Tag Archive for: Chicago Digital Marketing

Simple Ways to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

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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

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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. 

SEO Tips for Beginners

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It’s no secret that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be extremely beneficial to a website’s and business’s overall success. But getting there can be complex, especially for beginners, and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. A simple Google search for “SEO” returns almost 500 million results, which is more information than anyone could read in a lifetime. On top of that much of the information is now either out-of-date or not relevant. In reality, there are quite a few simple things you can start with to begin a highly effective SEO strategy. Here are 5 SEO tips for beginners. 

Research and use relevant keywords

It makes sense that keywords are key when it comes to SEO success. Think about what your audience would be searching for on your website. What is their search intent? What are they really looking for? Understanding search intent is extremely beneficial when it comes to planning site content and your SEO approach. 

There are a number of tools and strategies to use to ensure we get a good selection of keywords together. Start by brainstorming potential keywords. Just simply write down everything that is relevant., such as services you offer, products you have, close locations, etc. You can also use a keyword research tool to help you identify new keywords. Google offers a tool that forms part of its Ads PPC service, but there are other providers that offer free and paid variations. Lastly, do your own keyword searches on search engines. When you do a search in a search bar, there will be a list of suggestions at the bottom of the page. You can add any relevant suggestions to your list. 

Optimize titles and meta descriptions

Now that you have your keyword list, you can use them to optimize your titles, descriptions and other forms of content. You want to get keywords into the title of pages, but in a natural way. Remember that these show up in search results, so aim to clearly indicate what the page is about and entice users to click on it. Try to include where, what and who if possible. 

Next we want to optimize the meta description. A page’s description doesn’t have as big of an impact on SEO, but it can still help. The meta description should explain the content on your page and further convince a user to click. 

Optimize for mobile

Almost 60% of searches are done from a mobile device. Google favors sites that are mobile friendly. Back in 2019, Google declared that “mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search, websites.” This means Google now crawls the mobile versions of sites first, before desktop various. And eventually, Google won’t index your site at all if it isn’t mobile friendly. So how do you go about optimizing your site for mobile? Here are some quick tips: 

  • Keep page load time down 
  • Make reading and navigation easy 
  • Make it responsive to smaller screen size, meaning there’s no pinching or zooming required

Create content, then optimize it

You don’t want to start your content by picking out your keywords and massaging content to match. Write content you’d like to read, things that are interesting, useful, fun and engaging; then optimize the content for SEO. Once you’ve fully written the content, go back and pick out places to insert keywords. Don’t forget to also optimize: 

  • Titles 
  • Descriptions 
  • Header tags 
  • Images 

Build relevant links

Link building carries a bad reputation due to marketers that use black hat strategies for SEO. But when done correctly, link building is extremely helpful when it comes to driving visibility, especially for competitive keywords. Developing this requires having the right kind of links pointing to your site. These links help Google and other search engines determine your relative importance and to order search results using these metrics. Google has commented on this point by saying, 

“Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”

This can be the most difficult part of SEO, but there are some strategies to use to gain safe backlinks to help improve your visibility in search results. You can utilize highly credible directory sites, as well as a competitor link analysis to help identify new link opportunities. 

Final Thoughts

Having success with SEO isn’t something you can do overnight. It can take months and even years to create a site and content strategy that a search engine will favor. Often with SEO it is 20% of the effort that will get you 80% of the results and for most small businesses this is a great starting point that will help your site be more visible in organic search.

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.

 

How to Develop a Social Media Content Calendar

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Many marketers swear by the use of monthly content calendars. While there are real benefits of using content calendars, they still have their pitfalls. They require a lot of time and effort, and sometimes those things can’t easily be spared. Not only that, but working strictly off a set calendar isn’t always the solution for everyone. 

Whether or not you need a content calendar depends on a variety of factors, but if you discover a way to develop one that allows for flexibility and creativity, the benefits can be endless. 

The Pros of Using Content Calendars

Consisting Posting 

Planning your posts ahead of time ensures new content gets pushed out regularly. Having your topics picked out ahead of time saves time and allows for more than one person to manage social platforms. Regular content dispersion is important because it means you avoid the typical ups and downs in traffic and audience that come from inconsistent posting. Through a content schedule, you spread out your content throughout the month, setting yourself up as a resource to be trusted.

