With world becoming increasingly dependent on technology and social media, it is difficult to imagine life without them. This is not only applicable to individuals, but to businesses too. Business development, operations and marketing methods used today are significantly different from the methods used until few decades back. It is not surprising to regularly come across new marketing trends that influence business growth. One of the latest trends that have generated a buzz is blogging. Blogs have become an integral part of marketing strategy for businesses and a tool to widen their social presence.

No matter what is the size or type of your business, having a good looking website is not sufficient for the business. You need to make sure that the site reaches your intended target base and attract new visitors.

Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Here are the ways in which blogging helps in business growth –

• Blogs serve as a point of connection and communication between your business and customers. Though social media platforms are popular for aiding personal connection with customers, blogs are more effective in reaching out to customers in a personal way.


• Blogs have the power of generating attention of a wide audience. When you write blogs, make sure you choose diverse topics for blogging. Right from industry news to company updates, use your blogs to convey your ideas and opinions related to your industry. Your blog should be able to generate a feedback or discussion.


• Blogs help in increasing your social and online presence. You can use other social media platforms to promote your blogs and increase social sharing.


• You can utilize blogs to energize your audience and motivate action. Thus, it will help in retaining your visitors and followers.


• With blogs, businesses can stay ahead of their competitors as it will help you create a space for your business in the minds of customers. You should keep your blogs updated with the latest news, developments and even controversial topics. It will help in generating a following for your blog, and your business in the coming time.

Blogging, when done carefully, can provide boost to a business. So, you need to make sure that you blog about topics relevant to your business and industry. Blogs should not be technical and lengthy; they should be able to convey complex information in simple terms.

In the online marketing environment, marketers are continuously striving to increase visitors to their website. Do your SEO efforts end at driving traffic to the website? Of course not! Increasing visitors to your website is challenging, but keeping visitors engaged on your website is equally challenging. If visitors come to your website and leaves within few seconds, it is a waste of your SEO efforts as you are unable to convert your visitors into customers. So, businesses need to focus on boosting conversions and landing page optimization is an important to achieve conversions.

Landing pages of a website need to be strategically planned and created. Here are few must know tricks for optimizing landing pages –

·       Keep the landing pages clean, clear and precise. Putting too much information on landing pages can distract the visitors and confuse them. Strategically plan your Call to Action buttons depending on what you would like your visitor to do. Make you Call to Action buttons easily visible and use short, action oriented words.

·        Give a compelling headline that will immediately catch visitor’s attention. Make sure the headline is understandable, so that visitors find it relevant to what they are looking for.

·      Do not overlook the need of keywords on the landing page. Keywords are not only important for driving traffic to the website, but you need to ensure that keywords are seamlessly integrated with content on the landing page. Pay special attention to keyword density as keywords must not appear forced or out-of-context.

·     Remember, homepage is not the only landing page of your website. Many businesses make the mistake of optimizing only the homepage, but even the inner product or services pages are landing pages. So, first make a list of landing pages for your website and focus on optimizing them.

·         Landing pages make the first impression of your business on your visitors, so try to establish trust and recognition. One of the ways is to clearly display your contact details like location, address, phone number on the landing page. Also, display your social media presence.

From keywords to social sharing buttons, optimize your landing pages to increase conversions, and increase leads and sales.

Social media marketing is the latest buzzword in online marketing as these tools hold significant solutions for brand building. As social media is maturing, it has become very difficult to assess effectiveness of the social media activities worldwide. Are you worried over your social media marketing campaigns? Well, don’t worry! You are not the only one. Hundreds of marketers around the world are struggling with social media marketing. In fact, for most business owners, problem starts with how to use and tackle social media campaigns for benefit of their business.

Here are few commonly faced problems by social media marketers –

• Effectiveness of social media efforts – Though businesses are constantly experimenting with their social media campaigns, it is very difficult to measure how effective particular campaign or activity on social media.
• Content creation that targets audience and compliments SEO efforts – Influence of social media is being seen on SEO too. So, marketers need to create content that not only engages audience but also helps SEO efforts. Optimizing social media content for search engines and audience is turning out to be difficult.
• Audience outreach – With almost every business trying to create their space and mark their social presence, getting message to the target audience base has become difficult. Most businesses are making the mistake of not understanding the social media behavior of their target audience before executing their efforts. This results in ineffective audience outreach.
• Approach – Social media marketing cannot be executed with a standard approach for all platforms or networks. There is a need to craft-channel specific experience while maintaining brand identity and marketers need to develop specific personality for each channel.
• Analyzing data gathered through social media channels – Social media channels generate lot of data relevant to user behavior and habits. But, marketers are still clueless on how to analyze user generated data and utilize it to make their campaigns more effective and rewarding.

