5 Tips For Marketing Online Within Your Niche

5 Tips For Marketing Online Within Your Niche

by | Dec 20, 2017 | Marketing, Social Media

Many companies have a select audience to which their product or service appeals. General marketing tactics may work for the majority of businesses but may not always work within your niche. This is why it?s important to not follow one-size-fits-all marketing strategies and to try and think outside the box. Here are some tips for targeting a niche and getting leads.Outsource specialist marketing companiesIf you don?t want to do your own marketing and would rather hire a company to do it for you, think twice before selecting a general marketing company. It may work out better to find professionals within your niche. If you?re a tech startup hoping to get some press attention, it could be worth looking into a tech-focused PR company who are more likely to have better contacts in tech magazines and blogs that your average generic PR company. Similarly, if you?re looking to get a professional website designed, you may want to consider a designer who caters to your field. There are companies that specialize in web design for specific trades such as?law firm website design that may be able to help you stand out whilst creating something professional and presentable. As with outsourcing any professional, check that these companies have good user reviews and credentials so that you know that you can trust them.Use relevant social mediaIt doesn?t hurt to get your business on all social media platforms, but clearly, some will be more beneficial than other making them more suited for focusing on. Facebook and Twitter are useful for all businesses. Instagram, on the other hand, may only be suited if you have physical results that you can photograph on a regular basis. A cake-making company or a retailer may be able to use Instagram to successfully show off their products, helping them to gain clientele. However, it?s unlikely you?ll get much out of Instagram if you?re an accountancy firm, with little to photograph on a daily basis. Contrastingly, sites like Linked In are likely to far more useful to business-to-business companies like accountancy firms than they are to a cake-baker. Linked In is ideal for professional networking and could be a better place to focus your efforts, messaging and linking up with other companies that might need your services.Focus your keywordsMaking use of the right keywords can get the right people visiting your site. If you?re doing an AdWords campaign and creating a web ad, you?ll want to choose keywords that cause your ad to show up when key people search for you. Whilst it?s good to use some broad keywords, make sure to use some more specific keywords and related keywords within your niche. If your company sells backpacks for travelling, think beyond ?backpack? (people looking for a work or school bag could be searching this) and consider keywords like ?travel backpack?, ?affordable travel gear? and ?passport wallet? (people looking for a passport wallet might also be looking for a new travel backpack).Get involved in online communities related to your nicheThere may be online communities which attract your key client base. If your company sells cameras, you might want to consider photography forums and photography blogs. Promoting your product in these forums and in comments sections of blogs could be seen as spammy, but by contributing regularly you could build a good reputation for yourself which will help your online credibility.Cross-promote with companies within your nicheAnother great way to market within your niche is to team up with a company that sells restaurant bar furniture other companies within your trade. You can agree to promote their wares in exchange that they do the same for you. This could involve advertising the company on your website, posting about them on social media or even retweeting some of their posts. You?ll want to avoid a conflict of interest of course ? if you?re a restaurant, you might not want to promote another restaurant in your area although it could prove beneficial to team up with a local hotel (you recommend them in exchange that they recommend you). If you?re a budget company, you may want to team up with another budget company, whilst a high-end company might benefit to team up with another high-end business.
5 Practical Ways Content Marketing Helps Shorten Your Sales Cycle

5 Practical Ways Content Marketing Helps Shorten Your Sales Cycle

by | Dec 20, 2017 | E-commerce

We all know that in these times when everything has become digital the biggest tool of your marketing strategy is your website. But, of course, it is not enough just to have one. You need to design it carefully in order to allow your users to have free circulation inside it and all the information must be easy to find to make their trip through your sales funnel as fast as possible. Your prospects need to be fully aware of the nature of your business and you need to provide them with all the information necessary, so you don?t get yourself into the position where you will need to explain to your potential customers what is that your company does. In order to help your sales team use their time as effectively as possible in order to shorten your sales cycle, take a look at these tips:

1. Have your answers prepared

Today most of the people are reluctant to buy products or services right away. They want to know everything about a certain product before they purchase it, which results in series of questions that can take for hours. The point is that all these questions are quite similar, so you should gather them around and analyze them to find the certain pattern. When you do, just answer them and put those answers on your company website?s FAQ page. That way you will evade unnecessary questions and make the impression that you?re completely open to your buyers. Maybe it seems too difficult to ?guess? all the questions because people have different ways of putting them, but you just need to use effective keywords and every potential customer will find the way to the answer he or she seeks.

