms of bandwidth. You want to make your app engaging and purposeful, while keeping the design streamlined and simplified. You don’t want your app to eat up the battery life of your audience, or else they won’t want to use it. So design an easy and simple platform with all of the essentials needed for the app to be a success. However, get rid of any unnecessary animations, and lose any background activities that just don’t need to be there. This will help people get exactly what they came to your app for, without it disrupting the rest of their mobile experience.

Rewards for Click Actions

An app user has the expectation that their phone will respond quickly and efficiently to any action they try to do, so you want to make sure that your platform meets those expectations. You want to reduce the amount of clicks it takes to complete a certain action, but for each of these actions, you need to give the user some indication that something is being accomplished. For each of these actions such as clicking a button, liking something, sharing something, or refreshing a page, there should be some sort of response or feedback. These act as a reward or indication that the app recognizes something is being done, and the user can understand that an action is happening. A change in color, a glow, a noise, or an animation can serve as the equivalent of a click or a hover state on a desktop. Apps like Snapchat have the dancing ghost logo, and Twitter has a pinwheel that indicates when a page is being loaded to show users that what they are trying to do is actually being recognized. These are all little techniques that can help make the user experience natural and easy to understand.

Focus on Intuition

Instead of building a platform within the standards of web browser, a mobile app design has to depend on the guidelines of the operating system it is created on. An app should intuitively be able to adapt to the different size screens of the same operating system so that it works for all users, and the navigation patterns should be fairly identical across all platforms as well. There should be a sense of familiarity to the interactions and functionality of your app. There has to be a clear design pattern for architecture so that it is intuitive enough for first time users and still interesting for returning users. This can get challenging across different operating systems as what is a native action to Android, may not be native action to iOS. However, a universal design technique you can include is a natural path for the users to take. Place controls near the element that they will control, like an arrow or call to action that is in the proximity to show association between the two. This shows the audience that one interacts with the other and it makes sense. From the moment a user opens your app, the entire experience should be intuitive and logical in relation to how other mobile apps function. These small design techniques can be the defining factors that make that happen.

Aesthetics

When it comes down to aesthetics, there are a lot of similarities between mobile app best practices and those of mobile websites. You have to create an experience for the user that is practical for the size screen they are using. High resolution images are a must, with proper sizing in relation to the rest of the content on the page. There also needs to be large typography, with proper line height and letter spacing that allows users to consume the content from at least arm’s length. You want to avoid pinching and zooming as much as possible, so present the information to your audience in a clean and clear way that they can enjoy without having to work too hard for it.

It’s no surprise that Instagram is quickly becoming one of the most impactful social media channels out there. In just over 5 years, Instagram has built a community of 400M+ active monthly users, posting 80M+ photos every day and generating 3.5B daily likes. Needless to say, the numbers are quite impressive!

Instagram has done a great job in creating a clean, well-designed application that doesn’t overwhelm the user. The simplicity of the platform, coupled with its visual appeal, has allowed Instagram to quickly build a large community of highly-engaged users.

As marketers, this highly-engaged community is one of Instagram’s most attractive attributes, but the challenge is understanding how to market to them. Instagram has stuck to its core feature of allowing users to edit, caption, upload and view captivating imagery. The limited capabilities have challenged marketers to get creative and maximize their efforts with the opportunities they’re given. Even with the recent opening of their API to all advertisers, Instagram has kept it a priority to maintain the integrity of the user-experience.

If you’re simply wondering whether Instagram is the right channel for your business, the answer is simply YES! Every brand has a story to tell. However, if you’re wondering what you need to do before getting started, here’s a list of steps to help guide you along the journey.

1. Define Your Goal

Before you decide to create an Instagram Business account, it’s important to make sure you have clearly defined goals. What are you looking to achieve from your Instagram account? Are you looking for a place to interact with your customers? Are you trying to increase overall brand awareness? Increase foot traffic? Drive online sales?

Your messaging should have a clear call-to-action to help guide your followers to make or take your desired action. Having clearly defined goals will allow you to optimize your content and messaging to help achieve your brand’s specific goals.

2. Know Your Audience

If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, you can’t possibly know what to market. Having a deep understanding of your audience will significantly impact the way you communicate with them.

Develop your customer persona to help you understand what your customers’ values are. What are their interests? What are their daily activities? What do they care about outside of what your specific business offers? The more you know about your audience, the better you can tailor your content. As a result, you’re able to provide a stronger value to them. Today’s consumer is very savvy, and the days of “selling” to your customer are gone. Rather than buying what you’re selling, customers are buying why you’re selling it.

Give your audience a look into your brand, and humanize your brand to create an emotional connection. An important thing to keep in mind here is the 70/30 guideline. Generally speaking, 70% of your posts should be focused on something that your audience finds valuable, and the remaining 30% of your content should be focused on you and the products or services you’re selling.