Diverse Content 

When you come up with content topics everyday, it’s only a matter of time before they get repetitive. You’ll most likely revert to the same topics and posting style when you’re struggling to come up with something. When you lay all content out for a month, you’ll be able to better spread out certain topics, preventing you from becoming predictable and boring. 

Better Teamwork 

If more than one person works on a blog or controls a social media account, having a content schedule is key. Assigning topics will become much easier, and you’ll be able to do it much further in advance. It will also prevent any overlap in content and make sure everyone’s on the same page. 

The Cons of Using Content Calendars

Can Restrict Creativity and Flexibility

While careful planning and deadlines are what makes content calendars work, too many restrictions can stifle creativity and eliminate flexibility. Sometimes planning your blog content ahead of time can turn out to be counterproductive when your company’s goals change, roles shift, or strategies get re-imagined. It can discourage your team to think outside of the box. It may also prevent from responding to timely or relevant topics, which can make your brand seem out-of-the-loop. 

Can Seem Disingenuous 

Along with the inability to respond to relevant topics, scheduled content may also come across as disingenuous. For example, you might have scheduled a tweet about nice weather, just as a natural disaster hits your community. So while automated posts save time, they can come across as stale because they’re written days or weeks before it’s actually published. 

More Demanding 

Content calendars are only successful if the whole marketing team is on board and uses it. All the time you spend carefully planning out when, where and what to post ends up being a waste of time, if no one is actually sticking to the schedule. A way to combat this is by making sure that the calendar is easily accessible to all team members and easy to use. Also make adhering to the calendar a priority for your marketing team and hold people accountable for the content they are responsible for.

As we said before, content calendars are not for everyone. If you have a small team or don’t publish content that often, they may be more work than they’re worth. However, they can be very beneficial to many marketing teams. 

Creating content calendars can seem daunting, but they don’t have to be. If you’ve established that this is something that would be helpful for your business, here is a process that allows you to quickly and effectively produce weekly content, that allows for flexibility and creativity. 

How to Develop a Content Calendar that Allows for Creativity

(via Marketing Land)

Identify Key Audiences 

Think of four different customers that serve as examples of types of customers that serve as examples of the types of customers you’d like to land for your company moving forward. Pinpoint each customer’s unique challenges, emotions and values, as you’ll want the content to speak to those needs.

Identify Solutions

After identifying four key audiences, think of three solutions your business can offer to these four audiences. This could include different services, products, or value propositions. Then match up each of your three solutions with each of your four audiences. 

  • Solution A for Audience 1
  • Solution B for Audience 1
  • Solution C for Audience 1
  • Solution A for Audience 2
  • And so on until you have twelve broad topics to explore

Identify Categories 

The final step is to come up with a list of four content strategies that will allow you to approach each solution/customer pairing from a variety of perspectives. Some examples include:

  • Expert Q&As
  • Step-by-step Guides
  • Industry News
  • Listicles
  • Case Studies

Combine this list of categories with your 12 solutions pairings to generate 48 unique topics for a full year of content. The first example could be: Expert Q&A that addresses Audience 1’s challenges from the perspective of what Solution A offers. Try to address each audience in one post per month. That way, each month, you will address and provide content for all four audiences. 

Marketing Land advises to keep in mind that content isn’t just supposed to be brand promotions. Your content is supposed to provide value to readers. 

Final Thoughts 

Today, almost all businesses release some form of digital content. While calendars may not be worth it for everyone, they can be very beneficial for those that need them. If you think your company could benefit from a content calendar, but don’t know where to start, consider outsourcing a digital marketing company.

At Onimod Global we create monthly content calendars for our clients. As experts in social media marketing we know how to create visibility for companies in places their customers are searching, interacting, and engaging. . Take a look at how we’ve helped others, and learn more about what we can do for you.

The Top 3 Signs You Need to Revamp Your Digital Marketing Strategy in 2020

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In the fast-paced, highly competitive space of digital marketing, you never want to find your brand losing traction. While there are a variety of successful digital marketing strategies, it’s rare that it remains unchanged. The new year presents the perfect opportunity to evaluate your current practices, identify problem areas, and make necessary adjustments. 

With 2020 coming up next week, here are the top 3 signs you need to revamp your digital marketing strategy.  

