Lately, I found one very interesting infographic about how the marketing automation trends are going. Our friends from Marketo blog and marketing automation researchers at Software Advice, have a very cute robot to explain how things actually work in the online work with all this task. Here are a few ideas about what people are searching on this topic.
Concrete data about marketing automation
The majority of buyers (91%) were evaluating marketing automation software for the first time, with 48% of buyers currently managing marketing activities with CRM software.
Lead nurturing topped the list of desired capabilities (ahead of marketing analytic and lead scoring), with 40% of buyers requesting this feature.
50% of buyers had fewer than 50 employees in their company (15% had 500 or more)
Social media has been and continues to be a vortex of constant changes. Because of that, it can be quite hard to come up with an effective marketing strategy that targets the right networks. Thus, eCommerce strategies often end up getting changed.
Still, the amount of leads that come from Social Networking platforms is too good to pass up. That’s why eCommerce websites have to stay in the loopand react to new trends accordingly.
One of the main ways to promote a company on social media is through ads. However, this is actually a pretty bad marketing strategy in the long run. If you want to know why, read our article on the subject.
Without further ado, let’s see why eCommerce Strategies need to put a lot of emphasis on social media networks.
Social media is a great place to get leads
I think it’s important to understand what a positive influence social media can have on your business. It’s the best place to connect with possible clients and raise brand awareness. You’re achieving success, one post at a time.
Besides the huge number of people who use it, it’s also important to mention that people tend to share links very often on social media. That means that if you promote yourself in a unique and approachable way, you can expect it to snowball by itself because of people sharing your content.
Another interesting and fairly new thing is the shift that consumers are currently going through. They know all too well that companies make great efforts to provide useful information on social media networks.
We can see in this infographic that more and more people started searching for products directly on social media instead of using search engines.
Social networking websites are constantly making changes and adding new features in order to help companies with their promotion strategy.
For example, Facebook has introduced a new feature called “Instant Articles” that helps establish a connection between the companies that publish articles and their readers.
Basically, social media is becoming more and more welcoming for companies that want to do their marketing there. Both the users and the networks themselves are changing in order to create better brand promotion strategies.
The competition is fierce, but the possibilities are worth the hassle
Since social media networks are constantly changing and new features that help sales keep popping up, there are a lot of opportunities for companies that want to make it big.
That also means that your competition will be bringing their A-game.
After all, with such a high chance of a new “big thing” appearing out of nowhere, you can bet that a lot of people, both companies and consumers, will be ready to jump on the bandwagon. If you’re not there in time, you stand to lose a lot of possible buyers, and I really doubt you’d like that.
I’ll give you an example.
A lot of companies are investing in new virtual reality technologies. When that tech becomes available to the general public, we’ll most likely see a whole new way of doing marketing. Maybe you could make your eCommerce website 3D to give people a real-life shopping experience. That sounds really awesome.
I expect big corporations to already be working on promoting themselves in this new medium, but you can be sure that a lot of smaller companies will also get a great deal of success by riding this wave.
It can turn into such an important thing that companies that don’t adopt new ways of promoting themselves will be left in the dust.
Well-researched eCommerce strategies help you understand what to sell and who to sell to
Social media is also the best place to keep your ear to the ground.
A strong presence on social media can be the key to attracting leads. Furthermore, if you have the time, you can actively search for them yourself.
News about what’s popular right now usually first spreads on social media, so it’s also a great place to help you choose new products or services that you could provide.
If, for example, a lot of people are talking about some new line of clothing, eCommerce websites that sell clothes will make a lot more money by including those trends in their eCommerce strategies, especially if they place a huge emphasis on the content creation process.
Being active on social media and interacting with your audience is a sure-fire way of knowing what you’re doing right and what you can improve. If you listen to people when they give you feedback, you can be sure that they’ll also listen to you when you give them news and information about your business.
Don’t think it will be a walk in the park though. I’m talking about real interactions, as in your customers say something on your page or about you, and you respond. Don’t think that your clientele will feel particularly connected to you if you take more than a week to answer someone.
The Conclusion
As a closing statement, I’d like to say that you should try to stay up-to-date when it comes to any kind of marketing trends, not just the ones related to social media.
If some relatively unknown or completely new tactic becomes popular overnight, you can be sure that it happened because it works well.
I’m not saying that you should chase every trend out there, but I’m sure that from time to time, something will come that you’ll really like and want to try. It would be a shame to overlook it or find out about it too late. Knowledge is power, right?
Now, we here at Squirrly don’t know everything about everything, but when it comes to content marketing, we really know our stuff.
If you’d like to learn how our agency can help you, you can find out all about it in this article.
