Thursday, August 8, 2019

Digital Marketing Challenges That Are Hurting Small Businesses

In the digital age, if you want to grow the small business, then you should seek the assistance of the internet marketing which is essential these days. This emphasizes on the digital marketing which invites ample challenges. The tragic part is that the small businesses are getting affected because of the emergence of the online presence. It is indeed challenging for the small businesses to embrace the challenges of internet marketing.  

Below mentioned are the six challenges that small businesses face in the digital world.

1. Develop a powerful website

When business owners decide to make their bus reach across the globe, the first thing they need to do is to create their business websites. Usually, the start-up business owners usually hunt for professional website designers who are proficient in creating creative and aesthetically pleasing website which can deliver an exceptional user experience. It is necessary to create a positive impact on your audience by having a strong online presence.  

The need of design and UX matter
 
First, you need to present your brand in the online market. Therefore, you will have to make sure that the website should have a professional touch. If the website is not designed properly, then your business reputation will go down the drain. As per many customers, the credibility of a business is judged by the design of a specific website. If your clients cannot find pages and menus in your website and if the web pages turn out to be outdated and they do not have interesting visuals, then your visitors may term you as a spammy website. For instance, visitors are looking for your blog. They will not stick to your web pages if they do not find them instantly. They will hunt for other websites which tbdt can get in a few clicks. Visitors will also leave your website if the pages do not seem fascinating to them. Hence, it is necessary to create a good content and layout in order to keep your visitors busy with your web pages. If you are engaged with a small business with a limited budget, then you will get many options for developing and maintaining websites at a reasonable price. You can opt for creating sleek and modem websites that will seem exciting and fascinate the right visitors.  

2. Know your audience
 
When it comes to drawing your right visitors at your end, it means you should know who your target audiences are. This is the place where buyer personas come into the picture. It is essential to have buyer persona in digital marketing. Buyer personas are the semi-fictional representations of your right customers. You make use of the original data about your present clients and market research to fully develop your buyer personas. This is another common challenge faced by the small business owners, as they assume that it will consume time, especially if you require to gather data from your existing customers. Generally, it does not cost you much and it will not take weeks for collecting information about your clients. You can use a free survey tool and conduct a regular survey to know their levels of satisfaction. You can also obtain their feedback in regard to you'd services and products. Once you gather the information you require, then you can make yourself personas by answering simple questions connected to your ideal customers. You can use the HubSpot's Make My Persona tool which makes the process more comfortable and interesting.  

3. Create inestimable content

If you have a catchy website for your small business, you should have engaging and informative content to procure positive results. If you want to draw your clients' attention towards your business, then an engaging content can truly attract the right visitors. You can operate a constant publication schedule for your blog, edit video content and create content which you can share on social media channels.
You can create countless contents which require a big investment, time and resources. Not all small business owners have the potentiality to invest in doing so. This is another challenge which all small business owners come across of creating a good content. You will need to hire professionals who can create outstanding contents on your behalf. Therefore, there are many business owners who seek help of professional agencies to take care of their content requirements. Other small business owners hire an in-house content creators who will execute content-related tasks such as articles, videos, blog articles and share them on social media platforms.

 4. Content promotion

As for digital content marketing, merely creating a good content is not enough for your visitors. Usually, business owners tend to overlook the importance of content promotion. There are various methods you can fuel your content distribution which may take a lot of time to do. You can promote your content on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. You can also have a strong following of your relevant users who will be the follower of your business. The ideal way to keep your followers in touch with you is by drawing their attention which is possible by sharing meaningful content that sounds valid for your users. There are many small business owners who overlook the importance of social media. The reason is that they think that it takes time to send a tweet or post a message on the page of Facebook. You need to use the right tools to put across your ideas and information. There are several free social media management tools which will help promote your content. You can use Buffer for adjusting the messages for every platform. The tools will also help you involve analytic reports in order to adjust your strategy on the basis of your working process.

Email

To get benefits from small businesses, you should create an email newsletter. To keep your target audience engaged, you should send newsletters on a regular basis. Your newsletters should be able to solve the issues of your clients. You can also promote your small business through mails.  

Outreach

The outreach marketing points out to the practice of connecting with your clients which has something to offer to your business. The strategy of outreach consists of guest blogging or public relations. Small business owners should connect with the influencers. Getting connected with the bigger brands will require more money. Get connected to online discussions which is another best way to promote your content. Quora or LinkedIn can be the best platforms.  

5. Form new leads
 
The overall goal of content marketing is to earn the trust of your readers. When they trust you and seek out more information from you, they are willing to share some personal information in exchange for gated content, known as a content offer. A visitor who reads through your blog articles finds a call to action at the bottom of your posts.

The CTA helps promote an ebook. Once a visitor clicks CTA part, they will be on a landing page where they will be asked to fill out a form. In the given form, there will be an email address a name. The users will have to fill in the particulars and submit it. After the submission of the form, they will receive an email along with the e-book. It is the visitor who becomes your lead when you add their contact information into your customer relationship management system.