2. Spit it out

Most companies instruct their sales team to postpone the information about the price of a certain product or service until the end of the conversation, which can result in a wasted time. You?re gonna have to tell the price to the customers eventually, so don?t spend hours in the negotiations to realize in the end that they are not prepared for such price from the beginning. Instead, you should make a price page on your website with all the pricing information. That way you won?t be losing your time on people who are not prepared to pay the required sum and that transparency will also make your business honest and trustworthy. Just spit it out and then your salesman will do the rest.

3. Lead them the whole way

When it comes to buying services, your customers will want to know exactly what they get, step by step. We live in capitalist society and our new god is called ?Calculation?, which means that nobody likes surprises anymore, especially when their money is concerned. That?s why you need to tell them in advance what exactly can they expect from doing business with you. That?s why you need to include a step by step breakdown of everything that will be happening once they purchase the service. You can use this breakdown to include some call to action buttons that will additionally drive the interested ones deeper into your sales funnel.

4. It?s not enough being honest, you need to prove it

Today we are surrounded by false information and exaggerating, so you can?t blame your customers if they are not ready to believe everything you say in the beginning. You need to back up every quality you claim to possess. If they are not able to see black and white proof, you won?t have the credibility in their eyes. You need to prove your worth through testimonials and case studies. But don?t brag and flatter yourself, that will cause suspicion immediately. You need to tell stories about your customers, not your company. If you want them to know you offer reliable and super easy storage?solutions, you need to talk about satisfied customers whose life was changed by that product. Yes, changed. You should take examples where your customers were in the transitional moments of their lives like changing homes or expanding the business. This way you will have a voice of a satisfied customer but also an emotional factor to which your potential buyers can connect. They will be sure that you?ll take care of their possessions because you?ll have proven results and there won?t be a need for any additional proof that you?re a confident business choice.

5. Let them know who you are

Tell the story of your company through a portfolio where your work will speak for itself, without bragging. Do it like with testimonials and case studies - concrete results, spiced up with some images and maybe even video. People want to see with their own eyes, and that?s why it?s also a good idea to include pictures of your employees because customers? money goes into their hands. If you give them a face and a name, your future customers will be able to develop their trust more quickly.

Landing Page Design: Tips and Best Practices

Landing Page Design: Tips and Best Practices

by | Dec 15, 2017 | Marketing, Web Design

While the ad copy of your landing page is important, landing page design also plays a large part in maximizing its performance.It's easy to get carried away tweaking all the elements of your landing page's design. However, you want to focus on the changes that will make the biggest impact.To help you increase your conversions, Bradley shaw from dallaswebsitedesign picked up some solid landing page design tips and best practices for optimizing your offer.

Making Your Landing Page Flow?

  1. Remove Unnecessary Distractions
Landing pages should look and feel intuitive. The visitor should quickly get an idea of what they're being offered and what actions they can take upon going to your page. There are many distractions that can get in the way of this process including images, security seals, and even the navigation menu.In this example,VWO increased signups by 100% by simply removing the navigation menu. It goes to show that keeping your design minimal and focused can pay off.
  1. Use Typography that Is Readable
When you study the best landing page examples, you'll notice that most of the pages use typography that's easy to read. There's often nothing fancy going on. The focus is on making sure that visitors can quickly scan the message and get the main point.There are also other elements that make the text, particularly the headline work better. A strong color contrast is used to make the core message stand out. Headlines use bigger and thicker font. There's also a visual hierarchy to the text that leads readers from one point to the next.
  1. Use Relevant Imagery
A common mistake that many landing pages make is using the wrong images to support their offer. Too many websites still rely on stock images to make their website look more professional.The problem with this is that certain stock images have characteristics that indicate that it's a stock image. You want to use strong imagery that supports your message. For example, CodeCombat uses a great image of kids having fun on their computers while learning to programme.
  1. Optimize for Mobile VisitorsMobile Optimized Web Design
Landing page design gets tricky when dealing with mobile visitors. There are many things that you'll have to adjust including the page layout, content formatting, loading speed, font size and web buttons.If you're using a responsive theme, do not assume that your theme will automatically optimize your page for mobile. Do your due diligence and test how your landing page appears on different devices, browsers, and screen sizes.
  1. Use Visual Cues
Visual cues can help visitors pay attention to your message and increase your conversions. You can use them explicitly and implicitly. Arrows, circles and dotted lines would be examples of explicit visual cues.A person looking at a specific direction, spacing, color contrasts and the shape of design elements are examples of implicit visual cues.This study by ConversionXL found that using a direct arrow increased the attention span spent on a landing page form. Ideally, you'll want to use a mix of both for the best results.

