Having a content writing team is essential if you want to ensure that you have lots of high-quality content that is going to be published regularly. However, there are times when the team becomes pressed, which means that you need to seriously consider expanding at that point. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the clear signs that it’s time to grow your content writing team.
Your Team is Barely Catching Up with Deadlines
There are always periods of time when the team has to handle a lot of content, and it often occurs that the deadlines are not met. However, if you notice that this type of situation starts occurring regularly, you should seriously consider finding an addition to the content writing team, or even several new members.
Constantly chasing deadlines will drop the quality of your content, as writers are going to struggle to meet the higher demand. Some of the steps that you can take is to review the writing schedule and make as many improvements as possible. Other than repurposing your older content, the best, and probably the only viable solution is to hire more people.
The Editing Process is Taking Up a Lot of Time
The fact that the deadlines are always close by makes a lot of writers drop the quality of their writing. This drives more pressure on the editorial team. One of the solutions is to expand, but you can also get into little details and explain your expectations to the already present writers, so that they know what they need to work on and where they can improve.
Editors can create a document with recurrent grammar or syntax mistakes. This will reduce the pressure put on editors, and it will help them achieve more, as there will be far less mistakes.
Research Slows Down The Publishing Schedule
Creating high-quality content demands a lot of research, and when there is a lot of work to do, research takes up an additional amount of time. If you notice that research is affecting the publishing schedule on your blog, you should definitely consider adding more people to your team. Another solution is to choose a different content medium such as a video. No matter what you decide, the most important thing is not to lower the amount of research, as it will greatly lower your blog’s content quality.
Lower Content Quality
Content quality is one of the most important things in a company’s marketing strategy due to the fact that it is responsible for driving more traffic towards your website. Maintaining high-quality content is something that you should never sacrifice. If you notice that the content is becoming superficial, simply because writers are in a hurry to respect the deadlines, it is necessary to immediately consider expanding your team.
The point is to find a skilled manager who is going to ensure that all the deadlines are respected without any sacrifice in terms of quality. This is achieved with a schedule which is going to allow writers to work on different assignments. When a certain topic becomes overwhelming, the writer can switch to another one to rest.
Engagement is Going Down
Regularly publishing content is not the only thing that is important for a good content marketing strategy. There are other factors that are important as well. The amount of engagement that the content is generating is one of the clear indicators as to whether the content is truly good and informative. One of the reasons why engagement might start dropping is due to the fact that the content quality is dropping.
Consider expanding your team with experienced writers who will not only create incredible content, but also help other people take steps to improve their own skills. On the other hand, engagement requires communication. Replying to people in the comment section is a great way of maintaining and increasing the engagement of your readers.
One of the solutions to this problem is to hire a social media manager who would be responsible for replying to people’s comments. This will establish a communication between you and your visitors or customers, showing that you care about their opinion, which will make them return to your website.
These are some of the main indicators that you should consider when expanding your content writing team. If you notice any of these signs, immediately start searching for more content writers, as you don’t want your blog to lose its quality and its visitors.
Listen – You can’t miss here, man. Every web hosting company is basically the same these days. They all have the same gear, the same network, and the same deals. Just pick a random one! They’re all good. It’s just web hosting, not rocket science.
I cannot even count how many times I came across such a comment and how many people – thanks to this particular way of thinking – got their online business in unnecessary trouble.
As the saying goes – assumption is the mother of all screw ups.
It really is.
That’s a fact.
And I’m not just preaching about web hosting here. No. I’m talking about everything. Every possible deal, every purchase you could make, both online and offline.
In this day and age, making uneducated guesses about things that are really important to you or your work is just plain ol’ naive.
It’s a bulletproof recipe for disaster and disappointment.
For example, let’s go back and focus on the first paragraph of this article.
Even if that particular statement were true (and it’s not), you have to know that there’s more to web hosting than just hardware. Sure, it’s a tech business, which means that the quality of your gear is EXTREMELY important for your service – but, come on! There’s more to it!
And you know this.
You don’t need me to underline this for you. Otherwise, everyone would host their own site. Every lazy schmuck in the world with a couple of thousand dollars on his bank account would own a web hosting company and cash in like crazy on his tiny investment.
How come? – Well, because, in that kind of alternate-reality, all you’d have to do is buy the gear, hook it all together, and voilà – you got yourself a web hosting business! You’re now an owner of a fully functioning web hosting company!
Pretty sweet, right?
From now on, your job is just to kick back, relax, and let the machines do all the rest. They’ll make you rich and fat before lunchtime. Don’t sweat it, man. Go outside and enjoy yourself! Have a beer, catch a flick, go on a hike – do whatever pleases you! Your gear has you covered…
If only that were true. If only things were that simple. But, sadly – they’re not.
You can buy all the best gear in the world, but if you don’t know how to use it right – it can’t help you efficiently run a successful web hosting business.
How come? – Well, because you’d still lack the necessary expertise and knowledge on how to actually talk to clients and meet their demands on daily, weekly, and monthly level.
Yes, there are a lot of web hosting companies out there that basically on paper look the same, but once you really get close to them, dig deep enough and read more about their service – you’ll see the differences.
You’ll see that some of them are just plain awful. You’ll figure out that even though they look quite professional on the outside, on the inside – their business is actually a mess!
But that’s also nothing new and it doesn’t only concern web hosting as an industry.
