Tag Archive for: Chicago Digital Marketing

How to Measure Social Media ROI

As one of the top digital marketing channels for businesses, social media is a critical component in your company’s success. Here’s how to engage your network, drive collaboration, stay up-to-date, and share best practices.

Every business should be able to calculate their social media return on investment. By tracking ROI, it shows the monetary value of your social media campaigns. You can double down by using marketing methods that work and avoid ones that dont. Social media is a crucial part to anyone’s marketing strategy if your goal is to drive brand awareness.

Here’s how you can measure your social media ROI and improve your content.

What is Social Media ROI?

When you’re looking to increase your social media ROI, it’s important to know how to calculate the value of your activities.

The calculation is simple: (return – investment made) / investment made X 100 = social media ROI.

If your ROI value is more than 0 percent, it means you’re making money from your campaigns. If it is anything below that, then you are losing money.

ROI calculation depends on your goals and objectives as an organization. Different organizations will have different objectives. There are many social media goals you can choose from. It all depends on your core objective, which could be:

  • New followers
  • Click-through rates
  • Conversions
  • Completed lead generation forms

Metrics Used to Measure Social Media ROI

Your social media strategy is the backbone of your business. Without it, you’re just flailing around in the dark, hoping that things work out.

And they won’t. It’s time to get a plan in place.

  • Engagement – This metric is measured by the level of people interacting with your content and brand. A recent study shows that over one third of executives that create content are using engagement as a way to measure their contents performance. Clicks, likes, shares and brand mentions are all part of tracking engagement for you social media channels.
  • Reach- This metric is measured on views and interactions with your company on social media. Reach can be harder to measure than engagement because it only factors how many people saw your post.
  • Leads – This metric is generated by social media, and it’s important to know which channels provide the most leads and what content drives those leads. The best way to achieve ROI with leads is by linking your campaigns to your activity.
  • Conversions – This metric uses UTM parameters on the links within your posts so you can track clicks by each campaign and platform.

When you have all four of these metrics implemented correctly, it will drive ROI to your business.

Best Way to Track ROI

Once you have your plan laid out and you know which targets you are hitting it is time to set up a system for tracking your ROI. There are so many different types of platforms on the market that do a variety of things for you. The simplest way to do this is by using Google Analytics and setting up goals and event tracking.

Google Analytics is a simple tool to use and their help page provides their users with a step-by-step guide on how to use their program. Most importantly, Onimod Global is a Google partner. Google Partners are online marketing companies, trusted and recognized for exceling with Google’s products.

As more customers use social media to browse, connect and purchase, marketers need to know how social media continuously evolves. No matter what your ROI percentage is, there is always room for improvement. Some last key things to remember are:

  • Understand your audience – make sure you know who is interacting with you and how you can provide them with content that will engage them.
  • Think outside the box – quality not quantity, take time to create interesting and engaging content for your audience.
  • Test and Optimize – fine tune your organic social posts by using new imagery, keywords and headlines.

Last Thoughts

At Onimod Global, our goal is to help you align your content marketing efforts to real business results. Our data-driven content strategies make it easy to understand your audience’s needs, where your competition is winning, and areas where you have an opportunity to lead your industry.

As a Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, we are your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills.

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

How To Choose Content Marketing Topics

When choosing content topics, most digital marketers try to write about things they believe is relevant to their audience. While relevance is important, alone it’s not enough. Furthermore, some seemingly relevant content topics may not be a good fit for your brand. 

Effective content marketing grows only when you understand the competition at stake when trying to get the audience’s attention. One of the biggest questions you can ask yourself is, how do you determine topics that are a good fit but also have a positive impact on ROI?

Here are a couple tips on how to choose your content marketing topics effectively.

Find the content topic that your audience is most interested in

If you have two related topics in mind, write about the one that gets more average engagements on social media. While this may sound simple, its often times overlooked. A common problem most people run into is quickly sorting content or blog ideas to find the best topic out there. Evaluating topics with alongside of your social data can be a significantly easier step for analyzing content.

For example, if you’re writing about nutrition or fitness, you might want to critique different diets. In this search for the terms “Paleo” and “Vegan,” it’s easy to see that content about vegan eating is more popular.

