So, you are considering which are the best healthcare marketing ideas and top trends for 2020?
You want a progressive medical marketing plan that will set your practice apart, highlight its uniqueness, and attract ideal clients at scale.
This guide will show you 14 ways to market your medical practice, a clinic, a hospital in 2020 that are sure to convert.
One thing to note right from start: offline and online marketing methods are converging. What’s more, you’ll want to combine both strategies to win at medical practice marketing in 2020.
For example, local SEO techniques will continue to be a lucrative marketing technique for local practices that want to attract foot traffic through the door for both general consultations and treatment procedures.
Without further ado, here are effective techniques to add to your medical practice marketing plan starting immediately.
Wyzol made an interesting finding sure to concern any healthcare marketing plan for 2020.
96% of respondents said they’d watched an explainer video to learn about a brand’s service or product.
Perhaps you have a new medical procedure you are offering that the competition isn’t. Maybe it’s a new medical device that makes procedures safer, making a diagnosis more accurate, or your healthcare services quicker.
Show it in the video. But even more effective in 2020 will be hosting scheduled live videos, video podcasts, and streaming live events.
More people want to interact with your medical practice more directly.
They want to ask relevant questions they can get instant answers to during a live video.
See your practice establishing itself as an authority in your region because you offer practical advice on live videos—and at a convenient time.
And it’s never been easier to host a live video event. YouTube, Facebook. LinkedIn. Instagram. Twitter. Even Amazon. All these platforms now support live video.
Live video and podcasts are bringing an even more interactive edge to social healthcare marketing. Consider using this channel in 2020 to endear your medical practice to your target audience.
About 68% of people said they’d prefer watching a short video to learn about a service or product.
Compare that to text-based articles (15%), infographics (4%), pitches and presentations (4%), and ebooks and manuals (3%).
Source: 2019 video marketing statistics – Wyzol
So, video marketing will continue to soar in 2020.
For your healthcare video marketing, you can use interactive, animated, and screen recorded demo videos.
That way, you can help leads to ask you questions about your practice, understand how you conduct a procedure, and how to use your medical practice app to make an appointment, payments, etc., respectively.
Another thing:
In recent times, the trend has been to share short-form videos.
In 2020 and beyond, using long-form video will become even more attractive.
Longer videos mean you have more people sticking around to get all the juicy health advice you have to offer—and often for free.
Search engines equate readers sticking around on a particular piece of healthcare content to valuable content it should rank high up in search results.
And the higher your ranking the more organic traffic you will attract to your website, blog, or brick-and-mortar clinic or hospital.
Video Marketing Tip 1: While it’s a good idea to only share videos on your YouTube and Vimeo channels, the above trick will work best when you embed videos on your website or within your blog’s text posts.
Video Marketing Tip 2: Before making a video go to Ubersuggest website and type in the topic your video is going to be about. Find the right keyword with the most search volume that is closely related to your topic. Use this exact keyword in the video title, in the video description and pronounce this exact keyword during your video multiple times.
Video Marketing Tip 3: Did you know that you can get your video or audio transcribed for less than $1 per minute? Do it with Trint or Scibblr and your videos will get a lot more views and engagements. Use captions in your videos too.
Speaking of all those platforms…
You’ll want to present your case in front of a large audience to increase the number of leads at the top of your funnel.
But not only can it be expensive to create custom healthcare content marketing for all online marketing channels, but it can also take too much time and cripple your progress.
So Eric Siu and Neil Patel, two big names in digital marketing, recommend simulcasting.
Simulcasting is all about breaking up one piece of content, say a quality, useful video, into chunks suitable for sharing on different channels—online and off.
Tip 1: Multichannel online marketing will help you become visible to more potential clients by presenting your medical practice’s value proposition wherever they are. Simulcasting will make your marketing cheaper, more effective, and consistent across various channels.
Ten years ago, Facebook and Google weren’t big on paid advertising.
They are now, from selling any kind of advertising one could even imagine.
What you want is to get in front of a highly-targeted audience that is more ready to accept your medical calls to action at the right time.
So if somebody is typing “Rhinoplasty Denver Cost” into Google Search Bar you need to be in a position to be seen by that person.
Google generates almost $30 billion from the Ads every 3 months.
That’s because Google Ads can still be an inexpensive customer acquisition channel, for Medical Practices included. More Medical Practices now want you to advertise with Google than ever before.
Facebook Ads is becoming a really expensive marketing channel if you don’t get things right. Most of the Marketing “Gurus” will promise that Facebook and Instagram Ads for Medical Practices are the best for advertising.
But it’s not true.
The Leads from Facebook Ads don’t show up to the Clinics in 70% of cases. Is this is taken into account, Facebook and Insta become expensive if you track the conversions up to the number of sales.
Facebook and Instagram Ads are great for remarketing though. Choosing the Doctor for surgery is a tough decision.
That’s why potential patients visit the website and leave without talking to Clinics. To make sure your clinic is on the top of their mind for some time, you must show up in your potential patients’ Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Do it with Remarketing solutions widely available. The only prerequisite to this option is decent online traffic to your website already, from Ads, Organic Search or Direct online visits.
Top medical online directories (webmd.com or yelp are good examples) where you could consider advertising. However, for most medical clinics the SEO and Google Ads provide a better return on marketing investment.
The good thing about these ad campaigns is they are scalable, measurable, and according to multiple marketing surveys, effective.
You can spend as much or little as you want. Just pay per click. You can direct the clicks, calls, questions, and traffic back to a custom landing page.
You can measure the return on investment based off of incoming traffic from a specific ad, keyword, campaign, and medium of advertising used.
The only big disadvantage of the Paid Search Ads is the lack of long-term effect. You stop running Ads, you disappear from your audience’s radar. Completely gone.
While with SEO you build up the won asset that brings you targeted online traffic for a long time at no extra cost.
Healthcare Ads Tip 1: Use SimilarWeb’s free analytics tool to find out what your competition is doing to get more warm leads, make more sales, and get ahead of you. Then use those tactics yourself to achieve similar or better results.
Healthcare Ads Tip 2: Use iSpionage to see what Google Ads your competition is running, how much they spend and how well they are doing. That information is pure GOLD.
Healthcare Ads Tip 3: 72% of businesses run online Ads inefficiently by the latest statistics. By paying a specialized Agency with Google Partner badge you typically add to your cost but also bring a lot better return for your Clinic. So it’s worth it.
Picture these:
But some doctors feel business referrals have been on a decline. While there are no clear studies to back this up, it could be for several reasons.
Some lament it is out of concern surrounding insurance scams, greedy liaison programs in healthcare, and concern that the referee may not get proper service.
So, what can you do to improve your medical referral marketing results in 2020?
And do so right after you perform a successful procedure. That’s when your customer is most excited about your product or service.
Follow up with the customer to see if they made the referral.
Ask if you can make it easier for them to make that referral by writing a referral draft.
If they agree, send it to them through email or text message. You’d be making it easier for them to spread your positive medical practice message around, so do it.
For physician-to-physician referrals, only ask for referrals from PCPs or specialists aligned to what you do to ensure you only get the kind of patients you can help.
By referring back patients that are highly relevant to your partner’s medical practice. You don’t want either of you sued for malpractice.
An incredible 25-50% of physicians do not know if a patient got treatment to a healthcare facility they referred them to. Don’t be like that in 2020 and you’ll build genuine, long-term relationships when patients and partners realize you care.
Every. Singe. Time. 70% of specialists complain that most referrals are not accompanied by accurate health information to aid in making sound decisions.
Keep in mind, 80% of serious healthcare blunders occur due to poor communication during care transitions.
To cultivate a professional yet emotional connection with other doctors in your referral marketing network, physically meet and get to know each other and each other’s medical practice strongpoints and causes for concern so you can seek solutions together
Send a thank-you note for a referral, too. And if it’s the first time they are referring a client to your practice, meet up for lunch (on you) or a handshake to demonstrate your appreciation
So do invite primary caregivers into your network
Applying these patient and doctor referral marketing tips will help your medical practice gain more warm leads ready to become your clients with just a bit more lead nurturing. Trust is EVERYTHING in medical practice patient acquisition. So build it up.
Here’s the thing:
About 92% of your medical practice website visitors will not convert to customers on the first visit.
Unfortunately, when they leave your website, statistics have shown visitors rarely come back to the same website. So how do you regain the attention and potential business of bounced visitors in 2020?
That’s where retargeting comes in.
Also known as remarketing, retargeting is a newer digital marketing method. Here’s how retargeting works:
Remarketing is a cookie-based technology. You or your developer places a pixel (simple code) on your healthcare website. The code doesn’t jumble down your site’s performance. It isn’t meant to be obtrusive to your website visitors, either, although they don’t know it’s there.
When a customer visits your site for the first time, the pixel generates an anonymous browser cookie.
Even if your visitor leaves your website without taking the desired action, the pixel will follow them across the web, displaying your relevant ads to them even if they are browsing a different site.
While the average click-through rate for a Google Search Ad is 0.07%, that of a retargeted ad is 0.7%. That’s a clear indicator retargeting can help you attract more warm leads and convert more of those to customers.
And did you know Facebook retargeted ads are 76% more likely to get clicks than regular ads?
So, retargeting acts a bit like referral marketing—and offers some similar benefits, too.
When a prospect makes contact with you by visiting your online platforms, they demonstrate interest.
So they are likely to click on an ad back to your site because it all feels more familiar to them than conducting a new search.
Remarketing increases the number of visits hence trust-building and lead-nurturing opportunities you can have with them. That, in turn, increases their likelihood of converting to customers on subsequent visits.
Here are some retargeting tips for healthcare you can start using immediately:
You’ll provide multiple touchpoints where your target customer can interact with your ads, messaging, videos, and other forms of information to help you nurture them to become a trustful customer.
Show relevant ads or content to the bounced visitor for between 2 and 4 weeks. If they still won’t visit your website, maybe it’s time to focus on other leads.
But if they do, redirect the lead to the most relevant landing page(s). The best retargeting software helps webmasters to recognize the visitor’s initial intent based on their behavior on your online platforms.
So it can serve the visitor relevant information when he or she decides to continue their search on your landing page or website.
You probably already know using multiple channels to marketing your practice yields higher conversions.
Adding remarketing to your marketing arsenal can help you sell up to 50% more medical products or services, according to a Google retargeting report.
You’ll want to keep a keen interest in privacy policy updates such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act for a guidebook on prudent retargeting techniques that don’t turn invasive for your target market.
If you are wondering if you can use Google retargeting ads, the answer is a fat “No”. Google recently revised its privacy policy and banned healthcare retargeting to protect searchers from privacy data abuse.
Try retargeting on other platforms such as Facebook instead.
Organic Traffic 🔝🔝🔝 is still one of the top inbound healthcare marketing channels. Period.
Now that we’ve mentioned organic traffic. Search engine optimization will continue to influence how your customers do the research and find a medical practice.
What we see often is one major mistake the Clinics make. They go after general search terms, e.g. “Is LASIK dangerous”, “Rhinoplasty Before and After”, without localizing the search terms. This way they get organic traffic nationwide. What the Clinic needs to do instead is double down on Local Search Terms, e.g. LASIK San Antonio, Rhinoplasty Orlando, etc.
The money is in Local SEO! Both Google Maps listings and Organic Search Results (SERPs).
Local SEO marketing will continue to expand and offer more walk-in traffic-based business in 2020.