Are you new to SEO? Struggling to set up just the right strategy for your website?
Even if you’re a greenhorn to digital marketing who knows nothing about the history of search engine optimization, you can still put together a strategy that will help your website rank.
In this guide, I’ll go over six of the best SEO practices to help your business grow.
1. Submit Your Site
If you want to rank in the search engines, it’s a great idea to let the search engines know that you exist. Fortunately, they make it easy to do that.
What do you accomplish by submitting your site to the search engines? You get it indexed.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a search index, it’s the master catalog of content that the search engines maintain. They use that content to find resources that match people’s search queries.
In other words, if you want people to find your site with a search engine, you’ll have to get your site indexed. Submitting it to those two tools makes that happen.
2. Set up Local Directory Listings
Even if you’re not a mom-and-pop shop in the local village, you’re still a local business somewhere. That’s why you should get your business listed in the various local directories.
Fortunately, there are a few sites that let you do that:
What are the benefits of getting listed in local directories? There are a few of them.
First, it builds links to your website. Those backlinks will help with SEO.
Next, it lets people know that your business exists. That’s going to build brand-name awareness.
Finally, it’s another way to get your site added to the search index.
3. Add a Sitemap
Next, you should add a sitemap to your website.
If you’re unfamiliar with sitemaps, they’re digital documents that tell the search bots how to navigate around websites.
It’s not easy to create a sitemap from scratch. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that will give you a helping hand.
If you’re using WordPress, for example, the popular Squirrly SEO Plugin will create a sitemap on your behalf.
best SEO practices when it comes to content creation
4. Make Your Pages Search-Friendly
Also, make the content on your website search-friendly.
How do you do that? Optimize your titles, H1 tags, H2 tags, and meta descriptions. (actually, you can see above how you can easily follow all necessary instruction in WordPress if you use the SEO Live Assistant from Squirrly)
Make sure those elements contain keywords relevant to your brand. That’s how the search engines will associate your content with search terms that people use.
You should also optimize your overall content. Again, use keywords that people will associate with your line of business.
Finally, you should also add images to your content as well. It seems like the search engines give a bit of a bump to image-rich articles.
Why? Probably because it’s easier for people to digest the info that way.
Also: you should optimize the images too. Add keywords to captions and alt tags.
5. Find More Keywords
When you begin optimizing your content, you’ll probably identify a few keywords relevant to your business. That’s a great starting point, but it’s far from the finish line.
You need to find other search terms that people will use when searching for your products or services. Then, generate some content around those keywords.
I can’t stress this enough: a great SEO program includes keyword research. Period.
So, how do you find more keywords relevant to your niche? Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that are here to help.
Squirrly SEO includes a keyword research tool which impressed experts like Brian Dean and Neil Patel. It is widely considered one of the “go to” tools for keyword research. You can plug in the keywords that you’re already using and the tool will spit out a list of related keywords.
One of the best ways to start is by plugging in a competitor’s site and finding all the different keywords they’re ranking for.
From there, you can go through and cherry-pick the terms you also want to rank for. How does that help? You should try to rank for those same keywords so you can capture market share.
Outside of that, you’ll want to enter keywords into Squirrly SEO’s keyword research tool that intuitively make sense for your brand. This will give you a huge amount to choose from and add to your list.
How do you know which keywords to prioritize? Look for the “low-hanging fruit.”
Squirrly (or any other tool worth your money) will identify the search volume and level of competition for each keyword it identifies. Your task is to find the keywords with high search volume and low competition. You should also watch out for the trend.
Those are the search terms that will be easiest to rank for.
6. Get Some Backlinks
The last step: get some backlinks pointing to your site.
As I mentioned above, backlinks help your site rank. That’s especially the case if the backlinks come from high-profile sites.
Suppose you have a web page that’s ranking at Position 30 right now. If you want to push that page farther up in the search results, get 10-20 backlinks pointing to it.
Remember, though, you want quality backlinks. If you try to build a backlink profile with forum links or foreign sites, the search engines might view that as backlink spam. That won’t help your rank.
One of the best ways to build backlinks is to reach out to webmasters of non-competing blogs and offer to write an article. Inside the article, add a link to your site.
Wrapping Up the 6 Best SEO Practices
Those are the basics. However, there’s still a lot more you can do to earn a great rank.
Be sure to bookmark SEO-related websites like Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land and visit them regularly. That’s how you’ll keep up with all the latest developments.
Social media has been and continues to be a vortex of constant changes. Because of that, it can be quite hard to come up with an effective marketing strategy that targets the right networks. Thus, eCommerce strategies often end up getting changed.