Getting Traffic, But No Conversions

When you’re getting qualified traffic but lacking final sales, you probably need to reconsider your conversion rate optimization (CRO) initiatives. The best way to start this is by tracking on-site behavior. CRO is so valuable because it allows you to identify exactly where the fallout in the sales funnel occurs. Instead of just guessing what needs to be changed, you can now take remediation initiatives that target exactly what needs to be fixed. Areas such as content, page layout, CTA’s, shopping carts, etc should all be tracked and considered. 

Losing Rankings

SEO is vital for success in any digital marketing strategy because of all the other factors it supplements. When SEO starts to decline other key metrics, such as traffic, conversions, and revenue can follow suit. There are many reasons that can cause SEO rankings to fall, but the number one factor is search engine friendliness, or lack of, of your website. Search engines, such as Google and Bing, take into account page load time, structure, security, and usability when deciding how well a site ranks. It’s not uncommon for a site to rank well for years and drop because of a new Google update. With the popularity of mobile usage, sites that lack a responsive design have been falling in rankings. 

Keyword lists and site pages are two other factors taken into account. Keyword lists should be consistently updated to eliminate any low performing or irrelevant phrases. Site pages related to keywords should be updated accordingly as well. For best results, an SEO campaign must be cohesive and continuous. Having a strong, ongoing SEO campaign as a digital marketing strategy objective can be a large contributing factor to overall business success.

Lacking Social Success

Social media has become such a valuable tool for not only generating traffic, but conversions and revenue. Going into 2020, social media is no longer optional when it comes to successful digital marketing strategy. Business owners who have turned their back on social media or thought it wasn’t necessary must start to revisit social channels. Brands can improve their social media presence in a variety of ways. The most effective strategy is by being consistently proactive and responsive. This does mean that someone must always be listening and aware of what’s being said about your company and relevant topics online. Both positive and negative comments should be responded to. Excellent customer service can be demonstrated by addressing negative comments promptly with appropriate solutions. Guest posting, utilizing influencers, and sharing customers’ posts are additional strategies that help increase reach. 

Final Thoughts

The online landscape is constantly changing, which means digital marketing strategies should always follow. Failing to do so could mean missing out on valuable business opportunities. At Onimod Global, we ensure this doesn’t happen. As experts in all areas of digital marketing, from SEO, SEM, social, and more, we develop digital synergy for your company. Digital synergy is all about having visibility in the places your customers need you. Our cross-channel digital marketing campaigns are driven by machine learning analytics and human intelligence, to accomplish just that. 

Learn more about what we do and contact us today to ensure your digital marketing strategy is the best it can be for 2020! 

Leveraging the Holidays to Market Your Brand

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Whether liked or not, the entire holiday season remains the most important time of the year for both brands and consumers. Even though Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two largest shopping days of the year, the opportunity to generate monumental profits exists long after. During this time many consumers are open and willing to try new brands. Companies with strong brand equity have greater ability to capitalize on this opportunity. Leveraging the holidays to market your brand can set you ahead of the competition now and even after the season is over. 

Optimize Your Site 

Site optimization for the holidays can be done in many ways. The first is by adding holiday-themed graphics to your site. Consider things such as:

  • Updating your logo with festive detail 
  • Use “holiday” or “winter” colors across your site 
  • Creating a banner 
  • Shape special offers as gift boxes

Here are some examples: 

Source: Little Guy Logos 

Next, make sure your payment process is smooth and streamlined. Make your payment process as simple as possible. Consumers don’t appreciate when it’s difficult to add something to their cart or a lengthy checkout process. Make sure your payment system is as polished as possible before it’s too late. There should also be diversity in your payment options. If you already offer a variety of credit card and PayPal payments, consider adding Apple Pay if you haven’t already. Accepting all forms of payment may put you a leg up from your competition. 

Lastly, make sure you’re paying attention to site speed and mobile-friendliness. Page load time is always important, but especially this time of year. Consumers have even less time and patience than usual. They’re not going to stick around for a slow site when they can probably find the same thing elsewhere. This is especially important if you do decide to add holiday decorations and graphics to your site. Make sure you A/B test everything to ensure it’s not slowing your site. Delivering mobile-friendliness is also crucial this time of year. If you haven’t already shifted your focus to responsive design, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to pull that off before the end of the holidays. But better late than never, and it’s something to keep in mind for next year. 

