Internet Marketing Blog

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Recently, markets and industries have undergone monumental and dynamic changes. This includes omnichannel marketing, adoption of analytics, and uber targeting. And when the COVID-19 pandemic happened, it acted as an intensifier and accelerant. 

The markets are volatile, and the future of businesses is uncertain. But there are emerging trends that can scale your business to the global market. 

They include: 

E-commerce 

E-commerce has been great, but the coronavirus pandemic accelerated its growth. In May 2020, global e-commerce sales reached a high of $82.5 billion, a 77% increase from 2019. E-commerce has lower running costs since you don’t pay for a physical store. 

E-commerce sites offer more promotions and discounts, making the price of commodities lower than traditional brick-and-mortar store prices. Consumers can easily order goods from the comfort of their homes.  

As a business owner, going online eliminates the need to employ more staff members. Marketing your business using social media platforms and Google Ads is much cost-effective than the offline advertisement. 

Selling online gives you access to customer data, which is inaccessible through traditional stores. You can get the client’s name, phone number, email address, demographic data, and consumer behavior. 

The internet opens your business to different niche audiences worldwide. This will boost your sales and increase revenue. Selling online means your business is open 24 hours, 7 days a week, throughout the year. 

Automation ensures the sale process is constantly flowing and clients can buy at any time, any day. 

Tap Into Blockchain 

In most cases, blockchain is associated with Bitcoin. Undeniably, Bitcoin introduced the world to blockchain technology. However, this is just one of the blockchain applications.

Blockchain technology has various applications, such as banking, mining, education, entertainment, and automotive.  There are also blockchain solutions to improve logistics and transport. With blockchain technology, the data cannot be deleted or altered. 

Blockchain can disrupt the existing business models and drive operational efficiencies. 

Contactless Payment Options

The social implications of Covid-19 limit in-person contacts. This has led to widespread contactless payment options. To put it in simple perspective, cashless payments have increased since the pandemic started. 

This mode of payment is faster and convenient than traditional cash transactions. Speedier transactions keep consumers happy, which may make them buy more. Going cashless will reduce hefty queues, especially during peak times. 

Mobile and contactless payments are convenient for clients. It eliminates the need for clients to find ATMs or head to bank halls for cash withdrawal. 

Remote Work on the Rise 

Both large and small businesses have shifted from a 9-5 pm working routine to a full-time remote work arrangement. Depending on your business, you can consider the remote work option. It’s convenient, cost-effective, and easy to operate. 

Remote work adoption comes with flexibility, which increases the morale of employees. With lower operating costs, the business will realize more revenue. 

The Bottom Line

The adoption of the best technology will give your business an edge in a competitive world. Newer concepts, technologies, and personalized approaches are meant to build better and solid relationships with clients. These trends enable businesses to focus on giving employees more flexibility and empowerment. 

Are you struggling to build up your leads numbers and generate new leads in your business model? There could be a few things that might be going wrong here so let’s dive into some of the best ways that you will be able to build up more business leads. 

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Think About Your SEO Campaign

First, you need to make sure that you are hitting the right boxes with your SEO strategy. It’s important that you don’t end up in a situation where you’re going to struggle because your SEO isn’t getting the level of traffic you need. The more traffic you have, the more chances that you’ll be given to get those leads for your business. If you speak to an SEO specialist, they will help you understand the right steps to take with your marketing campaign. This should include off-page and on-page SEO tactics for your company. 

Use The Right CTAs

Once you have managed to get users to your site, you then need to make sure that they engage with your business. Often this is the case of leading your customers down the right path and that can be quite difficult to do, though certainly not impossible. You just need to make sure that you are using the right CTAs. There’s a certain art to creating calls to action that customers and users want to follow. We recommend that you use A-B testing to find out which CTAs are more effective. Remember, even small changes can matter here such as the color of the font that you are using. 

Getting Active On Social Media

You might also want to consider the best ways that you can use social media to your advantage as part of your business model when you are building leads. For instance, you could decide to reach out to influencers. Influencers have more power than you realize and it could help ensure that your company can reach the heights you hoped for. You just need to find the right influencer that will fit with your business brand and your own individual goals. 

Use Old Tactics

Finally, you should think about using older marketing and promotional tactics that you might have dismissed. Some examples could be email marketing. You have probably heard that the open rate for emails and specifically marketing emails is quite low. While this is certainly the case, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to see the results that you hoped for here. If you want to hit the right mark, you need to ensure that your email marketing tactics are personal and designed to reach the individual rather than a specific target group. That way you will increase the chance of them engaging. 