Great question! I’m going to answer that for you in the following part of this article:
1. Customer Service and Overall Responsiveness
Anyone who knows anything about the complexity that comes with finding a perfect web hosting provider for his or her business – knows that this is not an easy purchase to make. It’s not something that you can just search in Google and blindly choose one of the brands from the top of your recommended results list.
Nope. A whole lot of variables come into play here.
First and foremost, customer care and the overall responsiveness of that particular chosen business.
You don’t want to hand over your site to a company that doesn’t really respond to emails or just ignores your requests, do you?! Of course not.
For most today’s businessmen, their website means everything to them! It’s where they make their bread and butter. It’s where they generate leads and get people to eventually become their paying customers. Their website is like their digital visit card and office combined.
Having said all that, it’s understandable why they cannot expose their site to any unnecessary risk or downtime.
No connections means no new visits, which automatically means no new leads and clients.
Simple as that.
If people can’t see what you’re selling and why should they do business with you and not your direct competitors, then you cannot expect from them to spend their money on whatever it is that you’re selling.
That’s why people need to be really careful when choosing a company to host their business online.
Even though web hosting is a tech business – there are still a lot of variables that could go wrong here. It doesn’t really matter if you spend a lot of money on your hardware, you still need to invest a lot of your time and energy into making sure that everything is constantly working on desired levels.
You need to constantly cruise over your gear like a hungry hawk and make sure that there are no hiccups.
Even though this all sounds like a pretty straight-forward and standard thing, there are still a lot of careless and inexperienced hosts out there that can’t really ensure that your site remains online at all times. They either don’t have the skills, nor time, nor the will to be omnipresent online.
That’s what really separates good web hosts from bad ones. Before you go on and pay a certain provider to host your website, make sure that he really has the skillset to answer all your questions and ensure that your site is constantly up and running.
2. Reputation
It doesn’t really matter if you’re shopping for a shirt, pair of shoes, a bike, household appliances, or web hosting – you need to properly analyze your options and figure out what you’re exactly paying for here.
As I said above – it’s all about cutting down risks.
Consumers who tend to think that they’re making the right decision by siding with a random hosting provider whose credentials and reputation they’ve failed to properly check online, often end up with a website that’s constantly offline.
Of course, once they finally see in which kind of jam they’ve gotten themselves into – they start to freak out!
Web hosting is like a car, in many different ways. First and foremost of all, almost every piece of junk can get you from point A to point B, but at what cost?
You need to see who stands behind a certain product, service, and company. It’s in your best interest to catch up on the full story, and not just run through the headlines if you know what I mean.
Otherwise, you could end up paying for a piece of garbage that will only put you in an even more complicated situation.
Like I said above, web hosting is not something that you can really just type in Google and blindly pick from the search results. Nope. It’s more complicated than that. Like everything else, web hosting is a service that is controlled by humans. And having that in mind, you know that every single provider out there is different. Some of them are more serious and professional, while others are not. How they think of their job is what really sets them apart.
Your job here is to find those with great work and ethical skills. But, in order to do that, you need to do your research. You need to go beyond the regular Google search and really look for reviews and testimonials from real people online. Real clients.
3. Area of Expertise
The days of picking up random articles from the shelves are long gone, my friend. The world doesn’t really work like that anymore. If you want to make smart choices and get the most out of your money’s worth – you need to properly acquaint yourself with whatever it is that you’re shopping for. You need to know all the essentials, all the pros and cons of your every possible deal or option.
Especially if you’re shopping for something delicate like web hosting.
Even though at first glance it looks like all web hosts offer the same type of deals, once you really acquaint yourself with this service, you’ll see that most of them target different types of customers.
Some of them offer great shared hosting plans, but that’s it. They’re all about offering basic services for basic clients. You cannot really grow your business with them, while some of their competitors have great enterprise solutions but aren’t the right fit for someone with a small recipe blog, or something similar.
So, in order to find a good host for your business, you first need to know what kind of service are you looking for. Even though they have great hardware, that still doesn’t really mean that they have the capacity or expertise to host a bigger client.
Look into a company’s specialty or area of expertise before you buy, and go with one that understands your particular needs as a customer. You can find reviews and recommendations on the Web, and many of these will talk about a particular company’s strengths and weaknesses.
4. The Overall Quality of Support
This is a big one. This should be your main area of focus when choosing a web hosting company.
Why? – Well, because, the Internet never sleeps. It doesn’t really matter how good or new your host’s hardware may be, you could still run into a lot of problems. It happens. The important thing here is that you figure out if your provider has the skills efficiently solve any of your problems.
I don’t know about you, but when my site goes down for some reason, I want to know that my provider has my back! I want to know that my provider can find out what’s wrong and fix it, or at least tell me what I need to do to get my site back online.
Before going with a host look into their reputation for customer support. See what kinds of different ways you can contact them when you need support – email, toll-free phone, chat, and so on. Are they staffed 24/7? Do they outsource support?
You’ll find that, like in price and technical specifications, all hosts are not equal. Some hang their hat on their support crew, and some view customer support as an afterthought. Steer clear of the latter.
We’ve heard plenty of pros and cons when it comes to retiring to a home office over the past few years, and based on how things are looking at the moment, this independent business trend won’t go anywhere anytime soon. If anything changes at all in the near future, it will certainly be in favor of those fatigued and dispirited by cubicle restrictions and hungry for less formal and more inspiring workplaces.