Utilize Social Media 

Engagement on social media is at its peak during the holidays. Brands should use that to their advantage by creating shareable content and interacting with other users as much as possible. Here are some ways you can increase engagement during the holidays: 

  • Contests: Create a holiday contest where users provide and share their own content with you for a chance to win products or deals. This is beneficial because you can in turn re-share their content on your own page, instead of always having to create your own.
  • Video Content: Videos have the highest engagement rate out of any type of online content. If you have holiday commercials, that should definitely be shared on all social platforms. Consider creating different promotional videos for the holiday deals you’re offering as well.
  • Tip Sharing: Content that focuses on pain points and solves customers’ problems has the opportunity to gain a lot of visibility because those are the kinds of things they’re directly searching for. Creating and sharing blog posts on those topics across all platforms brings best results.
  • Interactive Campaigns: If your holiday marketing strategy has a particular theme or center subject, encourage followers to share similar content. For example, if your holiday commercial features a puppy, ask users to share with you pictures or videos of their own pets. This can create a cute thread that will attract the attention of those that may have not been aware of your brand.

 

Stay Cohesive and Maximize Reach 

Your holiday strategy should be included in your off-page efforts as well. The main goal should be to maximize reach to potential customers and inform them about your products, services, promotions, etc. This can be done by offering bloggers or influencers your products for them to review on their platform. Work to get some of your content featured in related guides on other sites. Make some type of event for people in your niche. There are endless ways that this can be accomplished. It just takes some work and creativity. It’s also important to remember that not everyone is going to be onboard with your pitch. Don’t get discouraged if someone turns you down. There are a lot of people online. Just move on and keep pitching! 

Final Thoughts

As the space becomes increasingly competitive, these strategies are most effective when started early. We are getting late into the season now, but this is something to keep in mind for next year. You can start building up your marketing strategies throughout the year to maximize reach and hopefully capture more consumers. 

How Onimod Global Can Help

Even the best e-commerce sites can need help with digital marketing, especially around the busy season. At Onimod Global, we’re experts in all areas including SEM, SEO, social, web dev, automation, and analytics. With our expertise and unique cross-channel digital marketing campaign strategies, we can power entire corporate marketing departments, or provide custom solutions for local businesses. We are your 24/7, in-house marketing partner. 

Learn more about what we do, take a look at some of our work, or start your conversation with us today!

We Are Ten! Celebrating a Decade of Innovative Digital Solutions

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Onimod Global is officially 10 years old! We’re celebrating a decade of providing expert and innovative digital marketing solutions for our clients. Working with companies of all sizes, in many industries across the globe has given us the opportunity to develop and perfect many different digital marketing strategies. 

We’re thankful for you, our wonderful clients, for putting your trust in our expertise, and allowing us to grow and perfect your marketing business goals year after year. With an innovative vision and a lot of hard work, Onimod Global quickly became one of the Midwest’s, America’s and the Globe’s fastest-growing digital marketing & SEO companies. Now spanning across six continents, our clients come to us – and stay with us – due to our proven business goal satisfaction rate and unique consultative approach. 

Over the last 10 years we have learned a lot about the changing face of digital marketing, but these are our core digital strategies we wanted to share with you. 

 

Our Core Digital Strategies:

SEO

Search Engine Optimization has always been our core attribute and the pillar of our digital marketing strategy. SEO has become vital in achieving long-term visibility for websites, especially with the continued expansion of new internet and search engine users. We’ve learned how to develop search engine optimization campaigns that drive organic traffic through increasing natural rankings across all major search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. We accomplish this in a variety of ways. Some of our best practices include improving website crawlability and indexability, developing high quality content, and implementing proper metrics. 

Crawlability describes the search engine’s ability to access and crawl content on a page. Indexability refers to the search engine’s ability to analyze and add a page to its index. While these two elements are not mutually exclusive, it is extremely beneficial to have both for a site. If there is an issue with either, it prohibits search engines from analyzing and adding pages to their indexes. This ultimately makes it more difficult for your site to come up in search results. Our strategy starts with making sure that is not the case. We make sure there are no dead or broken links and that a site’s robot.txt file is properly updated. Following fixing all technical issues we start focusing on content optimization. Rankings continue to improve when quality content is consistently added to the site. This includes practices such as dropping relevant keywords into appropriate site places, using video and images when possible, and blog sharing. 