We hope this helps you understand some of the best ways that you can build up your lead numbers in your business. The more leads that you generate, the greater the number of chances you have to make the right sale which is always going to be fantastic for the future longevity of your company. 

It’s easier than ever to start an online eCommerce store, especially with Prestashop development experts who can create the site for you or at least give you plenty of information and advice about how you should do it. However, just because you can open up an online store, that doesn’t mean you can go ahead and sell whatever you want to. Some items are just not worth the trouble, and some are never going to be sold in the numbers you need to make this a viable business. 

Finding the right products for your eCommerce store is crucial, but when you’re looking for the right products, it’s vital to stay away from the bad ones, even if they look tempting and you think they might be popular. Remember, this is your business, and you must run it correctly to stand a chance of doing well. The wrong products are not going to help you do that. With that in mind, here are some products you shouldn’t sell on your eCommerce site. 

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Counterfeit Goods 

We understand that counterfeit (fake) goods might look like a good business idea. They are cheap to buy, you can make a good profit, and people want to buy them. Unfortunately, not only is selling counterfeit goods against the law, but it’s also bad for business. 

If you’re upfront about the fact that you’re selling fakes, the authorities will soon come down hard on you, and you could lose everything you’ve built up until that point. If you’re not honest about how legitimate the products are, you’ll get in trouble with your customers, especially if they’re paying high prices. Your reputation will plummet, and again, you could lose it all. It’s just not worth it for the small reward you could gain. 

Age-Restricted Items 

As you delve deeper into the different rules and laws in place around online sales, you’ll discover that a lot of items are age-restricted. In other words, you have to be of a certain age to buy them, and as a seller, you need to see age verification before you can safely sell. Some of the products that are included in this are alcohol and knives. 

In a physical store, age verification is hard enough, but on an eCommerce site, when it amounts to someone telling you their age and you having to take their word for it, it’s impossible. The challenge is not one many new entrepreneurs want to think about because the penalties for selling age-restricted items to underage buyers are large fines and the closure of your business. 

Niche Items 

You can set up an online store to sell almost anything, but just because you have a store, does that mean people will buy from it? In the case of niche items, you might find that there just aren’t enough people interested in what you are selling to make a difference.

In general, niche items are a good idea since they will ensure your site is unique, and those who want to buy will come to you. However, if the niche is too small, then the profits will be small too, and even if you’re making sales, it will never be enough to make your site a viable business. 

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Cybersecurity remains a constant threat to businesses, but the COVID-19 pandemic has shed new light on cyber threats. As companies were forced to modify their operations swiftly in response to the coronavirus outbreak, hackers found new opportunities to gain access to in-house systems and servers. As a result, a significant number of businesses have been the victims of cyberattacks in recent months and many may still be unaware that they’ve been affected. 

As threats evolve and emerge, it’s vital that businesses implement new security protocols to combat them. This means staying up to date with the latest cyber threats and accessing advanced security measures to keep your data and systems secure. To get a head-start, take a look at these top tips to pandemic-proof your business’ cybersecurity now:

1. Identify Cloud Vulnerabilities

In response to the global pandemic, millions of businesses introduced remote working arrangements. To achieve this, a significant number of firms made hasty transitions to the cloud, often accelerating their planned transition phase to respond to environmental demands. Although cloud computing offers many business advantages, it’s vital that business owners recognize the vulnerabilities that are present. 

Providing effective security protocols are enacted, the cloud can be a secure place to host platforms and store data. However, businesses will need to decide which security measures are right for them and ensure that they’re introduced companywide. 

2. Offer Secure Digital Services

Increasing demand for online services and digital customer care is forcing businesses to consider new initiatives and experiences. Omnichannel customer service is increasingly popular as users expect a seamless, cross-device, and cross-platform experience, for example. 

Businesses will need to increase their range of digital services in order to meet the demands of their target audience, but they’ll need to do with cybersecurity in mind. By providing IT staff with training opportunities, such as the ITIL certification, or working with third-party, specialist IT service providers, companies can ensure that they’ve got the expertise required to develop effective cybersecurity strategies. In addition to this, companies will be able to implement new digital services in a way that complements their existing online presence. 

3. Educate Your Staff

Human error remains a major issue in relation to cybersecurity breaches and the increasing use of social engineering means that many firms remain vulnerable due to a lack of awareness amongst staff. Your employees are a critical line of defense when it comes to protecting your organization from cybersecurity threats, so don’t overlook the role they play. 