As technology becomes even smarter and smaller, millions of dedicated workers have a chance to replace their white collars for their thinking caps and leverage some of the many perks of a digitalized society. Soon enough, our bedrooms will be an environment just as fruitful for running a business as any other, and software developers will devise more effective solutions to overcome our collaboration, management and productivity obstacles. Here are a few things to include in your home office kit.
1. Collaborative Brainstorming
A number of cleverly designed collaboration apps has been available online ever since the home office trend began, and the best of them will actually enable you to work as effectively as if you were surrounded by your co-workers or seated in your client’s office. These highly interactive, real-time collaboration tools come with an intuitive and easy to use interface, and they connect remote jobbers from around the world in the blink of an eye.
If managing a team whose members work remotely, or, like yourself, from the comfort of their homes, these apps will certainly help you land on the same page, all while staying productive and organized.
Try Slack or Wedoist for smooth project development, Screenhero when you want to share a screen with your co-workers, and Sketchboard, MindMeister or Google Keep if you want to mind-map and plan together with your team or simply share valuable lists and ideas.
So far, Trello has been keeping the title of the best free of charge shared project management tool available online, closely followed by BinFire, Basecamp and Proofhub. Use Scribblar, ConceptBoard and IdeaFlip for real-time collaborative brainstorming, or simply join your distant colleagues in appear.in for a half an hour of video conversation.
2. Efficient Management
Working from home is nowhere near possible without flawless organization. Time scheduling, bookkeeping, and team management are three of the majorly significant aspects of any business, and their importance is even greater in the unconventional workplace such as yours. If you are struggling to manage all of your accounts at once and need a joint platform you can access from different devices, then these time and finance managing apps will make your daily tasks unexpectedly easier.
To keep track of your time and gain deeper insight into how to most efficiently organize it, seek Toggl. Rescue Time is perfect for procrastinators, since it tracks the time you spend on various websites. ClearFocus, focus booster and Pomodoro Technique, on the other hand, are designed to remind you to take a break every once in awhile and to help you find your most productive work routine, all of which makes them brilliant for workaholics. If charging by the hour, HoursTracker will precisely calculate how many hours you’ve spent working on a daily basis.
Among personal finance apps, Wally, Mint, Wallaby, Digit, and Acorns are simply unparalleled. They can all be linked to the rest of your accounts, diligent enough to keep track of your credit card spending, and clever enough to notify you when you’re spending too much of your hard-earned money.
3. Keeping Sharp
The single most aggravating drawback of working from a home office is the frequent loss of focus. Even if you do function better in a relaxing environment, you have certainly already experienced some fluctuations in productivity that are much more difficult to solve when there’s no one around to remind you of your assignments. Luckily, the app market is flooded with productivity tools to streamline your workflow and optimize your performance.
If you’re busy parallax scrolling your Facebook News Feed and your previously planned tasks simply have to wait until you’ve reached the lowest point of a bottomless pit that is the internet, BetterBuzzer will remain quite loud and stubborn in its determination to remind you to acknowledge the scheduled assignment. Although pricey, Clear will certainly motivate you to clear your task list and Evernote will allow you to keep it nice and tidy, no matter how little time for organizing you’ve got.
However overwhelmed or lazy, these self-managing tools are all equally superb in making the best of your working hours. Taken together, collaborative, managing and productivity apps can replace even the best of personal assistants, help you achieve the work-life balance you’ve been so eagerly searching for and make you just as efficient as if you were right there, at the office.
When it comes to developing a new business, the most important of all the factors needed for effective and successful business development is a proper business plan. Without a business plan in place, all of your efforts might go down the drain, no matter how comprehensive your business strategies are.
Not having a business plan in advance is one of the most common mistakes a lot of companies make, and they seem to simply keep their eyes open for any chance for potential change, innovation, new market or new business trends. They simply go with the flow and make changes along the way, without planning anything upfront.
You should never leave anything to chance, especially not your business. You strive for success, don’t you? You work hard for your business to become a lucrative source of revenue that will bring stellar conversions and help you become an influencer in your industry, isn’t that right?
If that is the case, you must have a proper business development strategy and, more importantly, a business plan with the goals you want to achieve.
Take a look at the following tips that will help you develop your business strategy and avoid making some of the most common mistakes business owners make, ultimately leading you to an effective business development plan that will help you get your business to the top.
Hire a Full-Time New Business Development Manager
If you have an employee or a team of employees dedicated solely to managing new business development – great! It is incredibly important to have someone who will focus completely on the process of prospecting for new clients by advertising, networking, making cold calls or creating any other kind of opportunities for growth, instead of expecting your employees to pitch in when they can or even waiting for new clients to come to you.
If you don’t have an employee in your workforce with that kind of responsibility, you should hire one as soon as possible. If you cannot afford it, you should have your team devote some time and resources to seeking out new potential clients.
The best way to successfully accomplish that is to develop an annual business growth plan that will contain all of your goals regarding business development, along with your strategies for growth and your desired revenue.
Only when you start taking your business development seriously will you start getting better results, so don’t leave it to chance or treat it as a side-project, but make it one of your top priorities for business growth.
Know Who Your Ideal Customer Is
If you have no idea who your ideal customer is, you will not be able to breed any positive results from any of your marketing campaigns. Not knowing who exactly you are marketing your products or services to will not make any of your efforts pay off, let alone help you generate more revenue.
You need to know exactly who you are looking for, so that you can target potential customers and tailor all of your marketing efforts in order to successfully attract a certain demographic.