3. Develop Your Style Guide

So, you have defined your goals and have a solid understanding of your audience. Now, how do you effectively broadcast your message to that audience? Developing your style guide is crucial in building brand awareness and establishing credibility amongst your audience. What kind of voice and tone best represents your brand and appeals to your audience? What feelings do you want to evoke surrounding your brand? What color palette and visual style best evokes those feelings?

Maintaining a consistent voice and look in your marketing is what helps make your brand recognizable. The goal is for someone to see your content and know right away that it belongs to your brand.

4. Create a Content Calendar

Before you get started with a new Instagram account for your business, it’s best to build out an editorial calendar with a plan for your posts. The last thing you want when building up a new account is to be at a loss for content, so be prepared and plan ahead.

Make a list of the type of content you want to share on your account to help you build out your calendar. In addition to product-related content, you may want to consider sharing customer testimonials, a look behind-the-scenes, pop culture references, etc.

Can you show your followers a new way to use your product? Oreo used their social channels to present different ways that Oreos can be used by creating short videos with the hashtag #oreosnackhacks. Can you give your followers an inside look into how your product is made? Gotham Greens, an urban rooftop greenhouse based in New York City, does a great job of showing their produce in the making.

Remember that social media is real-time and your content calendar is a guideline to keep you on track. Be prepared to adapt to real-time events and be flexible in the event that external factors may impact your content. As you move forward with your content development, refer back to your initial list to ensure that you’re sticking to the strategy and working towards your goals.

5. Commit Yourself

Being successful on Instagram requires commitment. It requires ongoing dedication to developing content and posting on a regular and frequent basis. If you want a presence on Instagram, then be present! Delegate someone to run your account that has a deep understanding of the brand voice and can dedicate time to building and maintaining your community. Once you’ve established a following, your fans will have expectations of you to be consistent. They are following you because you have provided something of value to them, and the best way to keep them loyal is to keep fulfilling their expectations.

Instagram effectiveness

Instagram is an incredibly valuable platform that gives businesses the opportunity to connect with a massive audience on a very personal level. Companies are able to show an inside look into how they operate, giving them an opportunity to humanize their brand. These efforts help develop stronger loyalty and ultimately create brand advocates.

Essentially, Instagram is a platform that, with the right amount of dedication, every business can benefit from. A picture is worth a thousand words, and in a world where we can be limited to 140 characters or less, a thousand words can go a long way!

2015 was another year of massive growth in the digital marketing industry, with digital ad spend growing by a massive 17% to $58.12 billion dollars according to eMarketer. The B2B vertical enjoyed a large amount of this growth when it came to digital advertising and marketing, and many businesses who have properly used digital channels to generate new business had great years as a result. This was particularly apparent when it came to how efficiently certain marketing tactics were used by B2B companies over the course of 2015. Here are five B2B marketing tactics that set the tone for 2015 and are certain to be backbones of B2B digital marketing strategies in the year to come.

Mobile Marketing Strategies

2015 was undoubtedly a year of massive growth for mobile marketing, and this was particularly true in the world of B2B business. With more than a third of US B2B marketing professionals using a mobile device 50-75% of the time when researching purchase decisions digitally, it’s little wonder that 65% of B2B marketers used mobile sites and mobile apps as a key part of their marketing strategy, while 45% took advantage of mobile email:

A great example of a business taking advantage of mobile over the course of 2015 comes from General Electric, who partnered with 40 merchants to promote local offers via Promoboxx’s digital marketing system. Promoboxx developed ads and landing pages for GE that were then co-branded with local stores in order to create a B2B relationship that was extremely strong. Leveraging Facebook’s mobile newsfeed ads at a CPM rate of $3.65 and a click-through rate of .5% as well as geo-targeted impression on mobile apps like TuneIn Radio, MLB, WeatherBug, Accuweather, and ABC News, GE to generate 1.7 million impressions, the campaign was extremely successful over a two week period.

Looking towards the New Year, recent studies suggest that mobile marketing tactics have been extremely successful for most B2B businesses. B2B product and service providers expect to increase the percentage of their mobile marketing budgets from 5.1% to 14.4% and 5% to 13% respectively, suggesting that mobile marketing spend during 2015 generated results that warrant such increases.

Targeted Content Marketing

According to March 2015 data from IDC research, for 44% of US B2B professionals, it takes between four months and more than a year to make a purchase decision. As a result it’s little wonder that content is extremely important in order to help facilitate consistent brand recognition amongst potential clients throughout their buyer journey.

With more than one-third of B2B tech decision-makers reading at least six pieces of content before making a purchase decision, and almost half reading somewhere between two to five pieces of content before their purchases according to Eccolo Media, having targeted content marketing remains one of the most important B2B marketing strategies used in 2015.