While these elements are extremely important, consistently measuring success is just as, if not more important. How will you know if your efforts are effective if you never check your progress? Measuring SEO success goes further than just tracking traffic and conversions. Time on page, pages per visit, bounce rate, scroll depth, and backlinks are all data points that give valuable insight to SEO performance.

SEM

Paid advertising across all search engines and social media platforms has become one of our specialties. Over our 10 years of SEM work we have become a trusted Google Partner, meaning we are a digital marketing company that is trusted by Google and excel with their products. We have learned to optimize our SEM strategy in a number of ways. A few of these include utilizing keywords and negative keywords, landing pages, and A/B testing all efforts. 

Finding relevant keywords and correct match type is essential for any paid search campaign. Irrelevant or low search volume keywords can result in a low quality score, which can prevent your ads from getting shown in search results. Generally, we suggest using on optimization for conversion match type, but it can differ depending on the campaign’s objective. Finding effective keywords takes a lot of trial and error. You want to use as many words or phrases as possible that align with what users are actually searching for. The use of negative keywords is important as well. You don’t want your ads firing for searches that are completely irrelevant to your services. We consistently watch the searches our ads fire for, ensuring we don’t waste budget on something that will never turn into a real customer or lead. 

Landing pages are something we suggest almost 100% of the time. Sending PPC traffic to a homepage can be a huge mistake. We believe that every search request is an opportunity and users are always looking for immediate solutions. If a user has already went as far as to click on your ad, make it easy as possible for them to actually convert. Sending them to your homepage means they will have to spend even more time searching through your site for what they actually want. If they don’t immediately find it, they’ll likely bounce and search elsewhere.

A/B testing is something that is widely underutilized when it comes to all aspects of websites and campaigns. You never really know how something is performing if it has nothing else to be compared to. We try to create different variations of ads and landing pages with various headings, keywords, body copy, placements, etc. To get clear results from tests it’s important to remember to only change one factor at a time and let it run long enough to gain accurate results. 

Social 

Mobile and social media have now established themselves as indispensable parts of the marketing mix. We utilize social media marketing to create social synergy for our clients. Social synergy is all about having visibility in the social spaces your consumers are searching, interacting, and engaging. The reason creating social positioning is so crucial is because it is now a great driver of leads and sales. An integrated social media platform can enhance marketing campaign effectiveness, help improve brand building across the enterprise, and make a real impact on sales and the bottom line. Integrated social capability brings another great benefit by keeping the enterprise updated with the latest innovations in social media. Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are constantly innovating and updating their collaboration tools, content-sharing formats, etc. With integrating social capability, customers don’t need to change business functions in sales or marketing to catch up with these changes.

We help our clients leverage the power of their content to elevate their audience and customer base in dramatic ways. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. For content to be effective it must be consistent and high quality. We create and stick to monthly content calendars that guide our blog and post topics, which tags are used, where everything is shared, etc. Not only should the content you’re sharing be consistent, but it should have a purpose. Content should be based on questions potential customers might search for. The more direct and detailed the answer is, the better it will rank. It should also be actionable. Inform your audience about specific steps to take or resources they need to carry out the advice you’re giving. Content should always include a clear and a strong CTA, because the end goal is driving sales. In today’s much-hyped world of social media marketing, integrated social capability can make a direct and positive impact on the business.

What We Do Best 

We have a lot of digital strategies and solutions, expanding further than just SEO, SEM, and Social. But what we really do best is being our clients’ true marketing partner. Onimod Global can power entire corporate marketing departments or simply provide custom solutions for local businesses. We’re here for our clients 24 hours a day and live for the moment they’re in a pinch and need our help. We excel in customer service and serving as our clients consultative marketing team, delivering custom digital solutions client by client. 

Again, thank you to all our clients over the last 10 years, as without you, we would not be where we are today. 

More from Onimod Global

Learn more about what we do, take a look at some of our work, or become a client today! 

Collecting and Utilizing Customer Feedback

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As we live and work in an era of unprecedented global transparency and digital experience-sharing, feedback has never been more business-critical than today. Feedback, both negative and positive, is constantly being shared about companies, products, and experiences. This is referred to as the feedback economy, and as it has grown, it has become the cornerstone of company growth initiative. 