Identifying your target audience is one of the most important steps towards a successful business so, if you are running a business without knowing your ideal customer’s profile, how do you expect to actually grow your business and bring actual value and revenue to your company?
Therefore, define your ideal customer and target the right type of audience, so that you can bring in quality leads and conversions and increase your sales and ROI.
After you have learned who you are marketing to, conduct some research regarding the channels where you can reach out to your target customers and showcase your business to them. You shouldn’t merely wait for them to find you, but instead, establish a presence on their preferred channels and market your products or services there.
Know Who Your Competitors Are
Even if you are not the competitive type and don’t have the tendency of competing aggressively for more customers with other companies, it is very important to learn about your competitors.
Knowing who your competitors are will enable you to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd. What’s more, you can perhaps learn something new that can help you improve your marketing efforts and attract more quality leads.
This is why it is essential to learn what your competitors are doing to grab the attention of customers and how they are managing to engage and convert them.
Therefore, you need to learn who they are and what they offer, as that will help you learn how to make your brand stand out and become unique.
Don’t Talk Too Much about Yourself
Talking about your company and brand when reaching out to your potential customers is fine, as long as you don’t try to oversell it. Customers can smell that from a mile away and they will feel as if you are trying too hard for the mere purpose of generating more money, so they will likely rather move on to your competition.
Therefore, when marketing your services or products, focus on talking about the benefits your customers will experience if they decide to purchase from you or hire your services, rather than talking about your product features or only talking about your company and your business ideas and beliefs.
You need to address your customers’ pain points and present them with the exact solutions to their problems, as that is exactly what will help you capture their attention and engage them in your brand. Trying to oversell your brand will never yield any positive results and you will come off as caring only about the money and not about your customers.
You need to show your customers that you care about them and about satisfying their needs, instead of only thinking about boosting your brand and growing your business. By doing that, you will build trust with your customers and inspire customer loyalty, which will help you ultimately turn your customers into your brand ambassadors.
When you manage to build a strong relationship with your customers, you will boost your reputation and greatly enlarge your customer base, which will help you grow your business and eventually generate more revenue. Just remember that focusing only on revenue instead of on your customers and meeting their needs will not help you achieve your goals quickly and develop a successful business.
Use a CRM Tool to Manage Your Business
Customer relationship management is extremely important for every successful business and it is crucial that you have the best approach to managing your interaction with existing and potential customers.
Without a proper customer relationship management approach, you will not be able to efficiently organize your marketing efforts, your sales and your customer service. That is why you should use a CRM tool for managing your business, since it will help you accomplish much more with less time and resources.
Using a CRM tool will help you save a lot of time and make the process of your business management significantly easier, as opposed to using Microsoft Excel, for instance, as your main CRM or not using any of them whatsoever.
Efficiency and time management are incredibly important factors that help you stay on top of prospecting and a CRM tool can greatly help you raise the levels of efficiency and productivity within your company and save quite a lot of valuable time, not to mention money.
There are many useful CRM tools that you can use free of charge, so consider starting out with one of those before you invest your money in an expensive software solution that might turn out not to be the best fit for your business development.
Conclusion
Growing a successful business is certainly one of the most difficult and challenging endeavours you can take, but with proper planning and implementing strategies that can significantly help your business stand out from the crowd, you can build a strong brand that will help you attract quite a large number of quality leads that you can effectively convert into your most loyal customers.
By having a proper business plan and developing the best possible strategies for business growth, you will manage to build a strong reputation that will enable you to hit the bullseye with your every marketing effort. Promoting your products or services will be child’s play and it will result in a constant flow down your sales funnel, thus generating more revenue and increasing your ROI.
Therefore, make sure you always follow the aforementioned tips, as they are certain to lead you to effective business development that will always breed positive results and help you build a strong customer base and expand your business.
Video content has become very popular in the online marketing industry. It has proved to be the type of content that attracts and engages a wide and diverse audience, making it easier to penetrate an oversaturated market. People love watching videos instead of reading pages of text about your products and services. When done well, video marketing becomes a powerful tool, but if you produce a bad video and use it as the pillar of your marketing strategy it can easily do you more harm than good.
A video is not much different than any other type of content you are using during your marketing campaign. It has to reflect your brand and do well for your business objectives. Still, there are many companies that produce and publish video content of poor quality. This is why we have compiled this list of the most common video marketing mistakes your company should avoid.
Making it a Hard-Sell
You should be aware that video marketing is not a brand new thing. TV shows are flooded with boring commercials nobody even bothers to pay attention to anymore. Don’t get the impression that an internet user is much different.
Your marketing video should focus more on entertaining the viewer. Make sure to provide the value that anyone can appreciate. If you end up publishing annoying video material, there is a good chance that it will be popular, but in a negative way.
Forgetting to Promote it
There is a very small chance to create video content that goes viral on its own and there is no chance at all to create viral video marketing content without a good strategy and plenty of work. Keep this in mind when you decide to upload your video only on YouTube and leave it there to reach “success”. What we are trying to say is: promote it via all the channels that cross your mind – your social media profiles, YouTube channel, official website etc.
If you want to have a serious approach, you need to optimize a landing page where your video can be seen, use keywords in the URL, always add a meta description, make sure to send a newsletter to subscribers, write a description for your videos and make sure to have social buttons on your website so that visitors can easily share your video content.
Forgetting to Brand it
This is a common mistake when you are a beginner in video marketing. You successfully create a good video and there are many people who watched it, but if you ask them about it, they can’t remember the name of the company that created the video in the first place. Why? Because it was not mentioned even once.