For example, if you aren’t already using Google My Business, you need to in 2020. Website traffic from GMB grew a chunky 29% and direct searches by 38% between Q4 2017 and Q4 2018, according to BrightLocal.
And maybe you already use GMB. But is your GMB profile optimized for your medical practice SEO marketing plan?
Over the years, organic traffic has been the highest business driver for online businesses. Recently, optimizing your online marketing for successful local SEO continues to bear fruit—and will continue to in 2020 for healthcare services.
Prudent keyword research and application, useful content that seeks to provide value before asking for value back (inbound marketing), and consistent, quality content production and placement where your ideal clients frequent will help you draw more leads to your funnel.
Tip 1: Of note is the growing number of “near me” search queries. People want to know which is the nearest quality medical center, especially when faced with an emergency scenario. For example, people who’ve dealt with chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and elderly people would be interested in your services. Optimize for “Near me” terms.
Tip 2: Try this. Search for “Procedure/Service (LASIK, Drugs Rehab, Urgent Care, etc.)” + “City Name”. Open the top 5 results and compare the Content. If your web page has slim content and doesn’t mention the Procedure and City in Headings and Paragraphs enough, you won’t be able to compete. So if your competitor has 2 keywords in the Headings and 5 in the Paragraph copy, you need to have at least the same number, or just a little more.
Tip 3: Your Google My Business (Google Maps) listing position depends on many factors. The distance from Searcher to your Clinic you can’t control. All the rest you can. Tackle the major ones. (a) ask your happy patients to leave a review on GMB with the name of the procedure, with location and with your clinic name inside the copy of the review, (b) check if the Clinic Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) is the same across all business directories you are listed on and it matches the NAP listed on your GMB Listing and your Website – BrightLocal’s Audit will do just that.
Tip 4: Reach out to your Specific Medical Association and ask if you can publish articles on their website. Write an interesting article with a link to your website. Publish it. The more of those links you have from multiple websites, the more Trusted your website gets. Google rewards Trusted and Authoritative Medical Websites with lots of visitors and high rankings.
Tip 5: Do not write short articles on your Blog. Do not write several articles on similar topics. Combine the topically related articles into one big article and update such articles regularly by adding more content. Sign this article with Author Bio if the Author is a medical doctor. If the Author is not a Medical Doctor, please a Medical Doctor to read the content, verify it and then write “Verified by Name Surename, MD” on each Article. When Google reviews the websites, it needs to know if the content is written by an expert or not.
Voice assistants and tools such as Alexa and Siri have gained popularity over the years.
While they are aren’t as useful as we’d have hoped by now, more people are using voice search to find answers to queries and local services. Especially those up to 35 years of age.
How do you use voice search in your healthcare marketing strategy?
Learn from brands successfully getting Google snippet features.
Use scannable content. Quit medical jargon and find out which terms, phrases, medical lingo, and references your target clients are using to describe medical services, procedures, and related conversations.
Does this search image look familiar?
It is a clue you can use.
Utilize a healthcare marketing agency or virtual assistant to find questions patients use in social media groups, online forums, offline seminars, groups and so on.
Then create questions & conversational answers or content relating to those questions.
It’s just a small change in your Content Marketing daily task. And it will get you a big reward over time.
Heathcare Marketing Voice Search Tip 1: Review your Blog Content. Rewrite some of your Headings and Paragraphs so you have simple questions and short answers in the first sentence of the paragraph. This will help you earn the chance of being featured in Voice Answers as well as “Position 0” in search results.
Heathcare Marketing Voice Search Tip 2: Use Tables in your Blog Posts. As of September 2019, Google tends to give higher priority to the content with tables when it comes to Featured Snippets selection.
In-person marketing will continue to be a big marketing technique for the healthcare industry in 2020.
People still want a personal touch, especially when it is about intimate, delicate, care-driven matters such as medical diagnosis and procedures, personal health records, as well as medical insurance covers.
Hosting or participating in live events provides a solid networking platform.
You can interact with current and future customers.
You can get instant feedback on your procedures or services from people so you know what their objections to buying are—and how you can change that narrative.
Tip 1: Find the common patterns in your patients’ daily routine, learn where they hang out and what they do online and offline. Once you found the place where they are receptive to information, you’ve found a sweet spot. To raise your profile even higher than your competition, consider presenting a useful talk on a trending medical topic or problem in your niche. DO NOT SELL. Just offer value.
Tip 2: Offline events lead to an increase in the Branded search on Google. When many people search for your Clinic Name, Google registers a positive ranking signal. This will help you gain more website authority and improve your rankings, provided that your on-page SEO is well done already. Therefore, make sure your brand name is communicated multiple times during the event. Some clinics that do many events do not provide their website URL in the presentation anymore. This forces the people to find the website by the Brand Name = helping your online visibility long term.
Tip 3: If the goal is to increase the number of Leads for your Medical Practice, do less healthcare industry events and focus more on the lifestyle events of your target audience. If you run a Plastic Surgery clinic, do events related to Arts, Golf, Polo, etc.
It could be you are interested in a specific cause, community drive, or healthcare policy. Or the trend is towards a medical device or product by a particular brand.
Do you stand for affordable, sustainable, and high-value health programs? Who you can partner up with?
Can you sponsor an event, non-profit, health associations, researchers, caregivers, and families providing a united voice for people with disabilities and chronic diseases?
Are you going to be sponsoring sports teams, medical students, healthcare technology programs, and more?
Make contact and request to sponsor their live event, seminar, offer first aid services at their event, be on their banners, and so on.
Tip 1: Sponsorships empower you to align with a solid brand or lifestyle, helping your practice gain more brand awareness, positive brand perception, and even general support in your field. However, if you want to a quick return on your sponsorship investment, choose your sponsorship target with Precision. For example, if your ideal client is above average income level individual, why not sponsoring a Local Golf School?
Influencer marketing has seen a meteoric rise in the last few years.
For example, Instagram, the backbone platform for the marketing strategy, saw a sizzling rise in brand-sponsored influencer posts—from 2016’s 9.2 million to 21.7 million in 2018.
Statista forecasts the trend to blast past 32.2 million paid posts in 2019.
But influencer trust may be dwindling.
Media agency, UM, surveyed 56,000 active internet users across 81 countries, including in the U.S. and U.K. The study showed a 7% drop in the number of people that now trust influencers’ opinions (specifically bloggers and vloggers) in 2019.
The drop could be associated with influencer scams, fake and inflated follower counts, and undisclosed sponsorships.
More strongly, though once-loyal followers now feel their influencer has since “sold out” to paid-posts to make money and lost their authenticity.
However, 47% of global consumer respondents said the opinions shared online influenced their decisions.
To make the most of influencer marketing in 2020:
Bonus Tip: So influencer healthcare marketing is not dead. Neither will it die in 2020. Know your ideal buyer’s habits and you’ll know which influencer is worth collaborating with. Never guess. Use the tools to check if the Influencer is legit. There are way too many scammers out there.
For purely digital brands, including radio and TV in a marketing strategy may not be a smart move in 2020—it hasn’t been for the last few years, either.
What about medical practices?
Traditional marketing channels are still influential in healthcare marketing strategies and can still help. But it can be really expensive and inefficient. People dislike TV or Radio advertising. That’s why they move away to their Streaming Apps.
The problem with both radio and TV advertising has been they’ve both been tough to measure…
…until now.
You can now check Google Analytics to grasp the number of searches people are making based in a particular region based on your radio or TV campaign.
But even more effective:
Radio & TV Healthcare Marketing Tip 1: Set up a custom website or landing page with a unique URL per large campaign. Be sure to set up tools such as Google Analytics to show you how many people are “landing” on the page or website. In your TV or radio ads let people know the URL they need to visit to learn more about your medical service, product, or device. You can then see your campaign’s impact by the numbers.
Radio & TV Healthcare Marketing Tip 2: Subscribe to call tracking service like CallRail and use one separate phone number per each large campaign. This way you can measure the Return on your Marketing Investment and draw the right conclusion based on the real data.
Putting up an ad on strategic billboards is an important move to consider for your healthcare service’s local marketing strategy.
If you can afford it, do it. And in multiple, strategic places.
The important question to ask:
Which area(s) do you want to get in front of your current and future customers?
Billboard marketing can help grow your brand recognition in a particular area.
Tip 1: Set up a custom website or landing page with unique URL per area where the billboards are. Be sure to set up tools such as Google Analytics to show you how many people are “landing” on the page or website. In your billboard lets, people know the URL they need to visit to learn more about your medical service, procedure. You can then see your campaign’s impact by the numbers.
Tip 2: Subscribe to call tracking service like CallRail and use one separate phone number per each area where the billboards are. This way you can measure the Return on your Marketing Investment and draw the right conclusion based on the real data.
In 2020, you’ll still attract a ton of credibility by aligning your healthcare brand with a reputable, ideal celebrity.
So how can you utilize brand ambassadors in your hospital marketing in 2020?
You know how Angelina Jolie adopted several children from orphanages around the world and demonstrated compassion for refugees. The U.N. appointed her as its Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees.
Other brands have reached out to celebrities struggling with various medical conditions or have a close family member or friend doing so.
Can you spot an opportunity to demonstrate your quality, cutting-edge, and/or specialist healthcare services by working with a relevant celeb?
You can provide free medical consultations for mentions. Or invite them to raise their humanitarian profile by teaming up with your practice on a community health cause dear to both of you. Or offer cash to get in front of their loyal audience.
Implementing these medical marketing strategies can help your practice attract more warm leads you can convert to paying customers soonest.
Remember to measure your impact using online tools. Have a custom landing page for each marketing campaign.
That way, you can tell which methods are offering desired results so you can double down on them and avoid losing marketing dollars on ineffective campaigns.
And if all these feels like a lot of ground to cover, feel free to work with a reputable medical marketing agency that understands your specialty, what your target customers are looking for, and which healthcare marketing techniques resonate best with them.
Author: Dennis Dubner, Founder, and CEO of SONDORA MARKETING, an agency helping healthcare marketers and CEOs with reaching an explosive growth.
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5 Keynote and PowerPoint Presentation design trends in 2019PowerPoint presentations are the simplest way to express business ideas and stories as they can be customized to increase attractiveness. With the latest improvements introduced by Microsoft in PowerPoint 2019, users can now prepare and design presentations in a unique manner. After you have selected your desired topic and have notes ready, next is the process to create an appealing PowerPoint design which can help you achieve excellent outcomes.
Although the design patterns being used in 2018 were attractive and helped business owners to boost their sales through product marketing, there are still some improvements yet to be considered. The design trends explained in this article will surely help you in describing your objectives clearly and gather audience attention as well.
Starting with an essential aspect of making PowerPoint presentations interesting, Simplicity can help you achieve excellent outcomes. Sharp colors and background illuminations can make it difficult for the viewers to focus on content as it creates unwanted distractions. PowerPoint slides can be created in both horizontal and vertical manner which can be customized in many ways. Presentations are meant to be persuasive and are designed to persuade the audience for taking decisive actions. Make sure you have selected the goal of your presentation so that you can change the perspective of your audience as well.
Although there are a handful of useful tools available at PowerPoint and Keynote, each of them is not meant to be utilized while designing your presentation. Starting with the initial design phase, try to change the predefined font and styles as they are quite commonly being used in the routine. Make use of bullets, points, and shapes, where necessary, because it makes it easier to express your primary objective.