Content marketing has been a big player in the world of B2B digital marketing for some time now, but in 2015 it evolved to encompass more than just having a blog for the savviest businesses. Content types like infographics, videos, articles, digital magazines, research reports, and gamification all are now recognized players by most B2B marketing executives to not only build brand awareness and loyalty in the B2B space, but also to help drive consideration and purchases of a product or service in the B2B space:

In my monthly SEO audit series we’ve taken a look at a lot of different websites and how they manage their content, and one B2B provider really stood out with how they manage their content marketing efforts: ReturnPath. They clearly understand that content marketing is so much more than just having a blog that is updated infrequently and have content like webinars, whitepapers, fact sheets, research reports, testimonials, and events. Even better, each of these pieces of content is hyper-targeted to the perceived needs of their customers and is also leveraged to capture emails in order to help facilitate easy email marketing as customers move down the conversion funnel.

Having strong, targeted, content marketing was one of the best ways B2B businesses could generate leads online. As we move into 2016 there is no reason that this should stop being the case. In order to take full advantage of this strategy in the new year look for more businesses to create new, unique types of content to help them stand apart from the competition and generate even more leads.

Social CTA Buttons

Back in the “Targeted Content Marketing” section you may have noticed in the content types graph that the #1 content type for effective awareness was a tie between social media posts and social media sites. While social media is certainly a great tool for generating awareness, it is also an extremely important tool for generating demand and actual purchases of a B2B product or service as well. According to a 2015 survey by Bizible, throughout 2015 paid social media was used by 58.3% of B2B marketers to generate demand – more than TV, radio, and print ads and video advertising combined.

While B2B certainly has a longer lead time than B2C, that doesn’t mean that direct response advertisements on social media with calls to action won’t work. This is particularly true for B2Bs that leverage services like retargeting to inform who they serve direct response advertisements to in order to take the amount of visits to a site into consideration before serving users with an advertisement.

A great example of this is MedCPU who have leveraged Facebook’s “Contact Us” button in their ads to target users in the U.S. who are interested in healthcare IT services and could feasibly be decision makers at hospitals that are buying such products. Over the course of two weeks, MedCPU was able to generate 248 clicks to their site at a cost of only 80 cents a click.

As we enter into 2016 look for more direct response ads and “contact us” buttons on social media. This is particularly true on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter, where social CTA buttons and direct response homepage ad units are now currently being used by a number of different brands.

Email Marketing

While email marketing is certainly not as sexy or trendy as some of the other tactics that are on this list, a recent July 2015 study found that 83% of B2B marketers think that email is currently the most important marketing tactic available. One way that email marketing is becoming trendier for B2B businesses is the concept of “lead nurturing”. Using tools like marketing automation and targeted content to guide prospects through the conversion funnel, almost two thirds of respondents said that lead nurturing would be the most important marketing tactic moving forward.

A great example of lead nurturing in action comes from the National Educational Association’s workflow to try and get current members to add their complimentary life insurance plan. Instead of just sending a blanketed email in the hopes of getting their leads to take an action, they took the time to determine what email would be most relevant to a user based on their behavioral patterns. They build out an extremely specific plan that had dozens of behavioral indicators to determine what email each lead would receive while it was in their workflow:

Look for email and lead nurturing to continue to play a huge role in B2B marketing in 2016, particularly when it comes to mobile devices. Between Q2 2014 and Q2 2015 desktop’s share of email has declined 12%, so businesses that want to maintain a strong email marketing strategy with or without lead nurturing need to take mobile into account – even if desktop’s share of email is still currently 3 times that of mobile.

Precise Location-Based Marketing

One of the most effective and quickly growing areas of digital marketing we’ve seen over the course of 2015 is an increase focus on precision location-based marketing. For B2Bs and B2Cs alike, the more precisely businesses are able to target a specific location or area the better chance they have of finding a qualified audience for their product or service. Whether it is a state, city, city, or even more importantly, a specific building like an airport or a convention center, narrowing down advertising efforts can dramatically increase the efficiency of any digital marketing campaign.

According to a study by Experian Data Quality survey done in August of 2015, US CIOs see the value of this and are planning on almost doubling their focus on gathering location data in 2016. Perhaps even more telling is that according to a study performed by Jivox, more than half of US ad agency executives use location API data to inform their dynamic ad strategies – a type of data that is second only to demographic data.

Over the course of 2016 look for location-based marketing to get even more precise to cater to marketing executives’ demands for more location data that they can efficiently leverage to generate greater ROI. Particularly with new wearable technology getting a major foothold over the course of 2015, there will be an even larger spotlight on mobile devices, with the pairing of mobile to related desktop and laptop devices and extremely precise location tracking down to specific geographical coordinates two particular focuses.