Yes, the video should be about the product or service you are trying to sell, but you should never miss the opportunity to promote your business and communicate its benefits. Make sure to have your company’s logo or website URL displayed during the first second of every video you create.
Not Knowing the Target Audience
Video content is not a universal tool that appeals to all demographics. If you try to make one multipurpose video, there is a great chance that it won’t succeed in attracting anyone.
This is why you should make a video that is focused on reaching a specific audience and to be able to effectively communicate the desired message. You cannot do this before you do target audience research. Also keep in mind that there are many variables. For instance, what’s appealing to teenagers in the USA doesn’t necessarily have to be appealing to ones in Asia.
Recording or Uploading a Poor Quality Video
This goes both for the content in your video and the video quality on the screen. Make sure that all of your videos are recorded in high-resolution, because bad video quality will make a user form a bad impression about your brand. Also, there is a great chance that no one will have the patience to watch it trough.
If you don’t know how or don’t have the means to record a high-quality video, you should hire a professional to do this for your company. There are many badly produced videos out there, so if you can provide a good one you will surely stand out from the crowd.
As you can see, none of the abovementioned things are too hard to achieve. But still, creating good video content will not be that easy, especially if you are new to the field. Feel free to read many guides about how to make engaging marketing videos. There are plenty to be found online. In case you don’t want to leave anything to chance, consider hiring a professional marketing agency to design a strategic marketing plan for your company.
If you’ve ever asked what is e-commerce here is the answer? It’s something that 80% of the world’s internet users have used. In short, it’s the buying of goods and services online.
Today most of us take it for granted, we don’t even need a desktop computer or laptop anymore. Just a mobile device with an app or browser. We can find nearly every retail product available, at the cheapest prices and we can do so from any location without worrying about going to the store. Retailers don’t even need a traditional outlet when they serve customers via e-commerce, and it reduces their overheads and improves efficiency. No wonder it’s still one of the fastest growing industries in the world.
A new infographic from eReviews explores the amazing growth of e-commerce and some of the most exciting facts along the way. Perhaps the most startling was the value of the market. When people first began Amazon shopping and eBay bidding in 1995, the entire online shopping market was valued at just $131 million and the likes of Paypal had not even been invented yet. In 2015 when almost all major retailers are now online and customers are increasingly shopping on their phones with multiple payment options, e-commerce is valued at a staggering $1.55 trillion!
Of course, in the beginning, e-commerce was an American phenomenon, but as the internet has expanded across the globe it is now population dense China that boasts the biggest economy, worth $562.66 Billion. The Alibaba empire founded by Jack Ma had the largest public offering in history, at $25 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s twice the amount of Malta’s GDP in 2015!
The US still isn’t far behind with a market of $349.06 Billion in 2015, a jump of over 14% from 2014. Amazon.com alone made net sales of $107.01 Billion. That’s quite impressive when you take the fact that the company didn’t make a full year’s profit for nearly its first decade of operation.
The UK is a distant third, yet they are held in high esteem. Data suggests half of online shoppers have sought out high-quality British products. When measured on a per capita basis (i.e. the percentage of the population that shops online), the UK market became the largest in 2010. They also have the distinction of making half of their Paypal transactions via mobile.
It’s mobile and other innovations that are driving e-commerce into the future and changing the landscape. 90% of companies now use social media for their business, and many platforms now have tailored features for e-commerce. The future also promises unending growth, as even more of the world’s population gets online. The US is expected to reach a market value of $548 billion by 2019. Overall online shopping is expected to be worth more than $2.35 trillion!
If you’d like to learn more about the history of e-commerce, it’s fascinating facts, and how it’s changing for the future, then make sure to explore the entire infographic
Content marketing is a long game. It’s not something that can help you become an overnight success. Sure, there are cases when a single blog post literally spread all over the Web like wildfire, but that isn’t really content marketing. This sort of marketing technique is far more than that. It covers all sorts of different aspect that bulk up your brand awareness, stimulates user engagement, and influences your customers to create more conversions on your site.
Content marketing requires patience. It takes a lot of time before it starts to bring in fruits of your labor. How come? – Well, because this practice requires continuity. In order to turn your website into a real content hub where people will intuitively come looking for tips and answers on how to improve their business – you need to generate a constant flow of smart and compelling content on your site.
That means that you need you focus on quality and quantity, as well. You cannot just publish a new post once a month and expect from people to come running to your blog. Nope. It doesn’t really work like that. Your job here is to be omnipresent, useful, and above all – relevant.
Naturally, this sort of thing tends to take a lot of time and lot of efforts, and yet again – it doesn’t really guarantee anything. You can set up all sorts of different goals for your content, but the thing is – its influence cannot be put in real and precise numbers. Most businesses really don’t like that. They believe that time is money, and every single second that is spent on something that isn’t really increasing sales is a valuable second wasted of their company time.
Thanks to that, a lot of marketers are still facing extreme difficulties while pitching content marketing to some of their clients. Even though most businessmen get that this sort of marketing is important for their brand, thanks to content marketing’s unclear accountability and revenue generation – most decision makers tend to look at this technique as something that isn’t really a top priority for them.
You and me both know that this a terrible way to look at content marketing.
Why Should Anyone Invest In Content Marketing If Doesn’t Guarantee Precise ROI?
