Category: Digital Marketing

The modern-day society we live in makes us mostly reliant on the internet or precisely put, on Google. When it comes to finding the ways to flourish our local businesses, nothing better than google business clicks the mind. Google business is probably the most accessible pathway for our company to get noticed far and wide. In this regard, Google business reviews are the most important thing to contribute to what kind of fame our business gets. Unfortunately, companies do not usually bother responding to the reviews they get considering it inconsequential to do so. However, according to Google My Bussines Support Page itself, it is necessary to interact with your consumers by responding to their reviews about you and show that you value their feedback. In this regard, here are some tips and trick to keep in mind while responding to reviews on google my business page.

The do’s of responding to reviews on google my business

The success and marketing of your business are profoundly affected by your review responses to your customers. These responses to reviews can become your gateway to more and more achievements id handled adequately. Therefore, it is crucial to stay careful in your answers. Here are some things you can do to ensure a well-designed response.

#1. Show Gratitude

If your customers praise you through reviews or give some suggestions, it is your responsibility to thank them. Such thankful reviews responses demonstrate your care and love for your customers. These responses also show that you are active enough to listen to the reviews without any complaints too. Such positive reviews are often overlooked or ignored by businesses since they only care about resolving conflicts mostly. Answering to positive comments is an excellent way to show your company’s dynamic and respondent nature alongside attracting more customers.

#2. Offer quick and easy solutions

In case you get a bad review with a customer sharing their bad experience with you, respond very carefully. In such cases, a simple apology can never get the job done. Resolve whatever issue they faced and try not to burden them at all during the item is being resolved. In cases where you cannot turn back the clock to get the mistake corrected, offer your customers some extra credit or deal a compensation for their loss.

#3. Be Brief

Let us be real. No one has the time to read a whole long paragraph with your responding to a review. Try to be sweet, simple, and short in your review responses. In the case of positive reviews, a simple statement showing your gratitude or telling them about some new offers from your business would do. In the cases of bad reviews, apologize and then offer a short compensation. Great responses are not read by anyone and are, hence, just a wastage your both your and customer’s time.

The don’ts of responding to reviews on google my business

According to NDMR, the customers with bad experiences with your business are more likely to review on Google my business than those who enjoyed your services. A statistical analysis by marketing charts shows that the proportion of people who share their bad experiences with a business is approximately 10%-15% more than those who share good ones. Therefore, it is essential to be careful in your responses to a negative review.

#1. Never respond hastily: Think and evaluate before returning

Always remember that your response to a positive review is not only visible to the one who gave that review. Instead, it is apparent to a wide range of audience. Therefore, it must be very well-thought and well-calculated. It is better to calmly evaluate the review, be it good or bad, and then respond objectively. A single hastily made, a rude, indifferent, and negative response can take your business into great peril. Even if the customer is unjust in his comments, make sure you respond to him in a way he would expect you to.

#2. Do not hide your response

No matter how poorly justified you think your review response is, you should not hide it form public at all. We understand that sometimes businesses do make such mistakes that have no refund. In such situations responding to an angry customer’s review can get very tricky. The biggest mistake you can do in such cases, other than reacting rudely, is to hide your response from the public. Make sure you are not avoiding web confrontation, instead, tackle it carefully in front of everyone. Public reactions to hateful comments show that a company cares about its clients and is responsive in all the situations. This much help in increasing your value in customers’ eyes. A study done by Cornell University reveals that responding to negative comments increases to consumers positive view about your company.

#3. Do not respond like a robot

One of the most important things to make sure your response looks like the company’s respondent has designed it. Never write a comment that looks like it is automatically generated. Copying the same review over and over again or with a little change make it less authentic. It is better to use the customer’s name in your response to their review. Try to respond in a way that gives priority to their issues and makes them the center of your statement. This ensures the customer that his or her reviews are being taken seriously and individually. Refrain from using the cliched comments like “Thanks for reviewing us.” These don’t leave a good impact on the customer even when they have been responded subtly.

Conclusion

There are so many other tricks, tips, do’s, and don’ts of responding to reviews on google my business page. However, those shared here are quite enough to save your reputation if you follow these correctly while responding. Follow these tips and strengthen your game of responding to reviews online.