“Vegan” has a much higher average level of engagement. So, writing about it can give me a competitive edge, making it easier to get my audience interested in my content, and extending its reach with more social shares. This search took less than a minute, making the Content Analyzer an efficient choice for maximum ROI.

Find topics with less competition

Just as it can be wise to opt for long-tail keywords with lower competition instead of core keywords with tons of competition, using content marketing topics that meet your business goals AND are less competitive is a great option for maximum impact.

Another option would be to pursue different types of content based on how saturated or competitive the content landscape is. If you are writing about a topic with high competition, here are a few tips:

  • Create higher production value content such as videos, courses, ebooks, or original research
  • Consider paid distribution, such as advertising on social media
  • Collaborate with influencers to increase the distribution power behind the content
  • Make sure you have a promotion plan in place that extends beyond the initial post-publication phase

Can the message be shared across multiple mediums?  

Social networks are where conversations take place on different topics. In most content areas, the conversation will gravitate toward one network over another. By comparing the performance of different topics through various networks, you can develop content that will appeal to target audiences on specific networks.

Content marketing takes a good balance of storytelling, educating, convincing and should include a call-to-action. Once you’ve landed on a strong topic, it’s equally important to ensure you’re able to create multi-purpose content out of it. You want to choose topics that you’re an expert on, but you don’t want it to be too niche. This may cause a shortage of material and of those actually interested in reading it. Not only that, but it might also be difficult to share that content across multiple mediums and platforms.

For example, mobile app development content performs better on Facebook and low code performs better on Twitter. If you want your content to reach people on Twitter, it would be a good idea to frame the piece around low code. You want to find the sweet spot between broad and niche. Ideally, you will find content pieces that can be featured in a number of ways. For example how-to content could be created as:

  • A YouTube video
  • An infographic
  • A blog post

You want to be able to then share these pieces of content across social platforms. Having flexible content ensures that all members of your audience will be able to find something they best relate to and be able to find it in multiple places. This also creates less work for you, as you can successfully reuse and share topics.

Final Thoughts 

Mapping out and choosing the right topics for content marketing takes strategic planning. Learning what content performs best among your audience takes time and experimenting. Continually measure and track your strategy and make changes when necessary. Choosing the right topics is essential to developing and driving an effective coverall content marketing strategy.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. If you’re looking for assistance with your content marketing or any other areas of digital marketing, contact us today!

4 Ways to Boost Your WordPress SEO

Yes WordPress is SEO-friendly, but simply launching a WordPress website isn’t enough to rank at the top of the search engines.

WordPress has been around since 2003, and has certainly come a long way to help define itself as a powerful marketing tool. Over a third of all websites are using WordPress, simply for its publishing platform and well-designed SEO.

However, if you want your site to rank higher than your competitors’ sites, you still need to do some work yourself. Here’s a couple ways Onimod Global can help you improve your WordPress site’s SEO.

Carry Out Keyword Research

Without keyword research, you are not going to know which search terms you should be optimizing your site’s content for. Keyword research should come at the start of any SEO project and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.

You can use our Keyword Overview tool to identify the keywords you should be using and optimizing for. Whether you are starting to optimize your site from scratch or are creating new content, knowing the keywords you are trying to rank the page for is essential.

Craft Unique Optimized Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Your page’s title tag tells users and search engines what your page is about and is commonly regarded as being an important ranking factor. It is what feeds the clickable page title you see on Google search results.

Yoast automatically sets your page’s title tag using your page heading. What’s nice about Yoast is that you also have the ability to overwrite this and improve it in order to work in variations of keywords that you might not include in your page’s heading. Here are a couple things you can do to optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions:

  • You can either use snippet variables, add custom text as your title tag, or use a mix of both.
  • Meta descriptions indirectly impact your site’s organic performance due to Click-through- rate. It is worth spending time to write enticing descriptions. 

Use Internal Linking

You need to use internal linking within your content to help establish topical relevance between different pages on your site, to pass authority earned from external links, and to help users efficiently navigate.

Adding in internal links to other pages in WordPress is really simple. All you need to do is highlight the text which you want to link (this will be your link’s anchor text) and click the ‘link’ button on the toolbar, which will then allow you to either paste a URL or search for pages within your site.