Despite the fact that almost every business out there is going all out in this department as well, and it’s becoming more and difficult to get your desired audiences to acknowledge and read your material – the demand for creating new and curating old content is still exponentially growing online.
It doesn’t really matter if they’re looking for a tv, a new cell phone, clothes, some sort of a digital tool, or even a type of pastry – people turn to the Web for answers. They start browsing through thousands and thousands of search results, looking for best solutions for their questions.
This is where content marketing comes to shine. When you really strip it down to its core, Google is nothing more than an algorithm that finds the best answers to people’s queries. If we don’t continue to create answers that feed this engine with valuable information, that it later on distributes to those who are in need of solutions – then people will stop using the Internet. It will stop being valuable to them.
Like I already said dozens of times on this blog – if you want to sell something to people, you need to make sure that they understand what exactly are you offering to them, how it works, and why should they even consider paying for your products and services.
Nine out of ten people won’t buy something just because it looks pretty. No, they need much more from you and your business. They need to be charmed and impressed. They need to clearly see how a certain product or services will influence their life for the better.
We live in a time and age where every single business entity is obligated to invest in marketing. But, unlike our grandfathers, we cannot solely get by producing generic ads and posters that ask people to visit our store or buy something from us. Nope. Those days are long gone, my friend. Today, your marketing needs to be smart, sharp, and subtle.
You cannot just aggressively stalk people around the Web and force your message down their throats until they finally cave and buy something from you. No. You have to be smarter than that. The only marketing that really works today is the one that subtly feeds its targeted crowd with information that influences their judgment.
People don’t want to lose control. That’s why you need to develop an approach that lets them see the value of your work and come up with the decision to give your business a go on their own terms of course.
That’s why it’s important that we, as individuals who are dependent on information, look at content marketing as something that is of crucial importance for our brand, and not just a luxury.
But Where’s The Money? How to Measure Success?
Even though content marketing is a long game and it tends to affect your brand on all sorts of different levels that are not really that easy to single out, in a way, some aspects of it still can be precisely measured, and thus – used to determine if your efforts are successful or not in this department.
If you set up your analytics right and learn how to read your data, you can clearly see and judge the performance of your content assets. You can identify your best-performing campaigns from a revenue perspective and you can even single out which post stimulated which sale or conversion.
It doesn’t really matter if you focus on landing pages, emails, images, blog posts, or videos – the influence of every type of content can be tracked and measured to the very last click or cent. Content marketing is nothing without data. It’s what help us see what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to tweak in our approach in order to improve our conversion rates.
But, in order to track the success of your content, you must first sync with your sales funnel. You must create all types of different content that influence your site visitors in every stage of your buyer’s cycle. Next to that, you must make sure that every single one your content pieces is backed by intelligent CTAs that offer your targeted users a chance to make organically go for the conversion after or during a certain exposure to your content.
When calculating the ROI of my content marketing efforts, I usually take three different stages into consideration:
Direct return: Where the complete credit to a certain sale goes to a particular piece of content or campaign.
Second chance: Where the credit to certain sale goes to more than one piece of content or campaign.
Collective effort: Where the credit for a certain sale is evenly spread among the various type of content throughout my sales funnel
Why do I keep track of such things? – Well, because following up on metrics like which post is converting best, which topics and types of content spark the most engagement, which one is generating the biggest number of clicks, time spent per post, etc. – I drawing a clear picture for myself and my employers what we need to do in order to grow our ROI in this department even more.
I hope this post helped you understand your content marketing efforts and how to look for ROI that you can use to encourage your employees to keep on investing in content marketing.
That’s it for now. If you have anything to ask or add – feel free to write your thoughts in the comments section below!
Relying on variety software solutions is necessary if you want to keep your business website a stable, competitive and powerful tool for creating more satisfied customers. One of the recent features that websites have begun utilizing is live chat software, which offers several benefits to business owners, the majority of which positively affect the conversion rates either directly or indirectly.
Staying ahead of the competition
The competition in the online world is very high, which indicates that it is necessary to always go the extra mile to attract more visitors to your website. The live chat feature is perfect because it is suitable for the customers that purchase goods or services from you. Appropriate responsiveness is something that is expected by people and this is the best way to always be reachable, no matter the working hours. It is very important to stand out in the crowd of businesses from around the world and implementing live chat is just what is going to help you achieve this goal.
Increasing customer loyalty
Building a brand’s reputation is very important, as it creates a stable number of returning customers. All of the customers around the world are looking for a brand which can be trusted. The live chat opens a window of direct communication with your customers in real time. Make sure that your customer support agents or sales agents are trained to communicate appropriately, as it is going to significantly affect the amount of returning customers.
Building customer loyalty is something that is very hard to achieve, but by utilizing this software solution, it is going to enable your business to grow further as more users are going to receive all the important information they need and purchase your goods or services.
It is an efficient solution
Having a direct channel of communication with your customers in real time was something unachievable in the past. Luckily, as technology has improved this is now something that is becoming widely popular due to several different factors:
1. Much faster than email – it is a much easier form of communication compared to other solutions which were previously used. Customers want their answers immediately, which makes the email channel completely obsolete and useless for fast correspondence.
2. More efficient than call – some would argue that calling customer services is the best way of finding information, however, the majority of problems that occur are labeled with unique codes which take time to be read, whereas they can be copied in the chat more easily. Additionally, the frustration of having to wait before a customer service representative answers is something that live chat eliminates, as all of the agents can simultaneously help several different customers.