Optimizing Forms and Buttons

  1. Experiment with Different Forms
There's nothing wrong with using standard forms if you're just collecting the visitor's name and email. But if your forms call for more than that, you may be able to see better results by using form design that's interactive.Tools like Leadformly allow you to use multi-step or quiz style forms that can increase signups. It also uses a clever progress bar to indicate to users how far they are along into the form.
  1. Optimize Your Call to Action Buttons
Ultimately, you want your visitors to take action. That means that you have to get them to press the button to either subscribe or go to the order page. That's why the design of your call to action button is important.Start by experimenting with the size and color of the button. Next, you want to play around with the actual call to action text.You'll be surprised at how much of an impact that this simple test can make to your conversions. If you're using a longer landing page, you will also want to try adding multiple CTA buttons throughout the page to see how that performs.

Trust and Credibility Elements

  1. If You're Going to Use Testimonials, Make Them Real
Using testimonials on your page is one of the best ways to strengthen your offer. But it can backfire on you if your testimonials are poor. Common mistakes include using low-quality photos (or none at all), using initials instead of full names, and using general feedback.If you're going to use testimonials, make sure that they're real. Include the headshot, full name, title, and company of the person that gave you the testimonial. Using video may be even better as adding video to full-page ads increases engagement by as much as 22 percent.
  1. Adding Trust Elements Can Lift Conversions
There are many other things that you can do besides adding testimonials to get visitors to trust your landing page. If your company has been featured in trusted media channels or publications, you may want to use their logos on your page and link to the source.Other elements that can help you include the about us page, privacy policy, and a money back guarantee if you're making a transactional offer. Some other supporting pages that can help include the how it works and comparison sections.As you can see, there are a large number of design elements that can impact the performance of your landing pages. There's no hard and fast rule for what approaches work. It's best to focus on the fundamentals of why certain design approaches work and experiment with different designs.Hopefully, these tips and best practices will inspire you to go beyond the ad copy of your landing page and get you in the process of optimizing your page's design as well.
How to reduce your Website’s Bounce Rate