The feedback economy has changed the way customers make decisions and their expectations are at an all-time high. While gaining customer feedback as become a no-brainer for most companies, analyzing and utilizing that feedback is not so simple. 

 

The Top Ways to Gather Customer Feedback 

Live Chat 

One of the best features an eCommerce website can have is live chat. This option allows companies to get closer to their customers by being able to immediately address needs or challenges. Companies can easily identify patterns of any recurring issues, speeding up the process of finding long-term solutions for those issues. There are a number of services that introduce live chats on any website, such as Zopim. You can make the live chat proactive by making it appear on users’ screens whenever they have been a page for a specified amount of time. This increases the efficiency of the feature and the chances of it getting used.

As with all forms of feedback, the quality of company response plays the biggest role in getting real results. Having employees constantly monitoring the chat is important, ensuring all customers’ questions or concerns are addressed promptly and legitimately. To go even further, you can get feedback on the live chat session. A short survey can be sent to the user, asking whether or not their experience was helpful. This can help companies immediately identify the effectiveness of the chat and chat-support personnel. 

Form-Based Surveys 

Surveys are the most basic and common way to gain customer feedback, but there are many opportunities for error when using this method. It’s common for companies to get carried away with too many questions, trying to get as much detailed feedback as possible. QuickTapSurvey discovered that the number of questions and time spent answering questions is not a linear connection. The more questions a survey has, the less time respondents spend on each question. Meaning that the more questions a survey has, the less accurate and reliable the responses will be. There is no ideal survey length, but from what research has gathered, the shorter the better. A good strategy is to make sure that every question has a clear purpose and will fulfill end goals.

It’s also important to include open-ended questions. While multiple choice questions are quicker for customers to answer, the answer choices are based on company assumptions. Open-ended questions give the customer the opportunity to give their unique and long-tailed opinion. These types of surveys should only be sent to engaged users that will take the time to provide the feedback. 

Consistently Monitor Social Channels 

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have become an invaluable resource for customer feedback. Similar to live chat, there are a variety of tools available to help companies gather conversations that take place on social media about a brand, and even monitor social presence of companies and their competitors. Social listening is a great way to get closer to customers, improve user experience, and quickly respond to comments or issues. Just as with live chat, time is crucial when it comes to handling questions, complaints, or any kind of negative feedback, as it can spread quickly. Social listening requires resources dedicated to monitoring and responding to feedback, as some companies even turn to third-parties. Feedback monitoring should go even further than just on social media, as there are a number of review-based apps and sites that are valuable as well. 

On-Site Comment/Suggestion Boards 

Suggestion boards take gathering feedback further by allowing users to not only collaborate ideas with the company, but with other users as well. Depending on the type of board used, posts can be upvoted or commented on by other users. This can help companies discover what needs or opinions are most popular among their customers. Simplicity and ease of navigation is important. Users should be able to post and comment without any difficulties. Creating categories, allowing users to view the most popular posts, and making it searchable are all ways to increase efficiency and effectiveness. To get started, invite the most engage users to leave ideas, those that know the brand best and can leave legitimate improvement suggestions. After there is a strong base board, other users can be invited to start upvoting, commenting, or leaving ideas of their own. Real results take time, as feedback isn’t accumulated immediately. 

 

Using Customer Feedback 

Product Improvement 

Being able to identify product improvement areas is one of the best things a company can get out of customer feedback. More often than not, loyal and engaged users have developed an expertise of products and their features, maybe even more than employees. No matter how hard brands try to put themselves in their customer’s shoes, users will still have a different perspective and different ideas that wouldn’t have been thought of. It can save time and resources following user advice. Not only will customers appreciate that they’re being listened to, it can set companies apart from the competition as a business that genuinely cares and implements customers’ valid ideas. 

Prevent Customer Churn 

Negative feedback shouldn’t be swept under the rug or kept silent. This is crucial to improve customer service and experience. Ignoring negative feedback has compounding effects. A customer who has taken the time to contact you about a problem is much more likely to spread that information to others, especially if they were just ignored. Failure and negative feedback is actually an opportunity to foster a stronger and long-term relationship with that customer. Understanding these customers’ problems and ensuring future satisfaction is important. Keeping a consistent two-way conversation open goes a long way, by building trust and showing you care. Responding to negative feedback increases the chances of keeping an existing customer, which is cheaper for companies in the long run, and looks better all around.