Example:
Using dark backgrounds and sharp colors in PowerPoint slides have now become a thing of the past. Considering the latest trends, colors such as light blue, green and white are now commonly being used because they make it easy to comprehend the content. There are loads of new and stylish templates available at PowerPoint 2018 which allow the users to create animations and multiple slide transitions. In order to keep your listeners on the track, using high-quality graphics and photographs can prove to be of high support. Using 3-D graphics and animations is not advised because it makes the presentation challenging to manage for people who are not having enough technical knowledge.
Using the animations and graphics available in the software are certainly not advised because they have already been viewed by the audience. Try adding high definition images which look posed, staged or shot in a studio. Moreover, typography approach can now be used to find personality-infused fonts, animated text effects and typographic cover slides which are designed to make the whole project engaging.
Default slide size and predefined fonts in PowerPoint background are evidently not included in the latest trend list. Presentations must be appropriately aligned with correct height and width so that your text is readable. If you have some images or animations to be included, just resize your slides before inserting them to make them suitable. Determine the amount of detail which your content requires for which adding on-screen charts and animations can be a great idea. Just focus on data visualization, illustrations and typography to make your presentations better and enjoyable for the audience.
Coming over to font size and style, make sure the writing is not too large or quite small in any case. However, whatever the size you have chosen must be easy to comprehend so that audience can focus without any hassle. The fonts ranging from 24 to 36 are recommended for creating a PowerPoint presentation because they deliver the best readability for the audience.
Placing long texts in any presentation makes it annoying as the audience probably never wants to read a wall of content. Colorful embellishments and graphical effects in data visualizations can make a presentation worth focusing and memorable. By focusing on your brand identity, choose the layout, color scheme and style after proper research so that it matches with the text included in the presentation. Although coping with the latest PowerPoint trends might not be possible for everyone as there are a lot of complications that need to be handled.
Last but not least, icons play a vital role in enhancing the focus and attention of the audience. As it currently the highest used trend in 2018 for designing PowerPoint presentations, these small visual representations make the context understandable and exciting by all means.
In order to make your PowerPoint presentation compelling, using the ideal storytelling techniques can yield amazing outcomes. There is a lot of potential for storytelling for which you can also consult case studies and life events of famous entrepreneurs. Maintaining the attention of the audience is not possible in presentations which include a bunch of facts and figures. Just try to be realistic and find a real-life story relevant to your presentation topic.
Using techniques such as augmented reality can prove to be helpful in this regard as it makes storytelling easier. As it allows the audience to focus and pay attention to the critical parts of your presentations, they will automatically start to show interest and attention.
PowerPoint presentations are by far the most efficient and convenient way to express your ideas in a professional manner. With the never-ending improvements and features which have been delivered in Microsoft PowerPoint, creating presentations by focusing on the latest trends can undoubtedly yield amazing results. As they are supposed to make presentations interesting and develop a strong focus amongst the audience, business owners, professionals, and students can now express their ideas in a beautiful manner.
So, if you are excited to share your great thoughts and ideas through PowerPoint presentations, following the tips and trends explained in this article will surely support you by all means.
How to Generate 3X More Leads in 5 Weeks On LinkedIn (Step-By-Step and Without Spending a Fortune)
Social media marketing is a necessary and highly successful approach to raising awareness, generating leads, nurturing and converting B2C leads to customers. But can the same be said of B2B lead generation? If you answered “No” to that question, you might be missing one of the best B2B lead generation platforms of the decade.
But it is not your fault. Like many B2B marketers, you might have thought LinkedIn as the largest resume platform in the world—and not much of a powerful lead generation accelerator.
Many marketers have traditionally thought of LinkedIn as a prospecting, hiring and one-dimensional advertising network. There is more to LinkedIn than posting work histories.
Here are a couple of LinkedIn marketing statistics every marketer—digital or not—will find interesting, for example:
Are you taking full advantage of LinkedIn to generate new business?
This guide is dedicated to helping you discover powerful ways to turn your LinkedIn lead generation strategy on and accelerating to 100 to 200 leads a day in 5 weeks. The key to getting there is to not only read the insider information packed herein but to also go ahead and consistently practice what you’ll learn.
But, before we get right to it, how about finding out why you and your business need LinkedIn. Here are incredible LinkedIn statistics in 2018 demonstrating why LinkedIn is important to your business and digital marketing strategy altogether:
That said, there are ways to attract more, highly-targeted and qualified leads on LinkedIn.
The first step to zeroing in on the most profitable LinkedIn market is to identify your LinkedIn target audience. Is that easy to do? Not according to the 42% of marketers who do not know how to gather the right data to kickstart targeted campaigns. Neither is it impossible or even that difficult.
The simpler way to understand your LinkedIn target audience is to start by listing down a number of keywords that interest people in your niche or those that have similar interests and goals. Then you’ll want to use LinkedIn Search to search your keywords among groups that identify with your keywords. Feel free to use as many highly relevant keywords as you can find.
While keywords are popular for SEO purposes, they are also psychological triggers. That means LinkedIn users are more likely to join a group using a specific keyword that they are interested in.
For example:
Searching “Healthcare” will turn around results specific to that niche including healthcare pages, companies, and groups on LinkedIn.
It is all about specificity. And groups that use specific keywords in their names attract like-minded professionals working or conducting business in that niche or industry.
This is important.
You do not want to assume your target audience wants what you think they want. But keenly following up on the types of questions asked, posts that get the most views, thumbs up and comments, for example, you can understand what they truly want.
You want to use that insight to create on-demand lead magnets. Those lead magnets will seek to offer a solution to what is keeping many groups’ members awake.
Remember to monitor several groups. The more you do the higher the likelihood you’ll create an ebook, report, article, or other lead magnet form that appeals to multiple groups’ members.
You’ll need the lead magnet in the next LinkedIn lead generation acceleration step up next.
LinkedIn Groups is a neat, powerful feature many B2B marketers are still to take full benefits from. You can join up to 50 LinkedIn groups. On the Search filter tool, select “groups” and then key in your keyword to find targeted groups to join.
You’ll want to join the groups that have:
The point of joining LinkedIn groups is this:
By offering valuable insights, you’ll master a most important LinkedIn marketing technique: organic LinkedIn traffic generation.
And how do you do that?
LinkedIn users are business people or professionals that can see through your sales pitch from a mile out.
Moreover, unveiling your selling agenda too early—without making considerable effort to offer answers, spark valuable conversations, and such—will discourage group members from trusting you. Group owners can delete your membership and ban you for that, as well.
The larger problem with that:
If you are banned from a group and labeled a traffic pest or spammer, LinkedIn will ban you from other groups or joining others, too. That would be the end of your LinkedIn marketing road as far as this guide is concerned. And you do not want that.
Dedicate yourself to commenting only. You’ll want to do that for 2-3 weeks—without posting any lead magnets or links to your product/service or website. The point is to offer valuable information that will increase your credibility, authority, and grow your influence as a knowledgeable contributor and solutions provider.
Here’s the benefit:
LinkedIn group owners have to approve comments before the posts can go live. An owner who sees you offering valuable insights for free for over 2 weeks is likely to set your posts to auto-approve.
That means your posts would no longer have to peg in pending status before reaching the larger target audience within LinkedIn groups you have joined.
As your posts auto-approve, and you continue to offer useful insights, more group members are likely to be aware of your solutions provision capability.
Now you can post a lead magnet.
Choose to use this tactic once per week or bi-weekly.
No spamming. No group bans.
Be sure to include a specific call to action with or within your lead magnet. But you can also post a link for interested members to follow if they want to download a relevant resource such as an ebook for a specific solution they seek.
It could be a link to a dedicated landing page or website homepage—not the product or service pages, which are too direct.
The whole point is to get potential leads to your website, provide their contact details to get the lead magnet (such as a niche survey or special report), so you can follow up with your marketing system in future.
Keep in mind, 63% of website visitors are not ready to buy yet (Marketing Donut).
HubSpot found the best time to post on LinkedIn is 5-6 pm, Tuesday through Thursday.
Source: HubSpot
There is more…
In the US, for example, you’d want to post during Central and Eastern Times because most people live in the CT and ET time zones.
To get the most LinkedIn engagement, you’ll want to post between 4 pm and 5 pm on Wednesdays, according to a Sprout Social LinkedIn Global Engagement study.
Source: Sprout Social
To boost LinkedIn post shares, the best time to post is 1-2 pm ET. And for optimal clickthroughs, 7-8 am, noon and 5-6 pm will help convert interested group members to highly targeted leads.
Moreover, LinkedIn sends a Daily Digest email of groups’ daily activities. You can get featured on it and broadcast your message to an even more targeted and larger audience by posting your content between 8 am and 9 am US Eastern Time.
That means more targeted views and potential clickthroughs to your lead magnet (and ultimately your website) from thousands of group members and LinkedIn network professionals—millions of which are decision makers at their company.
Powerful.
Better yet, you can create a LinkedIn group. LinkedIn allows you to create up to 10 groups free of charge. If you choose, you can create an additional 20 sub-groups under the main group—a sub-niche under each of the 10.
Creating a LinkedIn group is important for several incredible reasons—even better compared to joining owned groups.
You will have privileges you would never have as a joining member.
How is that?
There are only a few things to keep in mind (and these are important):
You can, once in a while, promote your product or service. You can add a link to a lead magnet or lead capture page within the Welcome Message.
Also, you can share group roles, responsibilities and restrictions in the same email message.
Here, you want to discourage spamming, irrelevancy, and outright chaos by letting everyone know what is expected of them. That is to help preserve the integrity and authority of the entire group for longer.
If you want, you can use a moderator to keep things clean and professional in the group.
However, only post offers that are highly relevant to most members’ need to solve a specific problem. You do not want to push members away with incessant sales messages. And neither do you want members to feel like the group is all about you or your offer other than a networking community.
The latter reason is also why it is not recommended to use a business name, logo, or contacts when naming your new LinkedIn group. Again, LinkedIn is a professionals networking platform.
You have busy professionals that are looking for ideas, inspiration, networking, solutions, and so on, within a community of like-minded or similarly-interested pool of professionals. Branding your business in their face at every opportunity will be overkill.
The goal, like when you join owned, top groups on LinkedIn, is to connect, offer valuable information, brainstorm, and solve problems.
That builds engagement—and organic LinkedIn traffic to your lead capture system.
And increasing LinkedIn engagement will not only have current members sticking around, but they are also more likely to refer other professionals in their circles to the group—technically, your group.
That would mean more warm leads that are likely to opt for your lead magnet or offer and convert to buyers.
Want to find out how to create a group on LinkedIn?
Watch this:
Notice how the group name doubles as a pre-qualifier? HubSpot reported 44% of marketers do not verify leads to filter qualified leads, which is imperative.
To boost your LinkedIn group engagement and encourage group growth, you can find valuable resources such as the LinkedIn Company Page Playbook and borrow inspiration from the top company pages on LinkedIn.
Using LinkedIn to generate highly targeted leads is a powerful approach to boost your lead generation strategy in 2018 and beyond. Thousands of more professionals are joining LinkedIn every other day.
That means the above LinkedIn lead generation techniques can help you to successfully triple or generate between 100-500 leads every other day, well into the next couple of years.
After your initial “contribute meaningfully” two-week stage, you can use a relevant lead magnet to implement in the following three weeks.
Remember, this is not a magic LinkedIn lead generation technique. You are going to want to practice the LinkedIn marketing tips herein to grow your email list and ultimately increase your sales.