Mark Up Your Pages with Schema

Schema markup can help to enhance your SEO efforts by adding context to your content and data. It helps Google to understand your content, present it in different and useful ways, which enhances a searcher’s experience.

By adding context to your pages, you are making it more likely that you not only rank higher but also get clicks when your page receives impressions. Since Yoast 11.0, a full structured data graph is built for every post or page on your site, but there are instances where you will want to mark up specific blocks within WordPress.  

Last Thoughts

WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS’ out there, and that is one of the reasons why it is so popular. It is user-friendly and easy to implement a whole host of SEO tactics using just a small number of fantastic plugins. By following the steps above, you are putting yourself in a great position to outrank your competitors.

Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

The Importance of Digital Marketing in 2022

Digital marketing is more important now than ever. You can utilize digital marketing to target specialized markets, allowing you to reach out to customers who may not have previously considered your company. But this industry is fast-growing, which also means ever changing and evolving. Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? Right here. 

As marketers think about building brands in the coming years post-COVID, how is digital marketing being leveraged to help companies bounce back? More importantly, how should you redefine your strategy for 2022?

According to a CISCO report, 90% of North Americans use the internet, and usage is expected to reach 92% by next year. Customers are now spending more time and resources on owned-media channels such as websites, mobile apps, and customer-service channels. There is also a noticeable increase in customer-conversion rates, with social and digital video channels driving the highest ROIs.

Having a digital marketing strategy in place allows you to reach millions of people cost-effectively. If your business doesn’t have a strategic digital marketing plan aligned with your business plan your business can suffer and you could lose out to competitors who are more digitally savvy.

Reasons To Use Digital Marketing

1. Reach a Specific Audience. 

With media like TV, billboards and radio, you are reaching out to a broad audience, and the chances of targeting a specific group of customers is low. Whereas in digital marketing, you can use the features of a marketing platform to specifically target an audience based on age, interests or behavior. 

Your chances of reaching the right audience are significantly higher, and you can pick and choose these metrics as your needs change. It also allows you to identify subgroups within your clientele. If you have more than one type of product, you can tailor a campaign to this more specific group of customers.

2. Access Metrics of your Digital Marketing Strategy ─ All in One Place.

Digital marketing metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the success of a business’s marketing efforts online. The goal of using digital marketing metrics is to track and decipher the way consumers interact with your brand online through websites and social media platforms. While there are many benefits of using metrics, the main use of metrics are used to drive improvements and help businesses focus their people and resources on what’s important. Overall, metrics reflect and support the various strategies for all aspects of the organization, including marketing, competition, standards, or customer requirements and expectations. 

Metrics indicate the priorities of the company and provide a window on performance, ethos and ambition. This allows you to determine your return on investment. You know exactly how profitable your digital marketing campaign was, as you can see the results of each aspect of your efforts.

3. Becoming Visible Within the Industry.

Some of the largest corporations have millions of dollars to spend on traditional advertising. If you don’t have that kind of ammunition, digital strategies allow you to outrank big corporations on a smaller budget. 

Here’s what visibility in business can do for you:

  • Helps you get exposure to a larger audience.
  • Build your brand awareness, so that people know who you are and how you help. 
  • Establishes your credibility and expertise.
  • Allows you to reach and sign more ideal clients.
  • Connects you to opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise. 

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is made up of multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. 

It’s also a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with prospects, and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field. More traffic means more potential clients becoming aware of your brand and services.

SEO is composed of three parts:

  • On-page SEO focuses on the content on your website’s pages. You can research keywords that resonate with your buyer persona or keywords that potential clients might ask. The task is to create quality content when answering those questions, so your pages rank higher.
  • Off-page SEO relates to all activity that happens away from your website. It involves external optimization practices that happen away from your site rather than on it. The main technique used for off-page SEO is backlink building since quality backlinks to your site from external sites tell search engines that your site is valuable and high-quality which helps to build authority.
  • Technical SEO is the back end of your website. Things like coding, image compression and cascading style sheets, also known as CSS. These are important aspects of your website that determine how quickly your pages load. Search engines like Google use it as an important ranking factor.