This article is contributed by Alma Causey, Freelance writer at Rizereview.

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When it comes to digital marketing, there are many different avenues and revenue streams which you can take in order to find success. Some of them are free, but often the most successful are those where you put a level of budget into the endeavour.

With that in mind, here are the steps you need to follow in order to set up an effective paid Facebook campaign.

Have a Goal in Mind

The first step to setting up a successful paid Facebook campaign is to have a specific goal in mind. After all, two advertisements on Facebook may seem very much the same; but, are actually really different in terms of what they aim to do. For example, one may be designed to increase audience size and boost engagement for the Facebook page itself. While another might be more intent on boosting website traffic and conversions.

Ultimately, your goal will change the way you present the ad itself and the parameters of the campaign, so it’s important to understand this from the outset.

When you first look to create a Facebook paid ad, you will be given the option to choose the objective of the campaign. You will have a choice of Awareness (boosted posts, brand awareness, post reach increases), Consideration (app installs, video views, event attendance) and Conversion (claim an offer, physical shop visits and website conversions). Choose whichever fits your campaign best and you can then move on to other considerations.

Define an Audience/Budget

Next, you will have to set the audience and budget for a campaign. This is a fairly simple step but very important to get right. As choosing the wrong audience or a poorly thought budget can severely impact the success of your campaign.

Your audience parameters will include:

• Location
• Languages
• Age
• Gender
• Behaviour/Interests
• Connections

See an example of these choices here:

So, for example, if you were a local, trendy, Manchester restaurant. You might set your location to Manchester within a 5km radius, with an age range between 20–50, with interests in your cuisine type. The ad will give you an estimated reach for your audience, so you can check if it’s worth your while.

Once the audience is set, you can move on to defining the budget. This can be done in a couple of ways, importantly by either setting a daily budget or a lifetime budget (especially good if you’re looking to have the ad running continuously). Daily budgets are ideal if you have a smaller budget and want to ration it out over a long period. You can also choose the start and end days of your campaign, so you can work out the exact spend of your campaign beforehand.

With so many budget parameters in place, overspending shouldn’t be an issue unless you accidentally put in the wrong date. So, remember to double check everything before putting campaigns live!

Create the Advert

There are a couple of ways that you can go about creating your ad, either by boosting a current post or creating a completely new one. For the purpose of the blog, we will instruct on the creation of a new ad.

Firstly, you will need to select the format you want the add to take. Your options are as follows:

Carousel ads tend to be ideal for e-commerce, as you can select a number of great product images for users to scroll through. Single image ads give you the ability to create variations to your ad with the simple image, to fit a number of different formats and ad locations. Then you have the video options, which include a simple video, a slideshow of looping images and a combination of the two in the canvas format.

If you have set a specific objective, then your format options may be limited (if you’ve set the objective ‘get video views’ then you will have to select a video format, for example).

Now, all that you need is the content for the ad. It needs to stand out, whether it’s an image or video, so some production value needs to be put into this in order to work. High-quality product photos, interesting videos and the like may be an expensive initial cost — but, you will find they’re much more successful when used in your Facebook campaigns.

And with that, all you have to do is set the ad live and wait for approval!

Monitor the Results

Once your ad has been approved, it becomes a waiting game. Will it be a success or not? That all depends on the numbers that come as a result of the campaign.

Of course, your objective should be a good indicator of whether or not the paid campaign is a success. Has your videos gotten more engagement? Is there more web traffic or conversions on your site? Is your Facebook page seeing more followers or likes as a result of the campaign?

Once you have determined the success of your campaign, then all you need to do is rinse and repeat! As after you have set up your first Facebook campaign the next few should be much easier! Just remember to tailor each one to your various objectives to ensure the right results.

This article is contributed by Zack Halliwell, freelance writer at Apadmi — Mobile app development London

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Any good marketing campaign dreams of an amazing word of mouth marketing where people are left talking about your brand.

Are you a digital marketer?

Well, then I have a secret for you.

User-generated content is your best shot to make this dream come true. It is the most trusted form of marketing that there is at present.