Empower Employees

Customer feedback can be used as a driver to motivate employees. If there has been consistent positive feedback about one feature in particular, share that with whoever is responsible and the team as a whole. It’s a good strategy for encouraging healthy competition among staff. Similarly if there is any consistent negative feedback about one specific feature, pass it on to those responsible. They should communicate with the dissatisfied customer directly. It can make employees feel more in charge and encourage them to take ownership of products or features. Sharing interesting feedback can help teams start deeper conversations about products and come up with new improvements and ideas. 

Identify Potential Advocates 

Consistently gathering customer feedback can help quickly identify those that are most satisfied and the most loyal. The next step is to develop those customers into valuable advocates. Get them sufficiently educated and excited about products so they can accurately share and recommend them. Advocates don’t need monetary rewards to be motivated. Give them shout-outs on social media, send them exclusive information, deals, or even hand written notes. New customers often trust other customers more than companies themselves. It’s a good sign if more than just the company is boasting about how great their products are.   

 

Final Thoughts 

Creating a product and marketing it well is only half the job. The feedback economy is growing, companies can take advantage of it by having a lasting commitment to gathering, analyzing, and sharing feedback to anyone that plays a vital role in product and business development. Customer feedback is becoming more and more essential for growth and mastering customer experience. A company that falters in listening to customer feedback is a company that will most likely falter in all other areas. 

 

More From Onimod Global

For more digital marketing tips, updates, and the latest news, check out our blog page here, or learn more about Onimod Global here.

Measuring SEO Success

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Consistently measuring SEO results and success is crucial to maintaining an effective SEO strategy. But what exactly should you be basing your SEO success off of? With so many different measurement strategies, you need to make sure you’re choosing what’s relevant to your company. What small business consider successful for an SEO campaign, large corporations probably would not.

While all businesses are aware they should be focusing on SEO to generate website traffic, it can still be a struggle to create an effective and comprehensive campaign, especially when it comes to small businesses.

Standard Measurements of SEO Success

Website traffic and conversions are the top two ways businesses measure SEO success. While traffic is important, focusing on that alone puts businesses at risk of missing other crucial metrics. Conversions do often equal success, but it’s almost impossible for a company to have a 100% conversion rate. It also depends on what the company considers a conversion. If it’s an online retail store a conversion is probably a purchase. But often times conversion doesn’t equal new business. For example, an online loan company would consider a conversion someone submitting an application, but what if the application was denied because they didn’t meet the requirements?

The metrics chosen should be relevant and align with your company’s ultimate goals and objectives. The most important aspect to be tracked is overall traffic and conversion quality. Are those coming to your website or filling out forms turning into new and legitimate business opportunities?

Measuring Quality

Time on Page & Pages Per Visit

Depending on what your goal is when a visitor reaches your site, these two things may be beneficial to track. For example, you posted a new blog and you know it takes an average of 3 minutes to read, but the average time visitors spend on that page is only 10 seconds. That probably indicates people are not sticking around to read it. It’s the same with pages per visit. Is the goal to keep users engaged on one page, or is there a final step you want them to reach? If your site’s pages operate independently then this wouldn’t really matter, if not, this may be something you want to consistently track.

Bounce Rate

Bounced sessions indicate that a searcher visited the page and left without browsing your site any further. Bounce rate can determine not only traffic quality, but also quality of the site itself. A high bounce rate can sometimes indicate your website needs improvements. Making it more engaging by including links to other posts or pages is one strategy to keep visitors interested. Though a high bounce rate doesn’t always mean the website needs to be updated. This can also mean visitors are just quickly finding exactly what they needed, such as hours, menus, addresses, etc.

Scroll Depth

Scroll Depth determines how far visitors are scrolling through each individual web page. Are visitors regularly reaching your most important content or the call to action? If not, consider rearranging the content of the page, putting the more important information higher up. Consider the quality of the content as well. While keywords are important and should be included, you don’t want that to be the extent of your content. The information included on the page should be enticing and valuable. Put yourself in the user’s place, what would make you continue to scroll down the page?

Backlinks

Backlink quality is measured by the number of links from websites with high domain authority. While you can’t control all the links that come back to your site, you can target backlink quality by reaching out to other sites that provide domain authority and a new, but similar audience. Keep in mind relevance and novelty. Endorsements from new sites can have a greater impact than repeats. The more relevant the site is to your content, the better endorsement as well.