Social Media Marketing

Social media networks are open to all, giving businesses a chance to follow their consumers’ activities or potential buyers. This helps marketers become more informed about their target audience, likes, dislikes, and interests so that they can create a better marketing strategy to attract customers. The opportunities are endless when it comes to social media marketing. A big plus in  using this type of marketing tool is that most of the basic services are free. 

The end goal is to create more traffic and generate leads for your business. The social media channels you can use for this purpose are:

  • Facebook.
  • Twitter.
  • LinkedIn.
  • Instagram.
  • Snapchat.
  • YouTube.
  • TikTok
  • Pinterest

In an increasingly connected world, your approach to marketing must be just as integrated.

Last Thoughts

In this day and age where just about everyone is connected to the internet, it is crucial for any business to have a strong online presence. As we continue to move forward within the digital age, younger generations are likely to be centered on using the internet to access different services. Having a strong digital marketing strategy is a must if you want to succeed in the increasingly competitive industries across the globe.

Could your digital marketing strategy use a boost? Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing trends. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Why Digital Marketing is Crucial for Small Businesses

Effective Digital Marketing is paramount in helping small businesses learn the online habits of customers – which in turn they can better target their ideal customers. Here, we have listed the benefits of digital marketing strategies for small businesses to help them market their products or services with the right digital media planning. 

When small businesses get started, their main focus is how to attract customers to shop at their store and how to get them to utilize your services. Most small businesses may rely on traditional forms of advertising, such as print ads and mailers. Small business owners have a tendency to believe, if they offer a good product or service, it’s only a matter of time until new customers find their way to them.

While this strategy may bring in some business, there is an easier route to take. Small businesses should consider the marketplace of prospects that are available online. Small businesses, no matter how new to market, should never overlook the opportunity that digital channels can bring. This is a way to generate leads and convert interest into customers. Here’s a look at the benefits of digital marketing and the ways online platforms can be used to help grow your business.

Online Marketing & Its Benefits

With endless opportunities, digital marketing can seem intimidating if you’ve never used it for a business before. There are many different social media platforms and marketing terms that may make it seem like a bigger project than it is. It’s easy for small businesses to believe they don’t have the time or money to compete online. As a result, many take things slowly and stick with one or two forms of traditional advertising, assuming that their business will evolve as time passes.

The marketplace is competitive and while word of mouth and customer recommendations can help drive traffic, customers will struggle to find your business unless you show up in the places they spend time. Delaying building a presence online is not an effective approach. The best way to ensure success is to promote your business is to use target marketing to attract customers that are interested in your specific service and/or product. 

You can find an excess of potential customers online. It’s a larger group than you’ll ever be able to attract only locally. Using digital marketing techniques, you can reach a global audience in a way that’s cost-effective, scalable and measurable. Some of the benefits of using Digital Marketing tactics include:

  • Target the right audience at the right time – personalization is simpler with digital marketing.
  • Get to know your audience and drive engagement to create brand loyalty. Get some inspiration by creating a customer loyalty strategy. 
  • Track and monitor responses to your marketing efforts easily and instantly (i.e.) any social media platform which are typically free of cost. 
  • The ability to reach out to anyone and anywhere as there are no geographical boundaries with digital.

Get to Know Your Target Audience

One of the great things about digital marketing is that it allows you to engage with new customers. You can get to know them and their pain points, and in turn, provide them with a solution. Social media and blog posts are a great way to start a conversation. It’s important to make note of any comments or responses to your posts, it’s another great way to strengthen your strategy. Using digital marketing helps you stop wondering who your customers are so you can personalize communications and refine targeting. 

By doing this, you will build a relationship with your customers. You become more than a business, you become a reliable partner. Remember, people are also more likely to buy from businesses that they have already bought from and had a good experience with. When someone is interested in your business, whether it’s in your niche or they are curious about your brand, the first thing they will do is research online and see what they can find out about you. 

With today’s digital age, customers expect to find a business website or social media page easily. They also might be looking for reviews so they can learn what other people are saying about your company and whether it is a good place to do business. For local businesses, 87% of consumers read online reviews – a growth of 6% from 2019 to 2020.

So if a potential new customer can’t find you online, they may conclude that your business doesn’t appear to be legitimate. There is a very good chance that a lot of these prospects may decide not to take your business seriously and they will quickly take their business elsewhere.