Creating relevant and original content for your brand is really important, and if it is created by your users themselves, then nothing could be better than that.

It’s like you are making your customers do marketing for you.

But it is not as plain and simple as said. Certain tactics and tricks are required that allows you to employ and utilize user-generated content to it’s full potential.

This article throws light on such interesting ideas that let you leverage UGC for your digital marketing campaigns.

Come, let’s have a look how.

Run UGC Campaigns And Hashtag Contests

One of the best ways to collect user-generated content is through hashtag contests and UGC campaigns.

As a brand, you could host a UGC inspired hashtag contest on social media. For that purpose, you may create brand dedicated hashtags. Thereafter, you may ask your users, customers, and followers to contribute to the hashtag campaigns.

It is actually interesting because it taps into the creative sides of the users. Also, the perk of getting displayed as part of brand content is too rewarding for the users. And if you are rewarding them with giveaways, then that just ensures more engagement by the users and followers.

Promoting your UGC and hashtag campaigns spread a word about it, engages more and more users, thus making it a trend. Nothing could be better than that. A trending UGC campaign naturally attracts immense user engagement and interaction.

Creating a perfect brand hashtags is really important for making your UGC campaigns really successful. Your hashtag must be trendy, simple, short, and catchy. It must resonate with the idea of your UGC campaign and brand simultaneously.

Display UGC Through Social Walls At Events And On Websites

Another amazing way of employing user-generated content for your brand promotion is by displaying it your users in a really interesting and engaging manner.

Now, how do you do that?

A social wall is a perfect answer to that question. A social wall is one of the most interesting, attractive, and engaging ways to display user-generated content.

You could employ a social wall to display user-generated content to your audience at an event, to your potential customers outside your outlet through digital signage or even your website visitors by embedding the social wall into your website.

A social wall is generally accompanied by a social aggregator which comes with powerful moderation, curation, and analytics features. So, you are not just limited to the displaying feature of a social wall.

Best way of doing so is by embedding Instagram feed on your business website.

The moderation and curation feature helps you to maintain your content quality and health while the analytics feature helps you get a deeper insight into customer behavior and sentiments associated with the user-generated content that you are displaying.

Collect And Display User-Generated Reviews

User-generated reviews that are posted online by genuine customers have a great impact on the minds of aspiring customers.

Most of the users before making any online purchase look for reviews of customers who have already bought that same product.

Customers always trust user-generated reviews and peer recommendations more than branded content. It’s like in the form of these reviews, your loyal customers are vouching for your the quality of your services and products.

Now, these online reviews may be both positive and negative. You should know how to deal with both positive and negative online reviews.

When a positive review is posted about you online, as a marketer, it’s a matter of joy for you. You can proudly display that to your other users through a social wall, digital signage, or by embedding it on your website. Always thank your users for a positive review. This makes them feel acknowledged and they are prompted to review you positively even in the future.

Negative reviews, although unwanted but are really necessary. Obviously, you cannot display it as your digital signage or embed it on your website. But you can surely learn from it. Negative reviews bring out those aspects of your services and products that you might have initially ignored or skipped. Remember to leave a comment that pacifies your unsatisfied customers and makes them believe that you will do your best to improve your services and products in the future. Don’t leave them unanswered.

Display User Stories Through Videos And Ad Campaigns

When you run ad campaigns for your brands online, just remember one thing-

“Your users are smart. They understand the difference between real and fake. They will know if what you are showing is genuine or produced by your marketing team.”

So, try to incorporate real user experiences and stories as a part of your ad campaigns.

Try showing your real users sharing their stories in the videos you incorporate as part of your video marketing strategy.

You could also support a cause in that direction while promoting your ad campaign.

That helps you create a personal link with the users. It presents the humane side of your non-living brand entity.

It also helps you target users that are generally not under your target audience radar but they resonate with the cause you are supporting.

Over To You

These were some of the major and interesting ideas that could help you leverage user-generated content for your marketing purposes.

This article is contributed by Anne Griffin, Digital marketer and Technical writer — Embed Instagram Feed on website

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The Conversion rate is a ratio of the total number of visitors to the number of customers who have completed targeted actions. So, in simple words, website conversion rate optimisation is a process in which SEO Experts try to generate leads/sales by encouraging customers to take desired actions.