Keynote or PowerPoint? [The Complete, Unbiased Review 2019]
A PowerPoint or Keynote comparison to help you choose the best presentation software for your needs. Charts. Graphs. And everything presentation software. When Forethought’s Dennis Austin and Robert Gaskins coded “Presentation” for Macintosh computers in August 1984, little did they know PowerPoint would dominate the presentation software market share for over 25 years. Long before the first “PowerPoint or Keynote” debate would come up.
The goal was to empower corporate workers, students, event organizers, and their audiences to visualize oral presentations, making them more memorable, articulate and concise. And that’s what Microsoft had helped PowerPoint users accomplish since August 1987 when it bought Forethought out—PPT included.
However, advances in the technology have over time swayed chunks of PowerPoint users to Apple’s iWork solution, Keynote.
But does Keynote make the best PowerPoint alternative out there or is Microsoft’s presentation design program still the top choice? To rest the Keynote vs PowerPoint deliberation, you’d need to lay out each one’s strengths as well as shortcomings.
That way, you know what to expect from each live presentation program and what each can do to help you fulfill your presentation design needs without wasting precious time and jabbing your reputation.
Shall we?
Currently the most popular presentation software, PowerPoint ships as a standard solution within the Microsoft Office Suite. Microsoft has also made strides to make the program accessible on the fly by ingraining it in the cloud-based suite Office 365 as well as a stand-alone app for mobile devices.
PowerPoint is uber-popular for several reasons.
However, PowerPoint is not squeaky clean.
The presentation solution came to exist not too long ago and has since helped power Apple Keynote Events, Mac presentation software as well as IOS. Apple products’ enthusiasts praise Keynote for its fresh user-interface and perceive it to be more innovative than Microsoft’s presentation software.
But is it?
Despite its visual and functional appeal, Keynote is not perfect either.
Keynote or PowerPoint usage statistics and market share are scanty to find. But in 2009, a Forrester study documented Microsoft PowerPoint had a staggering 95% share of the presentation software market.
But online Slideshare software and collaborative PowerPoint alternatives such as Keynote, Ludus, and Google Slides were yet to come out.
Prezi launched the same year. Currently, the online presentation software provider claims to have over 100 million registered users. But only about 8,000 of Prezi users are corporate customers.
However, Apple has bundled Keynote into new, shipping Macs since October 2013 while PowerPoint is installed in over 1 billion PCs worldwide half of which are estimated to be actively using PPT.
According to G2 Crowd, more corporate users prefer to use PowerPoint for business compared to Keynote as shown below:
PowerPoint vs Keynote: 271 reviewers prefer Keynote for professional presentations compared to 1,306 reviewers that prefer PowerPoint
As discussed earlier, neither PowerPoint or Keynote is perfect, especially when it comes to creating graphics, photos, audio, and other objects to add zing and clarity to your presentation. So, what excellent presentation design tools can you use for that?
Here are some of the best presentation design tools.
Canva is a comprehensive graphics design software provider. You can use Canva presentation templates to create refreshing PowerPoint or Keynote presentations. Besides, Canva has a font, photo-editing and color palette tools to help presenters create outstanding presentation graphics.
With LiveSlides you can insert live web feeds into your presentation. The tool is available as an add-in for Keynote and PowerPoint. You can download and insert into your presentations to interact with your audience via Twitter feeds, engage them by embedding YouTube video, and even embed any website into PPT or Keynote slides.
The company helps presenters to create authentic, memorable and modifiable presentations as a design toolkit. Sketch can also be used to prototype ideas into interactive designs. Users can also invite teams to collaborate on a design before exporting the file to PowerPoint or Keynote.
Want a presentation design app for displaying charts and graphs in Keynote or PowerPoint?
Plotly is a white-label data visualization tool designed to help executives, data scientists, customers and designers work in collaboration, and showcase their data in graphs—without any need for coding experience
This Google Fonts alternative may be a good fit for you if you want to create custom presentation designs in the form of calligraphic works. With Calligraphr, you can download a template, modify it using your handwriting, and then convert it into a personalized font you can use with PowerPoint or Keynote.
One of the most frequently asked questions is whether a PC created PowerPoint file can run on a MacBook and vice versa.
Well, before the release of Windows 2007, PowerPoint for both Windows (2007) and Mac (2008) saved the presentation program’s files in .ppt format. Since then, both save PPT files in .pptx formats.
Still, both are not seamlessly compatible. Even trying to view a PowerPoint file on a PC—which was created on a Mac—scrambles the font and layout. Keynote also doesn’t support Visual Basic.
Moreover, converted files tend to have inaccurate timelines for animations. One way to solve such an issue is to find the best Windows compatible fonts for Mac and using those.
As far as collaboration goes, Apple recommends uploading the file to iCloud or Box; other team members can then log into their respective accounts using PC web browsers so they can access the presentations you made in Keynote.
The Cupertino tech giant also put up a comprehensive Keynote/PowerPoint conversion checklist so you can find out what features Macs and IOS devices will maintain as you intended and which ones could distort.
Another way to find in-depth presentation software insights to help you address issues such as compatibility and customization options is to see the best presentation design books around.
Garr Reynold’s 2007 presentation design staple teaches how people aren’t wired to listen while simultaneously reading blocks of text spewing out of a projector. Learn how to appeal to the six senses and make outstanding presentations: design, symphony, story, empathy, meaning and play. And then he teaches you how to do it. The 2009 edition explains how to use multimedia and video in your presentations.
Nancy Duarte leaves no presentation stones unturned here. She spills the type of presentation design techniques she used with her firm to catapult Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, to Oscar-winning glory. Expect to grasp the fundamentals of turning ideas into brilliant graphics, as well as diagramming and sketching techniques to win your audience.
Sip it all in as Edward R, Tufte spews presentation design wisdom in this industry textbook. Not only does he make it clear block upon block of text kill the audience’s concentration, but he also explains step by step about how to integrate brilliant graphics, captions, data, legends into presentations to win your audience’s trust and undivided attention.
Whichever industry you are in, David Sibbet’s Visual Meetings will jog you towards using new presentation design and technologies to rejuvenate your presentations. He goes into detail about how you can use new media to create business success. Expect graphics recording, storyboarding, idea mapping, and graphics templates illumination by the time you are through.
Resonating is the freeway to your audience’s minds and hearts. You want to present with razor-sharp focus, engage with confidence and communicate with clarity. Cliff Atkinson shares his collection of old-gold communication techniques and how to blend them into your PowerPoint presentation designs and delivery with resounding success.
Lame presentations inspire walkouts while powerful ones inspire action and command the room with clarity and pizzazz. With these books, you can learn what makes people tick, the anatomy of phenomenal presentations, and how to use modern presentation design software powerfully and effectively.
You can still follow the most powerful presentation design influencers to learn even more elaborately how to inject zing and nurture support in your presentations.
Find out how to get your presentations design mojo back. Learn from Sondora how to benefit from fresh and refined motion graphics, virtual and augmented reality creations that turn boring slides into lively, clear and seductive presentations.
With over three presentation design books under his breathe—all acclaimed classics—Garr will inspire your creative buds to come up with authentic, resonating and actionable presentation ideas.
Nancy is also an accomplished presentation design geek who speaks lives what she teaches. She’ll show you to use presentation tools and new media to rock any target audiences.
The urban planner and freelance graphics designer’s work is only worth seeing, so:
Fresh from Hangzhou, China, Leo’s specialty is in motion graphics and brand design, perfect presentation designs to incorporate into your modish PowerPoint or Keynote files.
Exemplary creations on and offline make it easy to understand how Shawna has worked with Fortune 500 companies like Nike and Adobe to create genuinely exceptional illustration and visual designs.
Discover how over 85,600 followers found themselves in the velvety spectrum. Original. Bold. Concise. Words to live by.
A great Keynote or PowerPoint presentation design can help you educate with authority and clarity, engage with confidence and punch, and entertain in one swoop. The result is a successful presentation that is not only memorable to the audience but one that encourages action, whatever your call to action.
A presentation is both an art and technical science you’ll want to master if you are to craft great slides that compel effortlessly and affordable without tossing your reputation to the curb.
Sondora is your one-stop PowerPoint presentation design agency. You can also visualize out your wildest Keynote presentation design needs, and Sondora will work them to reality without you lifting a finger.
Expect a team of fresh talents and experienced presentation designers ready to help you inject life into your presentation software. Whatever your needs: motion graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, or custom illustration and branding design.
Hit contact and see for yourself.
2020 Fashion Marketing: Everything You Need To Know To Get Ahead Of The CurveFashion Marketing is my personal passion. We work with fashion brands and multi-brand retailers daily. Therefore, I think it’s our duty to write on this topic more. First of all, we love fashion and luxury marketing for its speed, borderless room for creativity and reach. And that’s why I’ve decided to add my 2 cents to the ocean of content on this topic.
Let’s start with the basics here. IMHO, Leadership, Marketing, and Finance are three vital parts of any fashion business as it can help a brand to get the products to the right customers profitably if done right. It is the only way a fashion brand can expand its market reach and stay in business.
I’ll elaborate on the Marketing component a bit more. While most people think that fashion marketing is just about modeling new products, it goes deeper than that. What’s more, the industry gets much more competitive with each passing day. Different businesses are pumping loads of capital to find ways they can get the edge and grow their reach, while still solidifying their grip on their current market base.
Fashion marketers have to research on their different target audiences and find innovative ways of getting to them. The global fashion market is noisy, very noisy! As a fashion marketer, you have to resonate with the customer and inspire them to develop an interest in the product and the brand. And not just a random customer, but a micro-targeted customer with a crystal clear set of values, beliefs, habits, expectations. An American woman, 40 to 50 years old with above-average income level as a Persona won’t be good enough of a targeting anymore.
Fashion marketing is very much different from the “normal” marketing for any other business. You can sustain the same marketing campaign for other businesses over an extended period of time. The fashion industry, on the other hand, is very dynamic and keeps changing as new trends come up every day. Marketing campaigns therefore only go for short cycles before fashion marketers are needed to come up with new campaigns for new products. The competition level is INSANE in fashion. This means that fashion marketing campaigns should be able to achieve its objectives as soon as they are launched. A good fashion marketing campaign should be able to balance both short-term gains and long-term goals.
And, just to mention, Fashion Marketing is being destroyed by the PROMO CULTURE. Black Friday, Christmas Sale, Final Liquidation Prices, 90% Off, Buy 1 get 2 Free, and so on and so forth. C’mon! This cannot continue!
The top fashion brands did not get to the top of the industry through sheer luck. One of the major components of their success is effective marketing strategies, tactics, and campaigns. Here are some effective fashion marketing moves that have proved tremendously successful for top fashion brands:
Competition doesn’t automatically translate to the enemy. Sometimes, your competition may be the key to your success. In the fashion industry, doing collaborations with your competitions can help you tap into their markets and break new grounds. It has worked for various brands before, the most notable ones being Nike and Off White, and H&M and Karl Lagerfeld among others. The collaborations helped the brands extend their product lines and increase their visibility.
Celebrity endorsements are also about increasing product visibility. Celebrities are usually almost worshipped by their fans and their opinions and choices are the ultimate truth. They are cult heroes.
Celebrity endorsements will not only help a fashion brand get new buyers but also loyal ones. No matter how big a fashion brand is, and a celebrity on its own rights, it can still do with a celebrity endorsement. For example, Rihanna was appointed as a creative director for women’s collection by Puma. Rihanna’s own fashion line, Fenty, has received celebrity endorsements from a number of superstars including Brandy, Cardi B, Ezra Miller, Gabrielle Union, and Karlie Kloss. Kanye West relied on celebrity endorsements from Calvin Harris and Justin Bieber to market his Yeezy Boost collection.