How to reduce your Website’s Bounce Rate

by | Dec 7, 2017 | SEO, Web Design, Web Hosting

How to reduce your Website?s Bounce RateWebsites have always been and are still being used as one of the primary tools for leveraging businesses. It is almost rare as a unicorn to find a business that is making insane profits without having a website. And that is because, for a prospective customer, a website is a door to the company?s products & services. Now some people may argue that choosing mobile app development could have been a better option, but then a website, somewhat, builds a foundation where you can connect with your customers in a much broader sense.But then there are times when you wonder why in the world your website isn?t generating business as expected, despite spending a fortune on it. You start doubting your product, as well as your business potential. But most of the times, the real culprit is ?Bounce Rate?.What is Bounce RateThe simplest definition of Bounce Rate is - it is the percentage of visitors that leave a website after viewing the first page. Even simply put, your product or service didn?t seem interesting enough to them. The effect of Bounce Rate on your business could be disastrous if, over the time, nothing is done about it.According to a research, 26-40% Bounce Rate is great, 41-55% is average and anything above it is not what you should be aiming for.So how do you reduce Bounce Rate of your website? If you are looking for an answer, this guide is a must-read for you:ReadabilityThe connection between Bounce Rate and readability is quite apparent; the better they understand, the more they are interested. If you have a WordPress website, you get a free SEO plugin from Yoast. Install it and follow the corrections it suggests to improve your content?s readability.According to Yoast, a piece of content has good readability when:
  • Not more than 25% sentences have more than 20 words.
  • Punctuations and grammar have been well taken care of.
  • There is sufficient use of transition words.
  • Passive sentences are less than 20%
Use sufficient InfographicsVisual communication has always been much more efficient at getting the message across, compared to text only. People find it the content more engaging when you use pictures, GIFs, and videos to communicate. Besides, Google also gives priority to content that has more infographics. And if you good ranking on Google search; chances are, people already trust you enough to go to your website.Integrate the content with your brandIntegrating the content with the brand brings uniformity and a sense of credibility to your website. The sections on your landing page should not feel scattered and must not talk about different or contradictory goals. Carry out extensive research on the tone of how others, in the same line of business as yours, pen down their ideas. Have a logo and a summary of your vision, mission, and offer, apparent enough on the landing page itself. The effect of appropriate content is almost the same on a website and app. That is why, the best mobile app development companies as well, understand the importance of appropriate content integration and make sure it has been seamlessly done.Load-TimeAccording to statistics, a 1-second delay could cost you 7% conversions. According to another study, 53% mobile sites turn into ghost towns if the load times are more than 3 seconds.What do these figures say?It is that people don?t like to wait, periodYou can decrease your website?s load time by using page optimization techniques like using compressed pictures and videos. Apart from that, using cached pages also decreases your load time as the server deploys web pages from local cache.Only use authentic web-hosts to host your website. Some popular web-hosts in India are HostGator, GoDaddy.?Author Bio:Hari Krishna is a well-versed content writer working in FuGenX Technologies, an emerging?mobile app development company New York. He likes to write on technology, start-ups and latest technological innovations that people like to know and share with others.
Top Reasons to Use WordPress Website Development for Business

Top Reasons to Use WordPress Website Development for Business

by | Dec 4, 2017 | Business, Guest Post, WordPress

Almost one out of every four websites on the internet is built on WordPress. From the smallest of businesses to stellar companies like Time Inc. and TechCrunch that garner millions of visits per day, WordPress remains the choice for all.This makes one thing absolutely clear- WordPress development services are reliable and suitable for businesses of all scales and industries. And it?s perhaps for this reason that despite having dozens of CMS in the market, WordPress comfortably trumps them all. Here are some of the reasons you should use it for your business as well:

It?s free

The most basic factor upon which majority of the businesses focus is ROI, i.e., while they do care extensively about the quality, they are equally sensitive about the price at which that is attained. With WordPress, it's win-win. They get to deploy one of the finest CMS with a broad set of features to help them push their business in digital space and the best part, they don?t even have to pay for it.

Extensive set of Plugins

Though WordPress is a complete package when it comes to creating and managing decent websites, there are thousands of other plugins and themes that you can use for additional functionality and give your website a unique feel. While most of the plugins are free to use, there are some paid themes as well for premium users.

High visibility

Websites built on WordPress are known to be SEO-friendly as they are indexed by search engines much better than other websites. This helps in improving the rank of websites in search results, thus, leading to higher visibility and recognition of businesses.

Simple but powerful admin panel

One of the key concerns of many businesses is that though they can get a website developed by hiring WordPress developers, managing them afterward without technical fluency remains a tough task. But with WordPress, users get a drastically simplified admin panel that required no technical knowledge whatsoever for day-to-day management of the website. Sure, having technical efficacy does have its benefits for its ability to edit CSS code for custom design, but it isn?t necessary to manage one?s website efficiently.

Task delegation and roles

Websites are generally managed by a set of different people, all of whom do not necessarily need the same set of privileges. For instance, if you have guest-blogging enabled on your site, they should be able to only write and not edit anything else. Similarly, for editors, there should be privileges of only writing and editing the content but not modifying the design or other aspects. WordPress has such capabilities built-in and can be easily managed through admin panel by granting or revoking different levels of privileges.Additionally, since the admin may not be available 24*7 to manage the site, they can easily schedule content that will automatically be posted at a specified time.

Social media and community integration

WordPress websites can be easily integrated with most of the popular social media platforms, and even the on-site community like the comments section can be easily managed through a simple interface.To put it simply, it creates aesthetically beautiful websites for free, offers a broad range of functionalities that even a non-technical person can easily manage, and yes, is powerful enough to handle millions of users. The only thing you need is to hire WordPress developers to create give a great start to your website and once it gets onboard, you can efficiently manage your business from anywhere you like.