3. It is cheaper – live chat does not only make your customer service more efficient, it also lowers the costs of phones calls which can be quite high as the number of customers grows. Due to the fact that your customer service takes less time for every customer, your business is automatically saving money, given that time is money in the business world.
Always make sure to follow the latest technologies and implement them in your business strategy, customers are surely going to notice it.
Truly understanding the customer
The live chat feature gives the agents a chance to get to understand the target audience that is attracted to your business. More importantly, in combination with big data, your company can collect data about customers and improve its services continually, which leads to an increased numbers of sales, improving conversion rates and profits margins of the company. Over time, live chat can become a powerful data collecting tool, which can significantly improve your business.
These are the major benefits that a life chat software solution can offer, directly improving your business’s conversion rates. The main goal that you should always strive to is customer satisfaction and this tool is the perfect way of achieving this goal. Educate your employees about customer communication and implement this software, the results are going to change the growth rate of your company.
From traffic growth and alluring blog building, to improved customer experiences and increased sales, branding has become the very soul of each successful business over the last few years, and we shouldn’t expect anything to change any time soon. Being a strategy that communicates value and builds long-lasting relationships with customers, branding has never been more important than today – now that we’ve understood that the modern world circles around the customer and that we’ve made the market bursting with competition, creating a powerful and captivating brand image seems like a crucial differentiator.
The following list includes 5 unavoidable branding trends established in 2016 that experts anticipate to be the key to triumph in years to come.
1. Compelling Journeys & Irresistible Experiences
There’s no doubt that the era of the customer is already here; their expectations have never been bigger and their purchasing behavior was never less certain. Still, what we can count on is their ever-growing need for pleasurable journeys and storytelling behind products and services, all of which implies the generation of flawless customer experience. As predicted by Deanna Laufer last year, “In 2016, [customer experience] will be among the top 10 critical success factors determining who will win and who will fail in the age of the customer.”
So far, these prognosis have been proven as correct, and companies that are looking for a competitive advantage in 2017 will have to continue to actively promote a positive experiential interaction with customers, instead of solely focusing on projecting a particular brand image.
2. Custom Tailoring for All
Still, not every customer wants the same exact treatment, journey, and experience, since not every customer perceives your brand image in the same way. An emotional connection is one of the main aspects of branding strategies, which is why it needs to be made as personal and as unique as possible.
However engaging, customer experience has to be slightly altered and customized for each individual customer. Consider it in Coca-Cola terms – by imprinting different surnames on every can, this business empire has, in a sense, tailored their product for every customer, thus offering a personal touch that the receiving end finds flattering and engaging.
3. Emotional Connections & Relatability
If a swimsuit commercial doesn’t evoke that irresistible feeling of enjoying a margarita on a sun-drenched beach full of young and beautiful people, customers will most certainly go to another company that does. Both branding strategies and marketing campaigns draw little attention to a company’s products and services if not based on relatability and emotions.
When it comes to decisions, be they purchasing or not, memories and sentiments are scientifically proven to be the greatest triggers, which is why branding should always be emotion-driven. Although old news, this trend has rarely been properly established and delivered in previous years, but great market leaders like Apple and Nike are explaining its importance with each new campaign, which is why following the example of these pioneers is the most secure way to the top.
4. Approach & Engage
Because of the saturated market in which every second company follows the same set of branding guidelines, conveying a powerful branding message is no longer sufficient. Instead of being present and raising awareness, successful companies now need to be active and insist on engagement. Customer relationships are being built in an online environment that requires a fine balance between professionalism and spontaneity, and based on the brand’s potential to interactively include customers and make them a part of their experience.
By doing so, social media campaigns are the last word of fashion in both branding and marketing, and are expected to become even more diverse, entertaining and alluring in the future.
5. Uniqueness Beats Competition
Each of the previous trends are being developed to defy market overflow and leverage modern customer behavior in order to beat the competition. Custom-tailored and a highly personalized customer experience, as well as emotion-driven and engaging campaigns, all lead up to one crucial competitive factor that guarantees success – authenticity.
It’s been noted before that most companies rely on the same branding advice, which is why having a unique approach is paramount for standing out from the crowd. In other words, the key to success has been found and offered to modern businesses, and it’s now up to each of them to think of the most original way to use it.
Along with contextual omnipresence and intriguing, but a professional public image, these trends are shaping the future of branding as we speak. Colorful logos and presentable ads are no longer enough – in the years to come, branding will remain the most intermediate connection between a company and its customers, but it will become the strongest advantage in a brand-saturated market.
That’s a question that almost all young entrepreneurs on a budget tend to ask themselves right before they starts to work on adapting their business for the Web.
Why? – Well, like I already said, they’re on a budget. If you’re just taking your first steps in this digital world as an entrepreneur, your first instinct is to think about all your costs and how to reduce them to a bare minimum.
As a newbie who still isn’t making any money from what you do or sell online, you are not really in a position where you can afford to be careless with your cash. You don’t have the luxury to waste your money on trivial things that won’t help you improve your business or bring in new customers.
Even though this sort of thinking is quite logical for inexperienced entrepreneurs, it’s also usually the main reason why they all end up in trouble. This is where most of these young businessmen create some of the bigger mistakes that really come back to haunt them and eventually even put their entire business in jeopardy.
While trying to save money, most people often get carried away and actually try to become economical where they really shouldn’t be. Nine times out of ten, this sort of thing happens with web hosting.