Newsjacking is a marketing strategy used by brands to capitalize on breaking news and trending topics to draw some of the attention to themselves and their products. David Meerman has been given credit for the popularity of newsjacking as a marketing strategy. The practice is quite common in the fashion industry. Fashion brands have often jumped on social media trending topics, especially on Twitter and Instagram, with humorous and sometimes direct marketing for their products. Here are some of the most renowned news jacks:
– Tide and Superbowl blackout: When the Superbowl experienced a blackout during a match, Tide saw an opportunity to market its washing detergent. They made a tweet saying that though they were unable to do anything about blackouts, they could help with getting stains out.
– Snickers and Luis Suarez World Cup bite: When Luis Suarez bite Giorgio Chiellini during a 2014 World Cup match between Italy and Uruguay, Snickers jumped in with a tweet advising the striker to grab a Snickers the next time he wants a bite.
Newsjacking has to be done right or it could backfire on the brand, as Kenneth Cole found out when the brand tried to take advantage of the Syrian Conflict to market their footwear.
A live stream can help a fashion brand reach millions of potential buyers as product launches and other brand events don’t have to be a privilege closed-door moment for the elite. Everyone gets to watch the event in real-time from their devices. Live Streaming helps the fashion house expand visibility and reach new audiences. Instead of relying on livestreams from invited guests on their channels, a fashion brand should establish their own official Livestream channels. Besides YouTube, other platforms that can make for great live streaming include: – Facebook Live – Instagram Live – Periscope – Ustream – Diecast – Vimeo Livestream – Streamshark – Stretch Internet – Brightcove brands such as Louis Vuitton are already capitalizing on Instagram live streams.
Insta is still going to be BIG! And if your target audience is older or younger, Pinterest and Snapchat are awesome. Do not ever forget about the second largest search engine in the world – Youtube – that keeps on trying to become a social media network.
Social media influencers can make a huge impact on a brand by simply giving them a mention or a review, or using their products. Influencer marketing is like high school, everyone wants to have what the cool kid has. Fashion brands can leverage on reputable fashion bloggers or vloggers to reach out to new market segments. It can lead to increased leads and sales. They can just generally share products from the brand or work in collaboration with a brand for a product-specific marketing campaign. One of the most common social media influencer campaigns is unboxing- in which the influencer uses a product for the first time and gives it a review on the camera. A classic example of influencer marketing is the unboxing video of Jordan Brand by YouTube vlogger Jacques Slade.
I am not a big fan but Giveaways can be an excellent way for fashion marketers to engage existing customers and acquire new ones for a brand. They can be used to promote new products or celebrate important occasions by the fashion brand. Giveaways help in creating brand awareness and growing the audience base. After a giveaway competition by Catparty on Instagram, the number of their followers increased by 70%.
This is a BIG ONE!!!! Paying a commission to the webmasters that already have massive traffic to their digital assets is a BAD DRUG for fashion brands. It’s LOVE/HATE relationship really. On one hand, the revenue skyrockets fast. On the other hand, brand evaporates. So it’s a tough call to start or stop an affiliate marketing campaign.
What is affiliate marketing
One of the benefits of affiliate marketing is that the return on investment is almost guaranteed. It is a widely used marketing strategy for increasing online sales outside of your website or an app. The affiliates are usually paid on commission, which is a percentage of the sales made from their sales funnel. Affiliate marketing is a great way for fashion brands to develop brand advocates and work with various publishers for mutual benefit. The costs majorly depend on how the affiliate marketing program is set up.
Some of the best platforms for Fashion Affiliate Marketing include:
You can dedicate a section exclusively to style guides and fashion tips. That style guides will give your website visitors ideas on how to dress and accessorize your brand and even incorporate your products with their wardrobe. You can do style guides for different seasons, special occasions, holidays, and topical themes such as a weekend getaway, work, and travel. When your audience is able to visualize how they would look in your products, they are likely to make a purchase.
In spite of the major shift towards digital marketing, traditional marketing platforms such as TV, radio, and newspapers are still relevant and can deliver a return on investment if well utilized. To realize any success with these traditional platforms, your brand should be able to tell a story. Well, the same stands for digital channels really. Just tap into people’s emotions in a positive manner and you’ll get rewarded. This has largely been Nike’s forte with their memorable campaigns. A perfect example was the “Just do it” campaign which also featured Colin Kaepernick.
While corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability may not have a direct impact on sales, it is a great way to establish brand awareness. In the long run, the fashion brand will be able to realize the benefits of CSR. You can never go wrong with giving back to the community.
Some of the notable brands who have realized tremendous growth after doing CSR activities include:
– Converse – The shoe brand set up a studio where New York artists could record their music for free. They do not claim ownership to the songs. Neither do they demand that the artists advertise the brand. This has had a huge impact on their popularity.
– Under Armour’s strategy to give free shirts to the National Football League (NFL) players resulted in shirt deals with more than 2 NFL teams.
– Lululemon offers free yoga classes every weekend in one of its California stores. This has elevated it as a fashion brand that cares about the wellbeing of its customers.
When thought and creativity are injected into a fashion marketing process, then there are higher chances of the fashion brand realizing returns on investment.
Fashion brands are increasingly exploring the option of allowing customers to shop and receive products from channels of their choice. Retail stores can be able to cross-sell items from other stores. One of the fashion designers who are already exploring this is Lyn Evans. All of its stores have iPads which customers can use to order items from the other stores in case they don’t find their favorite item or color in that particular store. Another brand that has embraced omnichannel retailing is Gap.
But wait! If you think Omnichannel is about the channels, you are very much wrong. Omnichannel is all about the Data and Attribution for most fashion brands. Every time I speak with a CMO about the Omnichannel, we have to invite a CFO into the meeting room as well. Omnichannel is a cause for many internal company conflicts for lots of brands. “So who gets the bonus then?” is what makes the omnichannel so difficult for the companies leadership.
Fashion brands are increasingly allowing their customers to customize the products to their tastes and preferences. NikeiD on the Nike website gives customers the option of picking the pattern and colors they would want on their shoes. Black Lapel, Indochino, Vans, Ray-Ban, and Adidas among other brands also allow their customers to customize and personalize their orders.
Online retail used to be left to fashion brands that were still trying to establish themselves. Not anymore. Luxury fashion brands are finally realizing how much potential online retail has to their business. Does it even make sense to list the luxury companies that sell online? It’s easier to list those who don’t. However, if you ask me how many luxury fashion brands are successful in selling online, I’d say “very few”.
E-Commerce marketing is HARD. It requires so many different expensive skill sets in your company that it barely breaks even. Hiring an internal expert data analyst and an external professional e-commerce marketing agency (may I say, like SONDORA MARKETING?) would be a great idea.
Visualization plays an important role in attracting customers. Amazon, in a bid to place itself as the top online retailer for fashion items, launched a photography studio with 22 photo bays in 2015. They also later launched a fashion site called Who What Wear aimed at enabling customers to shop for items that are inspired by celebrities. More and more brands are looking to curate photos in order to have a visualization effect on their customers.
Starting from 2019, lots of brands go beyond the standard visuals. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are yet quite slow in adoption by Fashion Brands. But I am pretty confident that this is a temporary state of things. AR and VR are going to be MASSIVE.
Fashion marketers are incorporating artificial intelligence in their marketing campaigns for greater return on investment all day long. AI has been pivotal in improving customer interactions and gives fashion marketers access to better and more reliable data analytics.
Social media is increasingly becoming a storefront for fashion brands. The brands create links on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest that redirect customers to their retail sites. Everyone does shopping ads for a good reason. It works beautifully.
But why Ads? You might ask. Why not organic reach on social media platforms? Well, thanks to Facebook’s Executive Team, the organic reach is aimed closer and closer to Zero now. Social Media Platforms have so much value that it wouldn’t be very smart not to monetize it. Would it? So if you want visibility, brand awareness and conversions, run Ads. As simple as that.
Let’s now move to the mechanics of Fashion Marketing.
In order to have in place a powerful roadmap and a successful set of marketing campaigns, fashion marketers usually undertake the following three phases in developing a strategic marketing campaign:
The fashion marketer does a market analysis so as to have a clear picture of the state of the brand. At this phase, the following functions are performed; – Analysis of competition – Research on the brand’s existing and potential customers. – Brand assessment – Industry trends After those functions are completed, the team comes up with a marketing plan.
The marketing plan is put into action. The fashion marketing team organizes resources, designs market organization and develops marketing schedules. The marketing plan developed in the first phase is used as a reference point for marketing tactics.
In this phase, the fashion marketing manager ensures that the results achieved from the marketing program are in line with the business goals that were set in the initial stages. Corrective actions are taken in case any deviations are noted so that the marketing campaign can stay on track. They also seek to maximize the positives. Basically, at this phase, the progress of the marketing campaign is monitored and evaluated.
The evaluation is done in the following ways:
With the cutthroat competition in the fashion industry, designers and fashion marketers cannot afford the luxury of wasting time and resources. They have to get it right the first time as the second chance is basically playing catch up to the competition. They, therefore, need to come up with a sound marketing strategy that guarantees results- leads and conversions. Here are 7 key components of fashion marketing;
The need for market research is even more profound in the fashion industry than any other. You need to understand the market size and its growth or decline, consumer spending habits, and any emerging trends in the industry. Some of the top publications that a fashion marketer can rely on for insights in the industry include Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, and InStyle among many others.
The marketing strategy should be able to comprehensively capture the target market for fashion products. Besides identifying the type of buyers most likely to purchase the product, it should also segment the target market into at least three levels for effective marketing campaigns and easy penetration.
What kind of perception does the market have of the brand and its products? Are they perceived as the go-to brand for fashion items when on a budget? The market perception is an important element to consider when developing marketing campaigns. Once the fashion marketer understands the brands positioning, they will be able to develop effective campaigns that reinforce positive perceptions and change negative perceptions. They can communicate clearly on how they want the brand to be perceived.
A brand can only ignore the competition at their own peril. A good fashion marketer will want to know who the competition is, the brand’s products are different from that of the competition, the market segment they operate in, and how they can have an edge over the competition. You have to stand out from your competition.
An effective marketing strategy is the only way to nurture leads and convert those leads to sales. The effectiveness of a marketing strategy is measured in terms of impressions, leads, and sales. The core question the marketing strategy should answer is, “how do I find and attract the target market?” After identifying the target market, they can use various tactics to reach them.
The fashion marketer should be able to forecast how much budget they will need for a marketing campaign. The budget can be planned weekly or monthly. The budget should have a ceiling for each activity such that the marketer doesn’t waste funds on a strategy that is not generating a return on investment.
From start to the end of the marketing campaign, the fashion marketer should be able to measure the success of the campaign. They should be able to compare the budget spent on the entire campaign versus the actual return on investment. For online marketing campaigns, the marketer can rely on services such as Google Analytics to measure the metrics. This will help them to measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.
Obviously, Fashion marketers do not necessarily have to be designers. This does not mean that they do not have a say on the type of products that fashion brands put out to the market. On the contrary, they do have a big influence on the products and their designs. Fashion marketers carry out market research and therefore are in a better position to understand fashion trends and the impact they have on a business. They know which designs would be a hit and which wouldn’t. They therefore also contribute to the design of fashion products. The responsibilities of a fashion marketer include:
This helps in decision-making with regards to fashion designs and business processes. They perform both quantitative and qualitative research into fashion trends and consumer behaviors.