Do More While Spending Less

Small businesses and start-ups are always trying to achieve as much as possible through their marketing on a budget. Advertising online can stretch your budget further and will allow you to refine your target audience. Social media is particularly good for this as it enables you to set a daily budget for a discrete audience that has an interest in your brand or ethos. Most importantly, it allows your business to exclude the people that would never buy from you – saving you time and money!

The key with advertising on social media is to select the platform that will work best for you and your brand. Don’t pick TikTok just because it’s trending or advertise on LinkedIn when you’re not trying to generate B2B interest. Research social channels, see which social media platform matches what you’re looking for and run some simple tests to see what messaging and content works. 

Last Thoughts

Ultimately, you are the one steering your business to success. Where do you want to go and what does success look like for you? Are you looking to develop a website that can generate leads? Or maybe you want to set up a Facebook campaign to see the results. The first step to achieving these goals is to develop an understanding of digital marketing and how it can have a positive impact on your business.

Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Top 5 Must Use Digital Marketing Tools

Fortunately in 2021, there are thousands of tools to utilize for your digital marketing efforts. Unfortunately, this oversaturated market has made it overwhelming for many to choose the right platforms for their marketing needs. 

With Americans spending over 11 hours daily on their electronic devices, there’s not much space left for traditional marketing. And while digital marketing tools help you execute a proper marketing strategy, they don’t do the work for you, and some work better than others – depending on your marketing goals.

With such a large selection of digital marketing tool available, it is important to know how each one will benefit you to help drive results. We’ve compiled a list of the all-around best tools that everyone can use and benefit from.

SEMRush 

When it comes to SEO, SEMRush is one of the most effective tools out there. This platform provides:

  • Keyword performance research 
  • Position tracking 
  • Backlink identification 
  • Technical SEO auditing abilities

SEMRush also just rolled out a few new features that include marketing, advertising and social media tools. If you’re looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one tool, this platform is the way to go. There are both free and paid subscriptions offered. But with a free account, your data pulling abilities are limited. You also won’t get access to all the additional tools they offer. 

Google Analytics

If you’re in the digital marketing space, you should be taking advantage of Google Analytics. This tool delivers vast amounts of insight on your campaign performance and how users engage with your website. It’s extremely beneficial when running A/B tests, keyword performance research and more. One of the best parts is Google Analytics is free to use. They also provide great educational tools to help increase your understanding in Google Analytics Academy. 

HubSpot 

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and sales software that assists you in attracting, engaging and nurturing your customers at every step of the sales journey. This CRM comes with a wide variety of tools that allow you to: 

  • Host web and landing pages 
  • Create blogs and email sequences
  • Track interactions with leads and customers
  • Analyze campaign success and user behavior

Canva

Canva allows users to create graphic designs and content simply and economically. It’s great because it helps you make professional graphics, even if you have no design experience. With the premium version you get access to over 50,000 templates, stock images, video, backgrounds, clip art and more. It’s the perfect solution for someone who doesn’t have the time to use InDesign or Photoshop, but still get high-quality designs to use for your business. 

Sprout Social

While there are endless social media management tools online that all provide similar features, the best overall is Sprout Social. It’s simple to use but also provides many tools to make publishing content and analyzing data easy. They offer dashboards let allow you to manage your pages all in one place, reports to help you manage your user engagement and ROI and scheduling tools. They currently support all platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Sprout has three different tier levels for their plans, but they’re fairly reasonable. 

Final Thoughts

When there’s so many tools out there, it’s important to know how each will benefit you and drive results. If you’re not using them correctly, or missing a few key ones you’re likely wasting time, effort and energy better put into other aspects of perfecting your marketing. That’s why sometimes, your best tool is a marketing partner. Someone who knows which tools are the best for your business, will help improve your marketing and drive success. 

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to digital marketing tools. Meaning it’s simple for use to identify which are right for you. Got questions about marketing tools or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today. 

Why You Should Invest in Video Ad Marketing

Investing in video ads can help drive brand awareness, more engagement, foster a greater audience connection and ultimately boost sales. If you’ve yet to commit to a solid video marketing strategy, here are 3 reasons to consider. 