By educating staff about the different threats they’ll encounter and teaching them how to spot the signs of an imminent attack, you can ensure that they’re able to respond appropriately when a cyberattack looms. As a result, you can safeguard your systems and your data and mitigate an attack before it takes place.

Making Cybersecurity a Top Priority

Cybersecurity should always be a critical issue for businesses across all sectors. As we continue to adjust to a ‘new normal’ in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s vital that companies make cybersecurity a top priority. 

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Running an online business is difficult at the best of times; but during a global pandemic we have to up the ante when it comes to our digital presence and capabilities. From setting up your office at home to employing people remotely – there are many elements to consider and ways to make your business succeed during these times. 

Today we want to talk about some of the ways you can improve your online security this year even at home and ensure that your online business prevails. 

Install dedicated servers 

The first thing to consider when running a business at home and remotely is to have dedicated servers for your operations. Servers can be overloaded very easily with a lot of activity and when you have people accessing it from many different locations it can be difficult for it to cope. Install dedicated servers for your business and also ensure that your servers are protected and private to those in your business. Protect your assets and data and keep everything in one secure place. 

Choose better passwords 

One of the most important things you need to do as a small business owner is force your workers to choose strong passwords. There should be no names, birthdays, pet names or anything that can be easily guessed by hackers. Use a service such as LastPass to generate random passwords with lots of letters and numbers as well as special characters and make sure everyone has their own LastPass account where their details are stored securely. You can allow access to certain people in the business and ensure that only those who need passwords will have access to them. 

Choose authority levels 

As well as having authority levels with passwords for accounts, you can also have levels of access for documents and files such as accounting or employee details. These can be password protected and accessed only by those who NEED access. This is an essential thing to do because if you allow access to all company files for everyone who works for you, people could use this as a way to get to their coworkers and it can cause some serious problems. 

Reduce application usage 

Applications such as email, account management, CMS, CRM, photo editing and more are great for business. However, when opening yourself up to hackers these can all be dangerous as they put your information in places where they can be accessed. For example if Adobe was hacked and account details were stolen; your bank details could be taken and used. It is important to only sign up to applications you need, and once you finish using one – delete your account and details. 

Keep everything locked 

It is important to always lock your computer when you walk away from your desk. This is a practice that can be done in the office as well as at home to avoid people getting access to information they shouldn’t. 

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Online retail has been going from strength to strength for many years now, while, unfortunately, bricks and mortar stores are finding business increasingly challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen internet sales skyrocket as shoppers have turned to e-commerce to purchase goods while the stores were closed. It is plain to see why online shopping continues to grow in popularity when you can pick from millions of products worldwide and have them delivered directly to your door.

Now is the time for e-commerce stores to enjoy a boost in success. Hopefully, you will be experiencing an increased demand for your products and an uptick in sales on your website. If this isn’t the case, and your conversion rates are not as healthy as you would like, why not try to implement some changes to capitalize on the increased demand for online shopping?

Website Health Check

Before you start to introduce changes, it is helpful to assess where you stand right now. To ensure that your website changes provide you with a healthy return on your investment, you need to know the breakdown of vital stats such as the number of page visits your site receives and, of course, the conversion rate. Once you know this information, you will be able to figure out the areas that need the most improvement.

SEO

Before you even begin to think about conversion rates, you need to attract a healthy number of visitors to your website. Effective SEO is the tool that will help to increase your web presence by boosting your search engine rankings and getting your business seen by your potential customers. SEO requires specialist knowledge to achieve results, so hiring an SEO expert such as PK Seo is a wise idea to ensure that your business gets noticed and for its rankings to be improved.

Product Descriptions

While shopping online is super convenient and offers an excellent range of products, there is one distinct disadvantage. When you shop online, you cannot physically hold the products and examine them in person. To overcome this issue, you will need to ensure that your product descriptions and product imagery are as straightforward as possible and contain all the relevant specifications. Having a comprehensive product description and high-quality photos can play a crucial role in helping to convert customers.

Detailed Delivery Information

Providing clear, but detailed delivery information is needed to make it as simple as possible for customers to buy from you. Having delivery and returns information readily available on your website provides potential customers with the reassurance that they can buy with confidence from your store with no nasty surprises such as expensive delivery charges.