All website owners, SEO professionals, digital marketing individuals take different steps to increase the conversion rate of the website. It is directly linked to their survival in the web-based business. Let’s see how conversion rate optimisation affects the performance of your brand.

#1. A Sharp Decline in Website’s Bounce Rate

The bounce rate of a website indicates the total number of visitors who landed on a website and left quickly without performing any action that gives business opportunities to its owner.

The high bounce rate of a site gives the impression that it doesn’t meet the user’s need at all. Websites with a high bounce rate are disliked by Google and are neglected in its SERP ’s.

There are many reasons why your site’s bounce rate is high. As a business owner, just identify all those factors and perform the troubleshooting work as soon as possible.

If visitors are able to navigate your site easily, find useful and informative content, and get products and services they desperately need, you see the bounce rate of your website goes down sharply, which improves its SEO rankings and gives you more business opportunities every day.

#2. A Sharp Decline in Cart Abandonment Rate

The volume of online trading is growing by leaps and bounds with each passing day. More and more people want to shop online. But it’s a bitter fact that shopping cart abandonment rate is also increasing. It means that online shoppers started the process of online shopping, but left without completing it.

An abandoned basket is a real pain for online shoppers. Their sales are affected and they trail in the E-commerce business.

You can deal with this problem by making the online buying process easier and simpler. Reach out to unhappy shoppers through Email marketing activities and urge them to complete the unpaid cart by giving them some discounts and free items.

Personalized Email marketing efforts work wonders in many cases. Customers come back to your website and buy desired products one after another.

#3. A Sharp Increase in Sales Through Different Social Media Channels

Online business owners, companies, business organisations, and individual entrepreneurs use different social media channels to advertise their products and services, increase awareness of the brand, interact with the targeted audience, and generate business opportunities.

Tech-savvy individuals are present on different social media websites and they spend a considerable amount of time over there. So, by pushing business messages on social media websites, you can easily attract a large number of new customers and sell a number of products. All you need to perform SMO and SMM campaigns carefully at regular intervals.

#4. You Get More Positive Reviews from Customers

Reviews play an important role when companies try to promote their brand on the web and sell products or services. At first, a conscious online shopper understands roams different online shopping portals to look into the offers made by E-commerce giants, get more information about products and services, and then make a final decision whether to buy a product or not.

When you perform conversion rate optimization regularly, Google displays your website regularly in its top search results, which helps visitors to buy the desired products and services or get the info they need desperately. When you meet customer’s expectation fully in a timely fashion, they become happy & give positive reviews to your brand. Always keep in mind that positive reviews help new customers to easily understand your main business message and deal with your brand regularly.

#5. Optimize Your Website as per SEO Guidelines

Organic traffic comes from different search engines. It determines the behavior of search engines towards your websites and how they treat it while displaying it or its pages in their SERPs. You must always keep in mind that the majority of Internet users flock to search engines to find the desired information, products, and services.

You must optimise your website for almost all leading search engines keeping the latest SEO tricks in mind. When your website or its pages meet the SEO guidelines of search engines and help users to find the required info in the smallest possible time, you get more organic traffic to your website every day. This means you can convert them into leads and increase the performance of your website up to a great extent.

Final Words

Generation of leads and sales is vital in a web-based business. It helps entrepreneurs to generate revenues to keep different business activities on. Just mix CRO with SEO activities and take your business to the next level.

This article is contributed by Jack, professional SEO Analyst at Stellen Infotech — SEO Service Company

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While most companies today have a digital marketing strategy, not many are actively controlling theirs. What does that mean? That they cannot shape the opinions formed behind their back on Facebook,Pinterest, Twitter, or other social media websites. What they should realize by now is that customer opinion will form, and it is always better to be able to nudge it gently in the right direction via direct participation.