Better Engagement

Movement and sound are two elements of an ad that easily catch user attention. They also help convey efficient, effective messaging, both which lead to higher engagement. This format is additionally effective in delivering your narrative to the target audience with a tailored message that’s easy to consume. Video ads that capture the interest of users and follow through with a CTA are more likely to succeed with keeping audiences interested. 

Additionally, research has found that the average user remembers 95% of a message when watched, compared to 10% when read. Meaning potential customers are more likely to recollect your brand’s message through video content, rather than a static image or text ad. 

More Shareable

Video content is quick, concise and makes it very easy to tell stories that are easy to consume by users. Video ads offer brands the perfect opportunity to express themselves and tell consumers why they can be trusted and why their products or services are worth purchasing. All of these elements also make videos much more sherable. As seen on Twitter, where 700 videos are shared by users every minute. Posting more shareable content helps increase your brand reach, generate more awareness and put yourself in front of more customer prospects. 

Higher Click-Through Rate

Along with being more engaging, videos also get a much higher-click through rate. According to a Smaato study, the average CTR of video ads via mobile is 7.5 times higher than standard display ads. One particular brand even found that video ads generated 47% higher CTR on Facebook than text ads. 

Final Thoughts

Though video ads can be more time consuming and costly to create, their ability to effectively narrate your story allows you to engage more prospects, gain higher reach and generate more ad clicks. 

At Onimod Global, we’re experts in all things digital marketing, including SEO, SEM, social media, web dev, graphic design, branding and more. If you’re looking to get started on building a video marketing strategy, we can help. Contact us today. 

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

The Benefits of Webinars for Business

Webinars and virtual events have become a turning point for meetings and business in general, exploding during the pandemic. Let’s explore everything business professionals need to know about the benefits of hosting these successful virtual seminars.

During the pandemic, live events were canceled across the globe and businesses were forced to use the internet and wireless communication systems to replace in-person meetings. While there’s no substitute for the excitement of live events, in many cases it’s more practical for people to attend remotely. Did you know that webinars are some of the highest converting forms of marketing? 

Webinars are the next best thing to replace face-to-face interaction with customers and employees. There are very few if any besides webinars that can replace the connection that in-person interaction holds. More and more companies are realizing that without that internet presence it is hard to grow because of the easy access, each business has a complete capability of doing it. 

What is a Webinar?

Just like a seminar or convention, a webinar helps businesses bring together a wide and varied group of people, albeit over the internet. To host a webinar, you will need to find a webinar platform that will help you share your presentation with others online. This webinar software will let you create your own virtual online meeting rooms that you and your attendees will use to view and follow the presentation. Presenters can also share their desktop screens, files, and any open applications on their computer or mobile device, with their audience during the presentation.

It is worth mentioning that webinars are quite different from simple marketing videos, in that the audience follows your presentation in real time. Furthermore, the presenter and audience can engage with each other, leading to the sharing of highly insightful information.

Why Create a Virtual Event?

If you’re involved in a field such as education or public speaking, webinars and online events are probably already part of your marketing strategy. However, there are many ways that other types of businesses can benefit from webinars. Some of the key benefits for driving business include:

1. Virtual Events are Built for Engagement

Your attendees are looking for education and connection, and a webinar can provide both. can help you create that sense of connection and engagement that you miss by not being in person. Virtual events and the platforms that power them are optimized to keep conversations, ideas, and engagement flowing constantly. Webinars are truly unlike anything else; if done right, you can keep your audience engaged for hours on end and that’s something that videos put simply, struggle to do. Not only that, but your audience can also ask questions and get real-time feedback on the training.

2. Reach a Larger Audience

When it comes to trade shows, geographical location is everything. After all, you can only reach out to an audience where a particular show is happening. But that’s not the case with webinars.

One of the biggest benefits of a webinar is that it enables you to reach out to participants and sponsors anywhere in the world. There are no geographical barriers because you’re online. You can be sitting in the US while your audience is viewing you from Australia.

Anyone with an internet connection can join your webinar.

2. They Position you as an Expert in your Field

It’s a free webinar… Who cares? Well, your audience does. And just because it’s “free” doesn’t mean they’re not exchanging anything for the content.