Chat Bots

Chat bots are becoming increasingly popular and can offer a highly effective method of increasing conversion. A chat bot can help to reduce the number of abandoned baskets your company has by providing website visitors assistance before they navigate away from your site. This can help to increase sales and give your conversion rates a healthy boost.

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The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc with most businesses. The pandemic has posed countless challenges and it can feel exhausting trying to overcome each one as it’s presented to you. Now, running a business has never been easy. But right now, it can feel like you’re constantly treading water to stay afloat. The main two problems that most businesses are facing is that people either don’t have the money to spend with their brand (through job loss, reduced working hours or reduced salaries) or simply don’t want to spend money on any non essential goods (as people want to save in case they lose their jobs, face reduced hours or have to agree to reduced salaries). Right now, you may not be able to generate significant sales and profit, no matter how hard you market your brand. But this doesn’t mean that you simply put your business on hold for the foreseeable future. Instead, you’re going to have to maintain customer interest and customer relationships so that people will be the first in line to buy from you when they do experience better financial times. Brand awareness and brand engagement are going to prove key to your business’ success over the upcoming months. Here are a few steps you can take to keep your company in the back of people’s minds until the time is right!

Entice Sales

Of course, you may need to generate some sales in order to create sufficient profit to keep afloat. To achieve this, you’re really going to have to entice consumers. This may include doing things that you wouldn’t usually. Significant sales tend to be the best way to get even reluctant people to part with their cash. Sure, this means you won’t make as much on your merchandise as usual. But it means you will generate something. Just make sure there’s still a sufficient profit margin to make it worth it!

Continue Sending Marketing Emails

You need to continue sending engaging content in your marketing emails. Marketing mails are literally designed to keep your brand in the back of consumers’ minds and are often successful at this. Rather than sales based mails, really focus on pure useful content. This will prevent people from being scared away by the concept of having to buy something and will encourage them to simply engage with your brand and see it in a positive light. Emails can be encouraging and direct people to your site’s blog. This way, you get people onto your site where they can then go on to browse other areas, but will feel like they’re doing so of their own accord, rather than being pushed straight to product pages.

Engage on Your Website

Have fun elements on your website that will keep people on your website. A Virtual photo booth is a good idea. People love taking pictures of themselves and editing them. The photobooth allows them to do this and can encourage them to share the pictures they take (with your branded logo added) with others, then encouraging others to visit your site too. Getting people engaging with your site makes it more likely that they will then take a look around your products and potentially make purchases. At the very least, it gets people to create positive associations with your brand, making them more likely to purchase with you in the future.

Maintain an Engaging Blog

As we’ve briefly highlighted earlier, you may want to direct people to your website’s blog. Blogs are extremely important nowadays. Not only can they help your site with SEO optimisation, but they can deliver genuinely useful content to your potential customers too! Make sure to fill your blog with regular, useful content. People may become regular readers, which will make visiting your page a part of their regular routine. They’ll enjoy your content, creating positive connections between your business and them in their mind. It also encourages them to browse your goods regularly. This can boost sales and see you generate more profits!

Of course, there are countless other things you can do to drive brand awareness and brand engagement. But hopefully, the above digital options can easily be carried out during these unprecedented times and can help to keep your brand in the back of customers’ minds when they’re unlikely to buy. This is all so important to keep in mind as we advance towards a recession – people having positive associations with your brand could really help your company to survive the upcoming months!

If you have a start-up, you probably have a website. If you have a website in 2020, it needs to be optimized for search engines to achieve success. Google and Bing’s algorithms now make it very hard for a completely new site to rank among competitors on the search engine results page (SERP) without first being perceived by them as trusted. This is even harder if your website impacts viewers’ money or life, such as if you’re selling a product or service. So, if you’re a start-up with a website, here is what you need to know about SEO.

Google’s Starter Guide

Google has an SEO guide for websites that need Google Search to survive (i.e., any website that doesn’t specifically reject Google). This guide clearly states that the best way for a website to be featured on their SERP is by clearly benefiting their users. They outline that any SEO you undertake should be with the philosophy of making the user experience better.

The first thing they ask you to check is whether your site is already showing on Google after its launch. At this point, you should double-check that you have a robots.txt page, as if you have just launched, it can help Google’s (and other search engines’) ‘robots’ crawl through the internet and add your page to their directory.