Fashion marketers are responsible for placing the brand such that the target audience can relate and feel a personal connection to the brand. They have to create the story behind the brand.
Besides creating compelling advertisements for the products, fashion marketers also have to manage media planning to ensure that the ads are distributed as scheduled. They are responsible for both traditional and digital advertisements.
Fashion marketers contribute to the decision on how brands price and distribute their products. Through their market research, they can be able to tell which distributions channels are better performing and how to price the products for each channel. This helps the brand to maximize their profits from both retail and online stores.
And now, since you’ve gone through this “long read” and wonder how the hack is one person capable of doing so many things, I have to say that such people work at many fashion companies. They are incredibly talented people.
If you are just beginning your marketing career at a Fashion company, I’d recommend developing many soft and hard skills.
– Good communication skills
– Outstanding Analytical Skills = numbers is everything in modern marketing
– Great taste and sense in Fashion
– Multitasking
– Martech knowledge: the more in-depth the better
– Fast Decision-making
– Business acumen
– Ability to work in high-pressure environments
– Creative skills
– Sales skills: the amount of time and effort it takes to sell an idea inside the fashion company is just ridiculous sometimes.
Thanks for your attention. Please comment below and we’ll be happy to address any of your questions.
LinkedIn Marketing Guide: Practical and Complete
If you’re looking to make important business connections, LinkedIn is the premier B2B and often B2C social media platform to use. You’ll find millions of Sales People prospecting using LinkedIn, recruiters finding job candidates; CEOs looking to grow their influence and build trust with buyers; and solopreneurs looking for freelancers to build their dream team. In the world of business relationships, you just never know who you’ll meet that will possibly send you your most lucrative client, so growing your network steadily and consistently makes good business sense.
However, if you think blasting LinkedIn users with connection requests is the way to go, put the brakes on your plans and rethink your strategy. Here’s some well-researched advice:
Networking on LinkedIn really boils down to common sense: Act professionally so you portray your business in the best possible light and be authentic in your interactions. Your ideal clients will be drawn to you once they get to know you as a person instead of as a salesperson.
Next on this LinkedIn Marketing Guide is….
With 90 million senior-level influencers, 63 million decision-makers, 303 million active monthly users (40% of which visit the site daily), LinkedIn may seem like your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Who wouldn’t want the opportunity to sell their product or services to 303 million people?
Let’s remember, however, that LinkedIn in NOT about sales: It’s about building connections and developing relationships with people who may (or may not) be interested in what you have to offer.
Here are some tips for networking naturally on LinkedIn so you don’t develop that pushy “used car salesman” reputation that makes people want to run away:
One note: There’s a huge difference between introducing yourself with your company name and what you have to offer versus introducing yourself with a hardcore sales pitch. Craft your introduction carefully and you won’t be perceived as a tacky salesperson desperate to make a sale. If you need help with LinkedIn Appointment Setting please let us know.
LinkedIn is the premier social media platform for professionals in all industries. With over 300 million monthly users, you have quite a large base to develop new connections and build relationships with potential clients.
However, there are several LinkedIn “sins” which can haunt you and affect your credibility and reputation. Here are just a few things to avoid doing on LinkedIn:
Judge others for their choices. No matter what their choice – whether a prospect chose a different coach or chose a branding color palette that you don’t like – posting your negative opinions on LinkedIn serves no purpose. If your prospect chose another coach, ask them privately what influenced their decision. Feedback is useful, public shaming is not.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you should NOT do on LinkedIn. Across all the social media platforms you’ve probably seen plenty of tacky things that made your eyes roll. Use your common sense and think before you post on LinkedIn. How will your posts be perceived? These tips are not meant to discourage you from being your authentic self; they are instead meant to act as guidelines to maintaining your professional credibility so your ideal clients will find you and trust you.
Next on this LinkedIn Marketing Guide is….
Since you’re not approaching LinkedIn with a sales approach mindset, you need to make every aspect of this platform work to your advantage in order to both attract prospective clients and then convince them that you are the expert they’ve been searching for. One way to achieve this is by showcasing your expertise in a natural, informative way which leads to increase your credibility as an expert.
Paying attention to small details on your profile can help build your credibility as will participating in groups and by publishing content on a regular basis. When people recognize your name as a regular, they will check out your profile and a possible business relationship can blossom from there.
So you have a LinkedIn profile, now what? In addition to searching out viable connections (such as people you already know or have worked with in the past), publishing content should be at the top of your to-do list. Publishing the right content on your feed as well as in your groups will attract potential leads and increase your credibility and expertise.
One word of caution: Do not publish an article to your wall and then publish that same exact article to the twelve groups you belong to. That single activity will get your LinkedIn account frozen faster than you can sneeze. LinkedIn does not tolerate spammers so post your content carefully.
If you want to post both to your wall and to your groups (which is a smart strategy), either post on two different topics or rewrite one article so it covers the same topic but not with the same wording. An editorial calendar is helpful when it comes to planning your social media posts.
But if the words “publish content” scare you to death, here are a few tips to follow:
When in doubt about what to publish, consider outsourcing the content creation to an experienced freelancer. They will brainstorm ideas and help fill in your editorial calendar rather quickly as well as prepare your content so all you need to do is approve it and publish. Extend your knowledge and expertise to your audience with your content. You just never know how your content will affect someone or to whom they will pass along your articles.
This LinkedIn Marketing Guide wouldn’t be complete without….
When it comes to using social media to market your business or brand, choosing the correct platform can make or break your marketing efforts. LinkedIn is one of the premier social media platforms and it boasts a very professional atmosphere. While Facebook and Twitter are geared toward the more casual user, LinkedIn was specifically built for professionals in business.
LinkedIn allows users to build a network of contacts through direct introductions or posting helpful information on their own feeds and in groups. While relationship marketing requires effort on your part, you can also encourage others to network with you by putting forth a professional image. As the old saying goes, “You only have one time to make a good first impression,” and that one time often lasts only a few seconds while prospects look at your LinkedIn profile.
Let’s discuss ways to make that right first impression:
Done correctly, marketing on LinkedIn will showcase your expertise; done incorrectly, you’ll be seen as someone who’s just looking to make a buck or who doesn’t know the first thing about marketing. Be smart with your marketing efforts and watch your business grow.
Making the right connections on LinkedIn (or on any networking platform) should never be hit or miss. Don’t leave your marketing to chance; instead, know exactly who you’re serving, who you want to speak with, and what you have to offer.
Don’t be intimidated by LinkedIn marketing. Consistency is important for online networking so develop a plan which includes specific content sharing, groups to visit, and qualifying leads you want to meet. Once you formulate a plan, implementation becomes much easier and less time-consuming. Consistency also shows these new connections that you are serious about your business instead of treating it like a passing hobby, so plan to visit LinkedIn daily.
A Practical LinkedIn Marketing Guide must contain new client acquisition tactics, e.g.:
As you probably know by now, consistency is vitally important for any of your marketing efforts but especially for LinkedIn. How many times have you noticed that someone is really active but then disappears for months at a time? Then, surprise surprise, they show up again but that’s short-lived and within six weeks they are inactive again. What kind of feeling or impression does that impact, especially on an uber-professional platform like LinkedIn?
The easiest way to be consistent with any social media marketing is to create a plan: a checklist or action steps that you can implement every day. A simple way to remember all the things to check or do when you log in to make sure you’re covering all your bases. A daily action plan will help you remember everything but it also saves time and prevents you from staring at your computer screen, not having any thoughts as to what to share or how to contribute to the groups you’re in.
Creating this list of content ahead of time allows you to have the prewritten content ready to just copy and paste when you log in to LinkedIn. If possible, outsource your content creation or block off time once or twice a week to create that content.
Participating in groups shows your expertise to others and puts you in a small spotlight so people get to know about your specialty and services.
Your name will stay foremost in people’s minds if you provide value in every LinkedIn post and by staying active in your groups. Create a daily action plan that works for you and then put it into action. Engage your audience and provide value every time you post and you’ll soon see a growth in your connections and possible new sales.
Even after doing all your target market analysis and creating your client avatar, some people will still say NO to your products and services. The reasons are numerous – ranging anywhere from the price is not affordable to not understanding the benefits you’re offering – but these responses are not reasons to give up. Remember that any kind of business marketing, both online and in-person, is not about the sale: it’s about building the relationship.
Relationship marketing is about just that: building a long-term relationship that fosters customer loyalty, interaction, and engagement. It’s not about a quick sale or adding new names to your prospect list. Right now, at the beginning of these relationships, it’s all about proving your worth and showing your expertise in a helpful way to gain trust from your audience.
I once heard a marketer ask, “Did you marry your spouse the moment you met them? Of course not, so don’t expect your prospects to buy your product the moment you meet them either.” That idea really stuck with me because we’ve heard time and again that prospects become customers when they know, like, and trust you. Hitting someone up with your sales pitch at a networking meeting eliminates the “getting to know you” phase and then you’ll always be remembered as desperate or uncouth.
Networking is vital to spreading the word about your business. LinkedIn is a phenomenal place to start but being seen on social media means being active every day of the week. Post to your feed and in your groups; share about live events you’re attending; add a personal element to your posts by sharing a new-to-you vacation spot. No need to spend hours a day on LinkedIn but posting a minimum of 5 days a week is necessary.
Also remember to network in person. Attend business events in your community. Inquire about joining your local Chamber of Commerce, BNI chapter, or Toastmasters group. If it’s in your budget, sponsor a youth sports team or, at the very least, participate at local community day fairs by renting a booth and meeting your local neighbors.
When you get to the point in your relationship that you’re asking for a meeting or a sale but the prospect says “No,” don’t take it as a personal affront and kick that connection off your list. Instead, get some feedback about why they said no and don’t be afraid to ask if they know of anyone in their circle who could use your service. This type of mutual friend introduction is much more welcoming than you randomly trying to connect blindly.
Also, you never know when your connection will change their minds and decide to hire you. It could be six months from now or two years from now but continued interaction on LinkedIn will keep your name front and center in their mind.
Consistency refers to posting to LinkedIn daily but it also means to keep your offerings updated and produce new content on a regular basis. Write a new article or record a new video for your LinkedIn feed on a weekly basis. Create checklists or short reports on a regular basis and hand offer them on your feed and in your groups. If your prospects and connections see the same old products or freebies on your site or in your feed, they will think your business is as stagnant as your offerings.
Hearing “no” is a disappointment but that doesn’t mean it will be a “no” forever. The timing of your offering for your prospect may not be right, plain and simple, so keep fostering that friendship/relationship and be ready when the prospect changes their mind.
LinkedIn was created in 2003 as a way to do business differently. It was founded as a business-related social network and has kept that reputation as the go-to place for business connections over these last 15 years. Not only can job seekers find hiring managers or decision-makers in their dream companies but business owners and sales executives can find prospects via LinkedIn as well.
Gone are the days when job seekers answer classified ads or send resumes blindly to large companies. Likewise, cold calling prospects usually don’t yield very good results in this technology age where the buzzword of the day is “relationship marketing.” Whether you want to get noticed on LinkedIn by hiring recruiters or by business prospects, LinkedIn is THE place to be seen.