Putting Your Resources to Use

Google Analytics is a great way to track and measure all of this data in one place. If you already enacted an SEO campaign, you most likely have access to all these capabilities. Google gives you an extensive list of metrics to use, but it can be difficult to know where to start or exactly what the data means. A few places to start could be by tracking isolate organic traffic, page visits, campaign traffic, or click through rates.

How Onimod Global Can Help

As experts in SEO and Google Partners, we know exactly what you should be tracking, and how. As one of our core attributes, we can develop SEO campaigns across all major search engines that deliver increases in organic traffic and natural rankings. We are cross-channel digital marketing experts that work with companies of all sizes, all around the world. Read more about what we do here, or contact us with any questions here.

Why Programmatic Video Advertising is on the Rise in 2019

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In the recent years programmatic advertising has quickly gained a substantial amount of popularity, especially among digital advertisers.

It’s estimated that they will be dedicating even more of their budgets to programmatic video inventory in 2019. It is estimated by eMarketer that programmatic video ad spend will reach $29.24 billion, which would account for almost 50% of all programmatic display advertising spending this year.

Why exactly is this strategy gaining so much popularity and why do digital advertisers believe it is valuable enough to be spending almost half of their budget on it? Are there possible downfalls?

What is Programmatic Video Advertising?

Programmatic video advertising is essentially the use of bots to buy ad space according to set prerequisites. The advertiser enters a detailed description of their ideal audience, their budget, and their ads into the program. The program then takes user data and uses real-time bidding to display the ad to a user that fits the ideal client profile, the advertisement with the highest bid is given the spot. This process is completed before the page loads. Ideally, the ads are only being shown to people that would actually be interested in what’s being offered, to hopefully get the most out of the ad spend.

The Benefits:

Greater Reach

The internet averages billions of users at any given time, with the possibility to reach millions, depending on the targeted parameters. Programmatic enables advertisements to reach a variety of different channels across platforms that companies would not otherwise have the ability. The program has an extensive web of established connections that allow these companies to reach new users across all platforms. Not only does the message have the potential to reach a larger amount of people, it also reaches specific people, those identified as the ideal audience.

More Specific Targeting Capabilities

Programmatic technology uses behavioral analysis to pinpoint the audience that the ads are best tailored for. The program is capable of IP targeting, geolocation targeting, contextual keyword targeting, and retargeting. This means advertisers and marketers can continue to reach those ideal customers that have yet to make a conversion to the website.

Uses Real-Time Data

As soon as a campaign is released, every detail is immediately trackable. You don’t have to wait until the end to measure the results. As soon as an ad is displayed the impressions, who it was seen by, where they were located, ect. can be instantly analyzed. This also allows to make changes whenever necessary, ensuring you’re not spending ad dollar in the wrong places.

The Challenges:

Fraud Risk

With the ultra simplified process of being able to buy and sell ads, anyone is essentially capable. The most common instances of fraud in programmatic advertising are non-viewable ads, as well as bot traffic. The problem of non-viewables is that the ads are reported as placed and displayed, but they were actually buried, never reaching the user. And while bots can make things very efficient, they can also be used to fool the system. The artificial traffic is used to drive up the prices, resulting in higher ad spend.

Ad Misdirects or Misplacement

Publishers can sometimes forward ads to affiliated entities, getting displayed there instead of their intended placements. This could mean that the ad never actually reach its targeted audience. Depending on the ad, this could be harmful to brand image. For instance, if an adult-intended ad ended up being displayed on a children’s site. While stronger preventative measures are being created, issues can still frequently occur.

It gets Costly

As the precision of pinpointing the perfect customer increases, so does the price. Depending on how specific your audience is, it may be more beneficial in the long run to purchase the more expensive program. You don’t want to be wasting money on an audience that would never even consider what you’re offering.

Final Thoughts

There’s no doubt that programmatic advertising is extremely efficient, but just as every other advertising platform there are a variety of downsides that come along with the advantages. As with anything, you just need to decide if those benefits outweigh the risks.

For more information regarding the newest digital marketing trends, visit the Onimod Global Website. If you’d like to see what we’ve done for other companies and can potentially do for you, click here, or if you’re ready, you can request a quote here today.