By doing so, they indulge in the free ebook. You also share more value with the visitors and keep them engaged with your brand. Small business owners find the lead generation as time intensive, as they have to build interesting and useful contents and create lead generation campaigns. You can capture good leads if you invest in the marketing automation program or outsource a digital marketing to an agency.  

6. Spike in the website traffic

At the time of carrying out digital marketing strategies and building your online presence, then you can experience an increase in the website traffic. These traffics are potential enough to create leads. But, such leads cannot guarantee you that you will get the chance to come close to your clients.

Why is it tough for small businesses to drive sales? 

The reason is that you are most likely to compete with bigger companies which have a higher brand recognition than you. The optimal way to drive sales is to commit and help your every client in the best possible manner. You need to have strong interactions with your target audience. If your customers feel that there are getting benefited from the information you share with them, then your customers will feel connected to you and they will look up to you, trust you and give importance to your business. Customers will invest money in the services and products delivered by you. In today's digital world, it has become extremely necessary to make use of the digital marketing strategy. All you need is to follow the inbound methodology to keep your business thriving in the ever-growing crowded digital world. The future of business is for the inbound business organizations. No matter what is the size of your organization, your budget, your ability to deliver helpful information, your projected revenue will help fuel the digital marketing in order to have a sustainable business development.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

How Your Ecommerce Website Can Recover From Panda

As I have already stated, it’s very difficult to manage and optimize the e-commerce websites as they have more than hundreds of product pages which needs extra care while optimizing. When you have more than hundreds of product page on the website, chances are that you will get caught by Google Panda. Most of the developers usually copy content from their competitors and then post it on the website which attracts the attention of Panda.

According to reports of Google team, more than 60% of traffic dropped due to content farming, although some of the websites also benefited from Panda.  Dynamic URLs make it more complicated because of the auto generated web pages; you should make sure that all the auto/cart generated pages have “NOINDEX”, “NOFOLLOW” because if your website has any copy content then it can affect the original and unique pages.

Have a look at the post from Google which has some specific guidelines for marketers by Google:-

One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

When it comes to the shallow pages, they are mainly referred as the pages which have very low quality content and don’t have any value. To know more about shallow pages, click here.  Almost all the e-commerce websites which were hit by Panda has pages with duplicate content which resulted in shallow page level. Most of the e-commerce websites offer variety of products, for instance, if a clothing store offers products of different sizes/colors and each product will definitely have a separate page.

If your website is offering 30 products in a particular section and that particular product has around 5 sizes and 10 colors, then there will be around 1500 unique pages. Rather than writing 1500 product descriptions ( which is a little difficult), you should write 30 product descriptions for the product page and then use a drop down so that users can pick the right product accordingly.

Have a look at the snapshot:-

Ecommerce websites can recover from Panda, but every SEO tale involves humility and a lot of hard work!

Thursday, October 31, 2013

What Google's Hummingbird Update Affects Websites



There’s no question that the Hummingbird algorithm is only the beginning of change in search optimization, but smart content creators can be prepared to thrive in this and any environment that may come in the future.
Hummingbird, which is the name of Google's latest search algorithm, is designed to provide web users with enhanced results. An algorithm refers to the way Google sorts through the millions of search results to provide only the most relevant ones. Hummingbird had already rolled out last month. 

Panda squashed bad content. Penguin froze low-quality links. And now, did Hummingbird eat link building?

Nothing has changed. If you have original, high-quality content, and you have high-quality and relevant websites linking to your own website, then your website is still going to rank well.

Many people have been upset by Panda and Penguin, and they’ll now see Hummingbird in a negative light. Don’t fall into that trap. If you’re the best at what you do, these updates Google has been continuing out are opportunities to separate yourself from your competition. They may have been engaging in spamming policy to get good SERP rankings, but if you’ve been focus on creating content that provides real value to possible trusted customers, their days are numbered. These changes will help you rise above, and the good news, as mentioned above, is if you’ve been doing the right things for your SEO you don’t need to change a thing.

Let’s get a look at what Hummingbird way for the prospect of link building.

In general, Hummingbird –‘Google says’ is a new engine built on both accessible and new parts, planned in a way to specially hand out the search load of today, rather than one created for the needs of ten years ago, with the technologies back then.

No. Link building is alive and well. But the description of link building sure does need to transform. As Will Critchlow from Distilled says, “Link building is a dreadful name for what we do.” And that is true for so many reasons.

SEOs used to be able to use links and other factors to scam Google into thoughts that their search website was more trustworthy and helpful than it actually was. Hummingbird once again makes the end user the unlimited focus of search results. We can’t scam Google anymore! Building links to less-than-amazing content will fail. Google will notice high bounce rates, the lack of natural social sharing, and a variety of other quality signals no matter how many links you build — maybe even faster with Hummingbird.

Have you seen any crash to your websites as an effect of the Hummingbird update? 

Do you see any details in the update you feel will give you a benefit?

Google webmasters is the same as always, I encourage original, high-quality content, since that’s what’s best for web users… Cheers!