But how exactly do you get “seen” in a sea of 300 million monthly active users? Let’s explore some simple ways:
Start by thinking about how your target audience would search for you. What are they looking for exactly? How do you want to be known? Use those keyword phrases throughout your profile where the LinkedIn search bots look, such as the Headline and Summary as well as the Experience and Skills sections.
No blurry selfies or brooding, artistic headshots. If you do make it to the top of a search, you’ll want to catch your prospect’s eye very quickly and a professional, happy headshot is the quickest way to do that.
Still address your top skill or benefit your prospect will receive but add some flare to it. “Business Coach” certainly describes what you do but in a very general way. “Business Coach to the Fastest Growing Multi-million Dollar Companies” adds some more flare and immediately identifies who you want to work with.
Like it or not, prospects will skim your profile instead of taking their time reading, so edit the important details into powerful sentences. No need for subtlety here; be straightforward and place the most important details first.
Business networking is never complete; it’s an ongoing process you should learn to love if you want your business to grow consistently. LinkedIn will only display your connections up to 500 but you can certainly connect with more people than that. You’ll find two different schools of thought when it comes to making connections. One side believes it’s vitally important to increase those numbers quickly because prospects want to see you – their coach – well-connected. The other side believes the smart way to connect is only with people you have met previously, thus creating a higher quality network of known names.
Don’t think of LinkedIn or networking as a one-time task or a “set it and forget it” process. Being active on LinkedIn means: creating content to share, joining relevant groups, and making comments on other people’s content. When you share content it displays to all your connections, thus informing them of your expertise and inviting them to make comments. Being active in groups means starting a conversation, asking a question, giving advice to others, and sharing content. If you are active and then disappear, it leaves a bad impression and your connections will start to question your dedication to your business.
LinkedIn Marketing can become the premier source to connect with business owners and decision-makers. Creating an optimized profile that looks professional is important but don’t just leave your networking to chance. Be active and show your expertise in your shared content and group interactions.
LinkedIn Marketing Guide Author: Dennis Dubner, CEO, and Founder of SONDORA MARKETING.
Misleading Google Analytics: Why It Pays Off to Read Between the LinesIn my experience, it’s rare to come across a digital agency that makes deliberate attempts to deceive with misleading analytics. That said, this doesn’t mean that misleading analytics in a general sense aren’t rife. Agencies sometimes fall into the trap of presenting inaccurate findings and voicing misguided suggestions without even realizing it.
As is the case with many things in life, the key to successful use of web analytics lies in interpretation.
With growing regularity, I’m approached by clients looking for clarification of data that appears to paint an inaccurate picture. If you’ve been operating a website for more than a day or so, it’s likely you’ll already be familiar with Google Analytics. It’s also probable you’ve got to grips with the basics of GA and appreciate the significance of the data produced.
Nevertheless, I felt it prudent to present a few facts and findings on the subject of misleading analytics, which I believe could help almost any online business. Or at least, any business owner who takes a proactive interest in the performance and prosperity of their organization.
Table of Contents:
• Introduction: Are Agencies Out to Mislead?
• Not All Bounce Rates Are the Same
• On Page Time: More = Better…Right?
• What vs. Why
• Digging Deeper…
In terms of keyword use and optimization, let’s consider another everyday example. You stock both tennis balls and footballs in your online store, only to find that tennis balls are converting 200% better. You’ve focused heavily on both keywords – ‘tennis balls’ just seems to be delivering better results.
On the surface, this would seem to suggest that ‘tennis balls’ is not only the better keyword but also the product you should be investing your time, effort and money in. The problem being that by placing your decisions purely on basic analytics alone, you could be making a big mistake.
For example, it could be that there’s a major tennis tournament taking place at the time and generating unusual interest in tennis balls. It could also simply be that the pictures and product descriptions you have accompanying your footballs aren’t nearly as impressive as those accompanying your tennis balls. Long story short, there are endless plausible explanations as to why you’re selling more tennis balls than footballs.
Explanations you won’t find in the most basic Google Analytics data.
It’s the classic case of focusing on what is happening as opposed to why it is happening. With Google Analytics, you’re provided with a detailed snapshot of what’s going on with your website at the time. Nevertheless, Google Analytics itself cannot be relied upon to accurately and effectively interpret its own data.
Ultimately, it’s down to you or your digital marketing partner to make sense of the data and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
For example, thousands (maybe even millions) of online businesses gauge their success or otherwise predominantly on bounce rates. The way they see it, the greater the proportion of people ‘bouncing’ from their website without taking action, the more urgent the action that needs to be taken. Bounce rates are calculated by way of a percentage of the total number of visitors who visit your website – those who fail to convert or interact.
But here’s the thing, not all bounce rates are created equally.
Think of it this way – how many times have you visited a website or a restaurant, in order to check out its menus and perhaps take its phone number? Or for that matter, looked up a product or service you’re definitely going to buy, but chose not to buy online at the time? Given the fact that you didn’t convert or take action, your visit is classified as a bounce…aka, a failure with the standard interpretation of bounce rates.
Hence, having a bounce rate as high as even 80% or so doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is bailing on your site dissatisfied or disillusioned. With bounce rates, it’s of critical importance to read between the lines and determine what your customers are doing when they pay you a visit.
Another common metric used to gauge the quality and effectiveness of a website is on-page time. That being, the amount of time the average user spends on your website. For obvious reasons, it’s naturally assumed that more is better.
As with the example above, however, this again isn’t necessarily the case. If you’re running a relatively simple e-commerce business, an individual spending a good 5 minutes browsing your products or services is great. That’s more than enough time for them to see what you’ve got to offer, check out your products and maybe even make a purchase.
By contrast, individual spending more than 5 minutes on the website of a doctor or dentist could suggest they’re struggling to find the information they need. It’s a tricky yet important balancing act to pull off – you need to retain the attention of the visitor, but you also need to ensure they get what they need as quickly as possible.
So once again, you cannot base your judgments or decisions on on-page time alone. At both ends of the scale, you could end up reading into data that paints a wholly misleading picture.
Over the last couple of years in particular, I’ve noted a distinct uptick in the number of clients I work with who’ve taken an active interest in analytics. The problem is that in the vast majority of instances, it’s only a passing interest. Unfortunately, a fleeting glance at the most basic analytics from time to time is the perfect recipe for misinterpretation.
Personally, I recommend investing a minimum of 15-30 minutes every week in Google Analytics, Google Ads Manager and Google Search Console observation and analysis. Irrespective of your experience with GA/GSC to date, this is the minimum amount of time required to dig deeper than the surface and figure out what’s really going on.
Once again, the key to effective and efficient use of analytical data lies in separating the ‘what’ from the ‘why’. GA can present all the factual data in the world, but it can’t tell you what to do with it or how to interpret it.
If you struggle to make sense of GA, it’s worth considering third-party involvement for the benefit of your business.
18 Reasons You Need a New WebsiteSimply owning and operating a basic website isn’t enough. It’s the approach you take to web design projects that determines the outcome. Even the best-looking websites out there don’t necessarily resonate with their target audiences nor they help you grow your business. Now more than ever, it’s about the total package of engaging content, mobile responsive design, and the all-around user experience. From time to time, every website needs to be tweaked and updated. Web development shouldn’t be viewed as a one-time-only job. Instead, the secret to creating the coolest websites around lies in continuous refinement and improvement. But if your website just isn’t up to scratch, it could be time to scrap the whole thing and head back to the drawing board.
If you’re generally quite happy with your website, it can be difficult to know when the time comes for a tune-up. Let alone a complete new-build of the whole thing. The problem is that just because you like your website doesn’t mean anyone else does. Never forget that your website is perhaps the single most important representative of your entire business online. If it doesn’t deliver a strong and memorable message, it’s game over. So rather than taking chances, an occasional audit of its value comes highly recommended.
It’s up to you whether you work with leading web design agencies or take the DIY approach, but periodic improvements to your website are mandatory.
So with this in mind, here’s a summary of 18 reasons why you may need a new website right now:
If you don’t already have a website, you’re in danger of disappearing entirely. Irrespective of the size or nature of your business, today’s consumer expects every brand to have a well presented and information-rich website. Hence, you need to get on the case as quickly as possible or run the risk of losing customers.
As touched upon, your website needs to deliver a strong and lasting first impression. Research has shown that you’ve got less than 7 seconds to win over every new visitor to your website. If they’re not immediately impressed by what they see, they won’t stick around to check out the rest of your business.
Chances are your competitors already have seriously impressive websites. Unless you find a way to outshine them with your own online offerings, you’ll struggle to gain a competitive edge. One-upmanship is the key to success with any online business venture. If you don’t provide your target audience with a more appealing offer, why would they choose you over your competitors?
If your current e-commerce platform doesn’t support the latest plug-ins and add-ons, you could be selling your business short. Consider carefully how dynamic and responsive your website is to the requirements and expectations of visitors. E-commerce websites that are not regularly updated almost always fall behind the pack.
Today’s web user has neither the time nor the inclination to deal with slow and sluggish websites. Instead, they’re willing to wait no more than 3 seconds for any specific page to load. Anything slower and they’ll head straight into the open arms of your competitors. If the back-end of your website doesn’t deliver the goods, you may need to start again from scratch.
The content you publish on your website will play a key role in determining if and to what extent your business succeeds. If your content is out of date, poorly written or generally uninspiring, it could be holding you and your business back. Quality content is the backbone of every successful website and should be prioritized.
It’s worth remembering that impulse purchases can contribute heavily to your total e-commerce revenues. The quicker and easier you make it for customers to convert, the more likely they are to do just that. By contrast, complex and drawn-out payment processes increase shopping cart abandonment rates. You need to do everything you can to streamline the payment process, eliminating complications where possible.
The importance of delivering outstanding mobile experience is hardly a new discovery. In fact, Google has been handing penalties to mobile-unfriendly websites for over three years. Given that more than half of all web searches are now carried out via mobile devices, you cannot afford to turn your back on mobile audiences. Instead, you need to ensure your website delivers a flawless experience for every visitor.
There’s only so much you can do with an existing website to improve its SEO performance. If you’re serious about climbing the ranks in the SERP listings, you might want to consider a fresh website from scratch. Powerful SEO elements can be woven into the fiber of a website during every step of the development process. Websites built from the ground up around effective SEO typically perform strongest in the SERP rankings. And you have slim and low-quality content you are guaranteed to have no organic traffic from Search Engines.
Of course, it could be that you don’t currently sell your products and services directly through your website. Rather than simply bolting a sales function on to your existing site, it could be more effective to build an entirely new e-commerce website from scratch. This way, you’ll have the opportunity to create a unified and cohesive online retail experience for your target audience. Bolt-ons are better than nothing, but a new purpose-built website could be even more effective.
It’s never nice to acknowledge a notable and continual decline in website traffic. Things may have been great at one time, but seem to have hit a downward spiral. If there’s no obvious explanation as to where you’re going wrong, it could simply be that your website doesn’t resonate with your audience. In which case, the solution is simple – invest in an all-new website, built from the ground up with your perfect customer in mind.
No website is immune to the attacks of cyber criminals. In fact, the likelihood of being targeted by fraudsters is at an all-time high. The question being – are you doing enough to safeguard both your online business and your customers? If the answer is no, it’s only a matter of time until you face the consequences. Hackers are becoming more sophisticated than ever before, which calls for enhanced diligence on the part of online business owners.
Under no circumstances should you ever build a website using cheap (or free) prefabricated templates. Along with coming across as amateurish, such websites are notorious for delivering a poor user experience, terrible SEO performance, and bloated code. Not to mention, the impossibility of creating a unique website that distinguishes you from your competitors. If your current website is essentially a clone of countless other websites, you need to think about starting from scratch.