New Year, New Opportunities

While these tactics made up some of the best digital strategies used in 2015, all of these elements, from email to content marketing, will change in some way in the coming year. It is important that B2B businesses take note of changes in each tactic and shift their strategies accordingly to continue to get the most out of their digital marketing initiatives. 2016 provides B2Bs with new opportunities to latch onto evolving trends in the industry and businesses that succeed in 2015 need to make sure they keep innovating to continue to get the greatest ROI possible.

Creating a website is hardly a simple task. It requires extensive planning, intricate design and development work, and the right team of skilled experts to make it all possible. Each and every website is different because all brands have varying objectives and unique needs that they need to fulfill. That being said there is no “one size fits all” website design for brands that really want to use their online presence to promote business growth.

Our approach to design is often unique to each project’s requirements and scale. In the case of larger website projects, we have found that scalability, flexibility, and maintaining a consistent brand style across a large number of pages – often 10,000+ present some of the biggest logistical challenges.

An elegant solution to this is to follow an atomic design process. This is a much more modular and granular approach to website design and build. Rather than designing pre-set page templates and layouts, atomic design is the design of building blocks or content modules that can be added, duplicated and moved within a set of defined rules to create unique pages that work for each type of content and page on a site, while keeping it on-brand.

The atomic design methodology is broken down into 5 distinct phases of website design:

Atoms

In scientific terms, atoms are the basic building blocks that together make up matter. When you translate that over to a website design methodology, they serve a similar purpose. Atoms act as the basic building blocks for all of your website design efforts. While they aren’t design elements that can stand alone, together they create different elements that are used throughout your website’s layout.
In atomic website design, atoms serve as the starting point for all parts of your website design project. Without clearly creating and defining certain design elements, your project would lack consistency and cohesiveness. This holds true especially for projects that encompass an extensive amount of pages. Without defining basic design elements such as font on mobile or a paragraph style for section headers, it would be difficult to not only design but edit different pages as you continue through the design process. Atoms can include any of the following:

• fonts
• color schemes
• buttons
• form fields
• logos
• inputs
• labels

When following this methodology, a lot of designers create their atoms and compile them in a unique style guide. This holds all of the essential atoms you need so that you can pull pieces of each as you start the bigger design elements. Aside from selecting color palettes, or determining what all paragraphs would look like on your pages, designers have to think about the mobile and desktop versions of each as well.

Molecules

In chemistry, molecules represent the smallest part of any chemical element, and are made up from atoms combined together. Similarly, with the atomic design process, molecules are design features that are made up of the basic building blocks defined in the style guide—the atoms.

To better grasp how a molecule would be created in a website design, think about a simple search form. You may combine a button (atom) with the appropriate input (atom) and label (atom) to create a full-functioning search bar (molecule). Those items (the button, input, and label) together create something that is incredibly useful and essential to the functionality of the site, however if they were to act alone, they wouldn’t be as valuable.

Organisms

Organisms are groups of molecules together. What makes these organisms different from a molecule is that there are several of them, allowing the complexity to reach a new level. In website design, organisms are several molecules combined together on a section of your page.
When you think about the masthead at the top of your homepage, you can compare that to molecules combined together to form an organism. On your masthead you likely have your navigation, your search bar, and your logo all together to help your users navigate your site easily. Each of those three features could be used alone if they had to be (molecules). However, if you were to break them down even more, they likely wouldn’t stand alone, they would simply be the basic building blocks necessary to help create the other functionalities of your site (atoms).

Templates

The next phase doesn’t align as closely with chemistry as the previous sections have. Templates are created by putting together all of the organisms to create a website page. This provides you with a much deeper understanding of what the design and page will look like once it’s completed and live.
For the most part, templates are created to show structure and layout—not the specifics of what content will actually be on the page. You can see things like sizing and dimensions, but not how the actual content would fit in. Templates are designed to give a general idea as to what to expect when your site is live, and show how all of the pieces will come together to create a functioning page.

Pages

Very similarly to templates, pages are created to give an even more realistic outlook onto what each page will look like. Often there will be placeholders (ex. “content goes here”) and some imagery to provide a vivid sense of how the page will function.
Since this phase offers the most realistic and accurate depiction of what is to be expected once the website is live, this section is essential for testing and review. You can fully see how content will appear, how the site will function, how images will look next to each other, how text and photos can come together, and how the overall flow of the website and each page will appear. From here, you can make any edits necessary if you’re finding that certain functionalities seem off and the design isn’t supporting your needs as originally intended.

Scalability and Consistency

The best part of this type of website design is that you’re able to lay out exactly what to expect as you move from each design element to the next. By using the building blocks initially created together to create more complex systems within your interface, you can effortlessly focus on scalability and consistency, ensuring your project is completed to serve your users in the most cohesive and user-friendly way possible.