Why? – Well, because people don’t really understand the importance of quality hosting until it’s too late. They tend to think that every host is a good host, and that every package works fine for them, until they figure out they’re wrong.
One Brick On Top of Another, And So On, And So On
If you’re determined to create a powerful online presence for yourself or your company, you need to secure a steady and reliable foundation for your website. You need to start from the beginning and truly invest more than just money into its development.
Even though these days most marketing experts are preaching about the power of social media and adding the right type of content marketing to your already existent marketing mix, before you even start to think about all that – you first need to focus on creating a good and respectable website for your business.
You need to build your empire from the ground up, brick by brick.
There’s no way around it.
You cannot skip this part, nor rush it in any way.
There are literally hundreds and thousands of reasons why you should really do your best to create a representable digital home for your company. Everybody has a professional website today. It’s like a digital office that’s open 24/7 to every single person that could be interested in your products and services at any given time, day or night.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really trust a business that doesn’t have a website. It immediately seems shady to me.
If you don’t have a website or even worse – own a crappy one that’s constantly offline – I will immediately abandon ship. Even though your products or services might seem great to me, I won’t end up paying for them because of your awful website (or no website). It will convince me that you don’t run a serious business.
A lot of online shoppers share my opinion here. I personally know dozens and dozens of people who would never, I repeat, NEVER, purchase something from a brand that doesn’t really care about its digital image.
Owning a good looking and well-optimized website will get you far in this digital sea of possibilities. It will help you create a credible online presence that will allow your current and potential users to easily come into contact with your brand and learn more about what you sell, all the latest news about your brand and company, and what makes you stand out from the crowd.
It will help you represent yourself in the best way imaginable to an insanely large audience of possible shoppers and consumers.
The Importance of Building a Stable Foundation for Your Website
If you’re running an online business or trying to create an impressive website for your brand, you’re hosting service plays an important role in this equation. It’s the cornerstone of your online business. It’s your hosting provider’s job to make sure that your site is always accessible to your visitors and customers, and that your data is constantly well protected.
If he fails to do so, then you’ll have some serious problems on your hands.
Since your website represents a critical component of your online business, you cannot afford to expose it to any risk.
Choosing a bad company to host your site can instantly become your worst nightmare. Being offline can hurt your business in many different ways. Apart from making you look bad in front of a global audience, frequent downtime can also cost you a lot of sales.
A couple of years back when Amazon went down for 40 minutes, the guys behind this brand said that this particular hiccup cost them exactly $4mil.
$4mil?
Terrible, right?
You don’t want this to happen to your brand, do you?
Bad hosting can negatively affect your business in a lot of different ways. It can massacre your rankings, butcher and lose your data, and so on, and so on. You get the picture.
So, Is Cheap Web Hosting Good or Bad for You?
As in everything other in business, the same goes in web hosting – “cheap” doesn’t often mean “good”. In fact, in more cases than not, it usually means quite the opposite.
Even though everyone is looking for the best possible deal out there for themselves, you as a shopper, have to understand that some things just cannot be bought for scraps.
The same goes for web hosting.
Despite the fact that this is an incredibly price competitive market, the cheapest solution isn’t often the best one for your business.
Why? – Well, because most web hosting providers don’t really deliver on their promises. A lot of them offer unlimited storage, bandwidth, and even free web design solution for $2, which is, simply put – bait for cheap customers. Once you migrate your site to their servers, you’ll see that what was promised to you won’t be delivered, which is, when you really sit down and think about it, quite logical for a service that goes price-wise below the industry standard.
Your website will frequently go down, and you’ll experience slow load page times, not because these providers want to trick you, but because they’re hosting too many sites on the same server.
Next to that, cheap web hosting providers don’t really invest in their support. Sure, this seems like something that doesn’t concern you now, but what happens when you start to experience (and you will) problems and no one is responding to your requests in hours and even days? And once you finally get ahold of someone, what happens when you figure out that you’re talking to an untrained and uneducated company representative who isn’t really able to provide you with any usable answers?
These are just of the things that could create a ton expensive problems for you just by going for the cheapest hosting solution.
When professional web hosting services are available for just $5.00/Month, what’s the point in siding with a cheap or free hosting provider?
You aren’t really saving any serious cash that you could better invest somewhere else.
The overall access and stability of your website is in question here. You shouldn’t gamble with that.
If you’re interested in running a professional business, you need to find a professional web hosting company that’s really able to keep your website constantly up and running, and on a highest possible level.
You need a company that’s able to respond to your requests within 30 minutes with great and intelligent answers. You need a host that provides a variety of hosting plans including dedicated servers and data centers in top locations.
So, when choosing a web hosting provider, don’t just look for the cheapest possible option out there. Compare prices based on what these companies offer, and how long have they’ve been on the scene.
Like I said above, web hosting is a highly competitive market, which means that brands are basically killing each other over the same customers. So, having this in mind, when choosing a provider to host your business online, keep your eyes open and really look at what they offer and what makes them different. Some perks are guaranteed for a limited time or they offer free features if you sign up now.
Read online reviews, but don’t take anything for granted. Don’t value random customer rants. No. Instead, look for real reviews and see for how long your possible next provider has been active online. Companies that have been around for a long time are more stable than companies that are just starting.
Thank you for taking the time to read my latest blog entry. I hope this post helped you understand why cheap doesn’t usually mean great in web hosting.
If you have anything to add or ask – write down your thoughts in the comments sections, and I’ll get back to you right away.
If not – well, that’s it for now, See you soon again, Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