Your navigation system will have a direct impact on how your website is interpreted and interacted with. Complex and confusing navigation systems are one of the biggest turn-offs for today’s web user. If they can’t find exactly what they need in seconds, they won’t bother searching any further. Consider the efficiency and effectiveness of your navigation system, along with how it may be affecting your performance as a business.
The days of Flash impressing online audiences are now confined to the history books. Today, Flash only stands to hinder the performance of your website, dilute your SEO strategy and make it impossible for mobile visitors to get any real value from your pages. On the whole, therefore, excessive use of Flash is to be avoided at all costs. If Flash plays a pivotal part in the design of your current website, it’s time for a rethink.
Social media has become a lifestyle for the 21st-century web user. Hence, it should be seamlessly integrated with your website. It’s up to you to make it quick and easy for your customers to head straight over to your social media profiles. Rather than seeing your website and social accounts as separate entities, they should be brought together to form one cohesive web presence.
Try to remember that every visitor to your website will make snap judgments based on visual content alone. If they’re put off by outdated imagery, everything else is inconsequential. Every image you add to your website should inspire and reassure your customers that they’ve come to the right place. If not, they’ll head someplace else – it’s as simple as that.
Last but not least, it could simply be that your current website is no longer an accurate representation of your company. You may have added new services, branched out into new product areas or simply evolved beyond what you once were. If this is the case, there’s really no better time to consider refreshing your online presence with a brand new website.
Ways to Calculate and Improve Lifetime Value (LTV)
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is an effective way of benchmarking your Customer Acquisition Cost against the Actual Profits you’ll generate from a single Customer.
Customer Lifetime Value is calculated by subtracting the total costs of acquiring a customer from the profits they generate. LTV can only be used to create basic financial estimates for the future, but can nonetheless prove instrumental in helping you make better decisions for your business.
LTV is useful because it provides a guideline as to how much you can spend to acquire customers, in accordance with their average spend. You can also evaluate the payback period – the time it takes for the customer to repay their acquisition costs. Longer payback periods amount to more risk for the business.
What’s more, investors always pay close attention to an organization’s LTV when carrying out wider financial health assessments. By getting to know your LTV, you’ll be in a much stronger position to drive your business forward.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) represents the average revenue that a customer generates for your business before they churn, offset by gross margin. LTV in SaaS is only ever used as a forward-looking estimate of the future, but calculating a reasonable estimate allows you to make smarter decisions for your business.
Business owners and marketing teams are constantly on the lookout for reliable ways to acquire new customers and enhance customer loyalty in a cost-effective manner. Calculating the lifetime value of your customer is an essential step in the journey towards boosting your company’s ROI in product development, customer support and marketing arenas alike.
In the simplest terms, LTV is a simple yet effective method for forecasting projected profits from customers throughout their lifetime relationship with your brand. Roughly translated, it’s a case of calculating how much you can expect to receive in accordance with the costs of acquiring them in the first place.
By calculating your customer lifetime value, you’ll have the opportunity to make more strategic decisions in key areas such as:
Product and Service Development – Customer lifetime values can help guide decisions regarding product and service development, such as whether it would be cost-effective to alter the design of a product to cater to the preferences of a sub-segment of your target audience.
There’s a great deal of data that can be brought together to create an accurate customer lifetime value. At its core, however, a basic customer lifetime value can be calculated as follows:
LTV = Lifetime Customer Revenue – Lifetime Customer Costs
Working with this formula, a typical example could play out like this. A customer orders products and services to the total value of USD 2,000 ($1,000 product price you charge in Year 0, and $1,000 revenue from the services you provide during Years 1 & 2) during the lifetime of their relationship with your business (for example, for 3 years). During these 3 years, the total cost of the sales and services you’ve provided add up to USD 750. This would result in an LTV of USD 1,250 ($2,000 – $750 = $1,250). With this data, it can be concluded that to spend anything more or equal than USD 1,250 on customer acquisition would be counterproductive. Doing so would mean breaking even at best, or coming out with a loss. Acquisition costs regularly fluctuate and vary significantly from one organization to the next.
In all instances, however, customer retention is considered a more effective and affordable strategy, with the potential to deliver a much healthier ROI.
Recent years have brought about the emergence of hundreds of thousands of new start-ups, intensifying competition across all industries and sectors. As a result, businesses are placing heavier emphasis than ever before on the acquisition of new customers. This, despite the fact that customer acquisition typically costs 700% more than customer retention.
Striking the right balance with your customer lifetime value calculator holds the key to your brand’s long-term success. The good news is that there are countless avenues to explore for enhancing and improving your LTV.
The most effective of all being as follows:
Be it products, services, features, resources or anything else, it’s up to you to provide your customers with something they have an interest in. It could also be something as simple as a blog, providing the kinds of insights that keep your customers coming back for more. It could be the quality of the service you provide, the simplicity of your online store, the consistent speed of your deliveries – whatever you can think of to set you apart from your competitors and nurture the relationships to deliver more value to the existing customer.
Placing your customers in the spotlight can be a great way of both nurturing retention and attracting the attention of new customers. From photos to video testimonials to reviews and recommendations, it’s all about engaging with the audience you intended to win over. Become part of the community, rather than building barriers between you and your audience.
Rewards and incentives are all well and good, though are often all-too predictable. But when we receive something unexpected completely out of the blue from a brand we’ve done business with, we can’t help but shout about it. All of which can work wonders for the respective firm’s reputation and position. Even if it’s something as simple as a hand-written greetings card, it could have the desired impact.
Rather than expecting customer feedback to flow your way organically, consider adopting a proactive approach. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to make suggestions and include some kind of incentive for doing so. Thank them for their comments, respond to any comments published online and act on their suggestions. It’s only when customers genuinely believe you’re listening to them that you can expect to win their loyalty.
Anyone wishing to do so should be able to contact your company instantaneously via whichever channel appeals to them most. It’s up to you to be there when your customers need you – not the other way around. Under no circumstances should you ever make your customers jump through hoops simply to contact a member of your support team. As mentioned a little earlier, stellar customer support typically holds the key to customer loyalty and a more robust LTV.
Your Customer Lifetime Value is by no means a silver-bullet metric capable of solving every issue you may face. Nevertheless, it’s one of the most invaluable and useful metrics to be brought into your key decision-making processes.
Once you’ve established your current LTV, it’s up to you to do whatever it takes to enhance and improve it where possible.
Googlebot in 2019 – How Does It Actually Work?
If you take a proactive approach to SEO, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the term ‘Googlebot’. If not, here’s its official definition as provided by Google:
“Googlebot is the generic name for Google’s web crawler. Googlebot is the general name for two different types of crawlers: a desktop crawler that simulates a user on the desktop, and a mobile crawler that simulates a user on a mobile device.”
In a purely matter-of-fact capacity, Google provides a fair amount of information on positive SEO practices. Nevertheless, they aren’t typically in the habit of providing the answers SEO specialists and webmasters really want.
As something of a break from the norm, Google’s Martin Splitt and Microsoft’s Suz Hinton recently sat down to discuss all things Googlebot in 2019. What it does, how it behaves and the more general information marketers and webmasters need to know.
Detailed below, you’ll find a selection of key questions raised during the meeting, along with a summary of the answers provided by both parties:
Much of the confusion surrounding SEO in general stems from the fact that most people have no idea how the Googlebot works. Even if they’re familiar with the concept, they may not understand its mechanics, its functions and its objectives.
According to Splitt, the Googlebot is simply a piece of software used to crawl websites, index web pages and help assign rankings. The system is designed to analyze web content, determine its value and decide who it should be presented to in the SERP rankings. The most appropriate content for any given query being prioritized and positioned more prominently.
However, Googlebot itself isn’t responsible for assigning rankings. Instead, it provides Google with the information required to make decisions and adjustments regarding SERP rankings. Googlebot essentially creates a ‘catalog’ of content by indexing web pages – SERP rankings are determined elsewhere.
Initially, Googlebot behaves in a similar way to a web browser. The software finds a website by way of a link or a sitemap submission, or through countless other detection methods. It’s also possible to direct site indexation or re-indexation if necessary. After which, the initial website visit occurs in a similar way as with any conventional web browser.
The frequency with which Googlebot crawls is calculated in accordance with the nature of the website and its content respectively. In the case of a dynamic website that’s likely to be updated with relevant content on a regular basis, it will be crawled more regularly than a predominantly static website.
A typical working example of which being news or current events website, which is updated around-the-clock with important news updates. Google wants to ensure it brings relevant information to its audiences the moment it is published, which in turn means crawling such sites more regularly to update its index accordingly.
By contrast, a retail store that’s updated once every few weeks needn’t necessarily be crawled as often. Just as an academic portal with relatively static content may not need to be crawled with any real regularity. Google also enforcers measures to ensure spammy sites are crawled infrequently, which can have a negative impact on their SEO performance.
It’s also possible to instruct Google not to index certain pages of a website if the respective webmaster doesn’t want the information to appear in the search results.
Webmasters and business owners operating JavaScript-based websites have long been concerned with Google’s ability (or lack thereof) to successfully crawl and index their pages. Given how crawlers have been traditionally incapable of executing JavaScript, they’ve effectively see blank pages when attempting to crawl JavaScript content.
Contrary to popular belief, this is no longer the case with Googlebot. Today’s Googlebot is designed to effectively execute JavaScript and index the site’s content accordingly. Albeit at a later point, having been subjected to Google’s ‘web rendering service’ and the use of a second browser.
Google, therefore, recommends the mindful and strategic use of JavaScript, due to its capacity to significantly slow down the indexation and subsequent ranking processes.
Interestingly, Google makes no attempt to hide its crawling activities from webmasters and online business owners. It’s actually pretty easy to identify a Googlebot visit, as outlined in Google’s official webmaster support pages:
“Your website will probably be crawled by both Googlebot Desktop and Googlebot Mobile. You can identify the subtype of Googlebot by looking at the user agent string in the request. However, both crawler types obey the same product token (user agent token) in robots.txt, and so you cannot selectively target either Googlebot mobile or Googlebot desktop using robots.txt.”
Addressing one of the most common questions among mobile-focused webmasters, Splitt explained that indexing is about Google ‘discovering content using a mobile user agent and a mobile viewport’. It’s essentially a case of prioritizing mobile-friendly content to be added to Google’s mobile index, rather than desktop content that may not be as appropriate for mobile audiences.
Mobile-friendliness – aka mobile-readiness – simply refers to the quality and appropriateness of a website’s content and layout for mobile access. If every aspect of a webpage or website can be browsed and interacted with using a mainstream mobile device, it’s considered mobile-friendly by Google.
Google’s efforts to index mobile content have been stepped up recently over the past couple of years, in order to satisfy the expectations and requirements of fast-growing mobile audiences worldwide.
Last but not least, Google once again took the opportunity to confirm that more than 200 signals (or ranking indicators) are used to assign value to any given website. Mobile-friendliness has been cited as one of the most important quality indicators for websites in 2019 but by no means the only indicator taken into account.
Interestingly, Splitt also confirmed that the value assigned to each of these 200+ quality indicators is continuously moving and changing. One of the many measures making it increasingly difficult for black-hat SEO strategies to produce positive results.
The moral of the entire story being eloquently summarised by Splitt in one simple plea to the masses:
“Just build good content for the users and then you’ll be fine!”