They specify that your website needs to be secure, serve high-quality content to users, and have content optimized to be fast and easy to access on all devices. The 4^th paragraph of Google’s guide is effectively a heads-up. It asks you if you need an SEO expert and tells you that doing so can save time and implies that the complex nature of SEO means there is a lot for a newcomer to cover. They recommend that you start off by getting an expert to audit your site, something that leading SEO companies typically include in a package. For example, Click Intelligence offers site auditing available in a custom package alongside content generation, pay per click strategy, PR outreach, and a lot more.

Google’s guide then proceeds to cover a lot of technical information, which can be overwhelming for those new to SEO, but is recommended for anybody looking to get a comprehensive understanding of the processes involved. However, they jump straight into the technicalities of SEO without outlining the importance of something else first. That something else is demographics work.

Proper Demographics Work

If you are significantly down the road of your start-up launch, you have probably conducted demographics analysis of your target market. If not, please understand that this is a vital component in selling products and services to both businesses and direct to consumers. When you start your SEO strategy, you will need to refer to the analysis you have conducted, as everything about your brand should be tailored to those to whom you wish to sell.

When you’re planning your SEO, you need to remember that the whole point of the exercise is to think of who you want to be searching for you and attempt to enhance your visibility to them. It can be worth it, at this stage, to conduct analyses of your competitors’ audiences, too. Really flesh this out – who are the users and how do they think, what do they want from a service, how do they search, on which devices do they search, etc. This analysis will help you understand that your audience will not search for your start-up by name almost all the time when you’re starting out. Instead, they will find your start-up by searching for a need they have that needs to be fulfilled. How do you tailor your SEO for them?

Keywords

Keywords are a foundation of SEO strategy. To successfully implement SEO, you need to understand the key terms that searchers are looking for, and tailor your site to include them in such a way that a search engine determines your site as valuable for those searching with your chosen keywords.

There are several free tools that can help you research keywords that you think might be valuable to your SEO. It’s recommended that you explore keywords as much as you can – expand on possible phrases and analyze where these search terms are active (which sites and which locations). Keywords can be short-tail or long-tail. Short-tail keywords are more general and shorter, e.g., “chocolate,” and long-tail keywords are more specific and tend to be longer, e.g., “best chocolate recipes.” Short-tail keywords are much harder to rank highly on the SERP with, so its recommended when you’re brainstorming keywords to choose a few short-tails but at least five long-tails to expand on each short-tail keyword you choose.

If you’re stuck with building your list of keywords, try a simple process with a complicated name: pattern recognition through stems and qualifiers. Take a short-tail keyword and apply different qualifiers to turn it into a long-tail keyword. Examples of these qualifiers are:

1. Relevant adjective – best start-up
2. Location – start-up London
3. Brand – Nike start-up
4. Product spec/feature – Student’s start-up
5. Product Type – SaaS start-up
6. Intended use – Part-time start-up
7. Comparison – Start-up vs corporation
8. Action request – buy start-up

Once you have developed a list of keywords, you can start to think about where you include them on your site. Then, you need to think about your content.

Content Marketing – The King

The importance of content has become a cliché in online marketing and SEO, but it is so for a reason. You need high-quality content that can take the form of a blog page, videos, pictures – anything that your demographics will willingly consume with interest. Content needs to be factual and enticing, and is important in the eyes of Google, as it gives you some authority within your niche. Factual, well-researched posts that are 100% original and inform readers about a specific problem and potential solutions are highly recommended, as they not only position your site as an expert, but can attract backlinks.

When people share your content online in blog posts and other pieces of content, they may choose to link back to your site to demonstrate their point. This establishes your site as helpful for other people, and search engine algorithms observe these backlinks and are more likely to position you higher up on the SERP, as they can see that your site is trustworthy and provides value. Backlinks have to be genuine; they can’t just be hacked by creating a series of blogs and copying and pasting content with the addition of a link to your site. When they work best, backlinks are from high-quality articles themselves. Sites that master content marketing generate 500% more leads, have 434% more pages on the SERP, and 55% more traffic, according to Semrush.

Taking care of your SEO on a regular basis involves a lot of content generation, as your site will need to stay fresh and relevant in order to generate genuine backlinks. That shouldn’t be the only thing you maintain with your SEO efforts, though. The world of SEO is ever-changing and is rife with major revolutions that can see a high-ranking page wiped from the face of the SERP (as was observed in the infamous Google Medic update).

If you feel you have the basics of SEO down, you should regularly audit your site to make sure that everything is working as planned – and stay up to date with SEO news, as any bit of leaked information from Googles’ search engine algorithm department can help to boost your site’s rankings.