Therefore, a company’s presence on different digital platforms matters. That means, if you run a company, you should focus on matters of digital marketing. But how can you do that?In several steps and the first of those is:

Getting in deep and evaluating what you envisioned

You may have set some goals in the past that you expected to meet via digital marketing. If that is so, then you need to determine whether that worked out or not. Some examples of digital marketing goals are:

• How many times are your blog posts shared on social media?
• Is your fan base big enough or do you need it to grow on social networking websites?
• How many times has your brand name been mentioned on social media sites?
• Does your company have any positive reviews on Yelp or Google Reviews? How many?

Have you already set your goals? Then stop to check whether you are achieving them or not. When you don’t know if you have hit your target projections, how will you know what needs improvement?Then compare those goals with what your company needs to achieve in the present to succeed. It might be time to extend those old goals, do away with them completely, or add new ones.

If you didn’t set any goals, then start doing so.

Choosing what to measure

How will you know which goals to choose? Through KPIs, which are factors that will influence your organization’s targets or its goals.Most types of KPIs, such as a valuable online interaction through your company’s site or page, are related to conversions. Of course, different businesses will define conversions differently,such as a purchase made or a user filling in a contact form. If they know the definition and stick to measuring it, they will do fine.

But these metrics come in two flavors:

The measurable metrics

• KPIs that can be quantified and those that are in alignment with your organization’s goals, such as sales or leads should be included.Startups may not have either early in the game. They can measure engagement and reach instead
• Leading indicators or as economists say metrics that indicate the path the economy will take. They can show you whether the type of marketing company you are putting your efforts, time, and money into is useful and if it will bear significant results or not.An example is measuring how many visitors spend more than 3 minutes on the website when they aren’t even filling in the contact form!

The metrics to ignore

• Anything that you can’t impact, or change, shouldn’t be considered a KPI
• Vanity metrics, such as a keyword on Google that wouldn’t bring in any traffic that can be converted. But we explain this concept in detail below

Knowing which really matter in digital marketing — Vanity or value metrics

Usually, metrics mean a characteristic that can be quantified. If you keep thinking in abstract terms, such as thought leadership, you will never see any numbers. By focusing on other useless metrics, such as the number of social media likes, you won’t be able to select the real KPIs. For marketers, KPIs are crucial because they correlate to ROI. When you use the so-called vanity metrics, you won’t have an accurate idea of your marketing effectiveness.

Vanity

Don’t let these metrics steal your focus:

• Web traffic
• Page views
• Time on site
• Impressions
• Keyword rankings
• Social media followers
• Bounce rate

Value

The metrics that you should be focusing on are:

• eBook downloads
• Customer lifetime value
• Sales-qualified leads
• Conversion rates
• Customer acquisition costs

For the ROI framework that you intend to create, you will need valuable and not vanity metrics. The former doesn’t just deal with surface-level analytics data. They also look at the whole picture and how your business is really doing!

Choosing a Good Analytics Platform and getting the most use out of it

After selecting your metrics, you will need the right platform to analyze and quantify them. You don’t have to do anything manually. Many of these tools are even free to use, such as Google Analytics. Below we categorize these useful platforms based on the measurement index they are intended for:

Website Analytics

Knowing everything about your website should be the first thing on your list if you want to evaluate your digital marketing performance. The following tools can help with that:

• Google Analytics is amazing because it is free, Google-provided,and can be used to track traffic to your site and for other useful information
• Web trends is the platform that you can use for your multi-channel measurements. You get a snapshot of analytics from the web, social media, and mobile platforms
• Moz is nothing if not comprehensive. It combines even more avenues and brings you analytics from search, inbound marketing, social, and social listening

SEO Analytics

Aside from Google and Moz, you can use these tools to analyze the success of your SEO tactics and campaigns:

• HubSpot becomes integrated into your content, which makes it easier for you to monitor and optimize it
• RavenTools provides you with an interactive list with which you can rise within the ranks. It taps both into Google and Bing for the data that it sends your way!

Social Media

You may want to check out these tools to measure social analytics:

• Socialbakers Analytics compare your social analytics and other relevant data with that of your competitors
• Adobe Social is a multi-purpose tool that can be used for social listening, publishing, and social media measurement

Are you ready to evaluate how well you are doing — or can do — on the digital marketing front? Then get started!

This article is contributed by Alma Causey, Freelance writer at thriveagency — Thrive Marketing Company .

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