Audiences join webinars because they want to learn. Learn more about the topic and challenges you are speaking about and learn more about the solutions to these challenges. To attend a webinar, your prospect has to register, put the date in her calendar, set aside time for the event, show up at the right time, and then give you around 1-hours of their time. They’re essentially jumping through these hoops just to listen to you talk about a certain subject; this positions you as an expert before you even start teaching the content.

3. Webinars Generate Leads

As mentioned earlier, webinars are some of the highest converting forms of marketing. One of the best reasons to create a webinar or other online event is to generate leads for your business. Webinar attendees provide information to attend your webinar. You can also have virtually unlimited attendees at a single webinar. From a bare-minimum standpoint, that’s like collecting a bunch of quality business cards.

4. Saves Time & Money

Webinars can be a great option for businesses dealing with shrinking budgets. In fact, virtual events are about 75% less expensive than in-person experiences, as hosts typically save money on staff, venue, setup and takedown, accommodations, meals, travel costs, and more. At a minimum, the only thing planners have to worry about paying for is the cost of their virtual meeting platform. Although virtual events do require some setup time (e.g. event website, registration, event marketing, and promotion, etc.) and some extra coordinating with presenters, it’s tremendously less than that of an in-person event.

To organize and host a successful webinar, you don’t need much more than a list of invitees, a webcam, some scripted content that you want to share with said audience, and a broadband connection to stream high-quality footage directly to your audience. Hiring a digital marketing expert that specializes in webinar hosting is also an invaluable tool to make sure you’re getting it right.

Host a Webinar with the experts at Onimod Global

If you want to reach out to a broad audience, and boost your engagement and conversion rate, webinars are the way forward.

If done right, webinars can be better than visiting a prospects personally or jumping on a call with them. The biggest benefit here is that it provides an online space to nurture your seasoned, quality leads. On the other hand, you can also leverage webinars to form a great first impression.

Onimod Global has helped hundreds of our clients across the United States and globe plan, set up and execute webinars to generate business in an unbeatable fashion.

Ready to take the plunge? Contact us here today. 

Simple Ways to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

If your website is struggling to generate traffic and leads, it could be due to a high bounce rate. While reducing bounce rate doesn’t automatically mean you’ll increase conversions, it could help. The ultimate goal is to increase engagement, user satisfaction and making it easier for them to find what they’re searching for. 

With that, here are 5 simple ways to improve your website’s bounce rate. 

What is Bounce Rate?

A bounce is a single-page session on your site. Is a high bounce rate a bad thing? According to Google, it depends on what determines the success of your website. For example, if users come to your homepage first but you want them to get to your sales page, then you don’t want a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate can also indicate that your visitors may not be engaged or satisfied with your site. Ultimately, we work to reduce bounce rate because it can also mean you’re making users happier and delivering them what they’re searching for. 

1. Increasing Page Speed

The longer a user has to wait for the site to load, the more likely they’ll leave. So, making your website faster is one of the easiest ways to reduce your bounce rate. Also, speed is a Google ranking factor, so it can help improve your SEO as well. Some simple ways to improve website’s page load speed is through: 

  • Optimizing images and video: Make sure they’re all sized appropriately and compressed. 
  • Leverage a caching, page speed plugin. 
  • Upgrading your web hosting package. 

2. Strong CTAs

No matter what your conversion goal is, the best way to improve your CTA is by including ranking keywords in the CTA itself. To accomplish this, you can go to the Google Search Console, determine what your pages are actually ranking for, take the top keywords and include them into the CTA. For example, if your conversion goal is to get visitors to download a white paper, your CTA would say “Download my white paper.” This is a lot more powerful than using a generic vocabulary. 

3. Use an Inverted Pyramid Writing Style 

If a person lands on your website from a search engine, it’s likely they’re searching for an answer for something. We want to draw them into your content and hook them in as soon as possible. With the inverted pyramid style of writing, you include the most important information in the beginning, then go into more details and give the least important information last. This also helps to create more engaging content that’s clean and has a good flow. 

4. Add Visual Appeal  

Visual content, such as photos and videos, always has higher engagement rates. This is due to videos and images being easier to consume than standard text. If you have a longer piece of content, it’s best to try to turn that into video form. It’s more likely for users to watch a long video than read a long blog, for example. It’s also easier to draw people in with visual content. And hopefully, once you’ve drawn them in, you can get them to convert. 

5. Make Site Search Simple

Lastly, it’s important to make it easy for users to search your site. If you can provide an easy search experience for users, it’s less likely they’ll bounce back to Google to search elsewhere. The longer you can keep them on your site, the more engaged they are and the more opportunity you have to persuade them to convert. 

Contact Onimod Global

Struggling to make your landing page convert or just need some digital marketing advice? Contact us! We are experts in all things digital marketing including SEM, Web Dev, Automation, Analytics, and much more. Learn more about what we do here, or keep up to date with all things digital marketing on our news page.

 

7 Social Media Graphic Design Tips

No matter what you’re sharing on social media, it always performs best when paired with striking visuals. So here are some social media design tip best practices to help your content stand out amongst the crowd. 

1. Determine Your Goal 

Usually, the main goal when using social media is to grab user’s attention and get them to engage in some way. No piece of content will ever cater to all social media users, so the most important factor is figuring out what works for your audience. Here are some questions to get you started when determining the goal of your social media graphic: 

  • Who is my target audience? 
  • Which platforms are they using the most?
  • Which devices are they on most frequently? 
  • What is the message I want to spread?
  • What emotion am I trying to invoke? 
  • What action do I want my audience to take after seeing this graphic? 

2. Be Consistent 

You want to maintain consistency across all design elements and branded materials so that your target audience can clearly recognize who it’s coming from. Whatever graphics you create and share should essentially be an extension of the same brand they see on your website. Be sure to incorporate your brand’s colors and fonts into your designs and avoid anything content that doesn’t accurately reflect your brand. 

3. Tell Your Message Visually 

Majority of people scroll through social media slightly distracted and only for a few minutes at a time. Try to use visuals with minimal text to capture attention and get your message across as quickly as possible. Statistics have shown that people can recall information about 55% more efficiently when it’s paired with a relevant graphic. That’s why you want to choose visuals that evoke a specific emotion you want your audience to feel. Possibly a visual representation of a pain point you know your target audience is experiencing, or that pain point being solved or relieved. 

4. Avoid Color Discord 

Make sure you’re choosing colors that complement each other, avoiding color discord. Combine contrasting colors to make your graphic a scroll-stopper. The most eye-catching color combinations are those that oppose each other on the color wheel. You also want to avoid using colors that might clash with your own branding, as well as the branding of the social platform you’re using. For example, Facebook’s signature blue. When you’re already competing for attention with the color schemes of other ads, you don’t want to compete with the colors of the site itself. 

5. Establish a Visual Hierarchy 

It’s important to establish some sort of visual hierarchy throughout your design. A visual hierarchy is the use of size and color to emphasize one item over another to draw the viewer’s eye to a certain item above others. Basically, you want to give visual clues to what’s most important in the graphic. Emphasize your message by focusing on the most significant phrases. The title text should have the largest font size, then subtitles, body copy and so on. You should also highlight any sort of CTA that might be included as well. 

6. Be Sure to Use Correct Sizing 

Every social platform requires images with different sizes, specifications and image types. When creating your design you need to identify which platform(s) you’ll be sharing it on. You will most likely have to resize the graphic to fit the specific dimensions of every platform you’re planning on sharing it. This can seem like a tedious task, but this is important for optimization and to ensure important elements of your graphic aren’t cropped or distorted. 

7. Keep it Simple 

Because social gives designers a much smaller canvas to work with, overcrowding can happen fast. You want to avoid overcrowding because it hinders user experience and can make it difficult to get your message across. You can avoid this by: 

  • Using large illustrations 
  • Limiting typeface to 2 fonts 
  • Sticking with 2-3 colors 
  • Utilizing white space to contrast the main bold, colorful element 

More from Onimod Global 

Needing assistance with graphic design, branding or social media? We offer high-end design and branding for your business.

Visual identity and marketing materials are our specialty. Bring an in-house graphic design team to your business with Onimod Global. Learn more about who we are or contact us to bring your digital marketing strategy to the next level today.