Marketers need to address these concerns to get a better visibility to their social media marketing campaigns and generate better outcomes. 

Over the past few years, marketing approaches of businesses and their objectives have evolved significantly. Today, marketing efforts are not just targeted towards acquiring customers, but there is greater emphasis on creating engaging experiences. With marketers and consumers becoming tech- savvy, marketing techniques have also turned digital and opened whole new world of opportunities. Online customers are looking for personalized experience as it ensures convenience and flexibility, and hence businesses are striving to understand the behavior of their target audience base.

Personalisation in marketing ensures that a business is approaching the right customer, in the right way and at the right time. Here are few benefits of bringing personalisation in your marketing campaigns –

·   Customer relationships – Personalized marketing helps in building deeper and more enduring relationships with customers and it goes a long way in building brand loyalty. It helps in customer retention too.

·     Attention – By remembering customer preferences and interests, business can flatter customers and gain their attention. When there is a connection with the customer, chances of conversions are more.

·         Effectiveness – When marketing campaigns are created after analysis of user behavior and needs, they turn out to be more effective and rewarding.

·    Interaction – Personalisation in marketing campaigns allows businesses to interact with their customers at an individual level.

·     Trust - Today, every customer has hundreds of options to choose from; personalisation creates familiarity and if businesses use Personalisation properly, they can develop trust for their products and business amongst customers.

·      Conversions – It has been seen that personalisation helps in faster conversions, thus resulting in increase in revenue for the businesses. By offering products tailored to user interests, converting visitors into customers becomes easy.

·      Relevance – Personalized marketing campaigns are based on relevance, so you can yield greater results by targeting limited users compared to the generic email marketing campaigns used decade ago.

With increasing influence of Internet on behavior of users, prominence of personalisation in marketing is expected to grow further. Focus on tailor-made marketing solutions and help businesses create personalized marketing campaigns for better results.

One of the major objectives of digital marketing is connecting with audience and expanding reach of marketing campaigns. But, does content only indicate text? Well, of course not, it is an umbrella term as there are different forms and types of content. For any successful content marketing campaign, you need to strike balance between different forms of content. Also, you need to create and update content regularly and be creative in your approach. Create the same form and tone of content over and over again won’t stimulate prospects of success and make the entire campaign boring.

To make sure your content marketing campaign stands out from competitors, you need to integrate other content forms with blogging. Here are different forms of content you must try –

·         Videos – With content efforts going social and popularity of videos among online audience, content marketers are slowing releasing potential held by videos. From tutorials to how-to topics, videos are great way of providing valuable and informative content.

·         Infographics – One of the best ways to present information in precise way, infographics presents information or data in a visually appealing manner. One of the prime benefits of infographics is that it can be shared hence their social value is high.

·         Memes – Easy to make, hilarious and power to go viral, memes is a great way of capturing attention of your audience. Memes need to be witty and strike a chord with your audience. As they are adaptable, you can develop memes across different niche and topics.

·         Presentations – When you wish to describe an idea in detail, you can create presentations. As presentations allow integrating text with images and other media, you can be creative, innovative and think out-of-the-box to explain your ideas.

For content marketing, you need to keep experimenting with different forms of content instead of following a standard format. Remember, the key is to develop connect with your audience.

Analytic tools provide an insight into the technical performance of a website and help in bringing improvements to the website. But merely setting up analytics on the website does not guarantee success as you should be able to make proper interpretations from the available data. It has been seen that businesses set up analytics but fail to dig and utilize information provided by the tool. Also, analytics tools like Google Analytics provide insight into technical performance of the website, but to measure effectiveness of the marketing campaigns, marketers need to analyze the metrics properly.

Here are few key metric provided that by Google Analytics that every business must watch out for –

• Content – This metric allows you to analyze which content on your website is popular with the visitors. Once you get an idea of what content your visitors like to read, you can develop more effective content strategy and improve content on other pages of the website. Content has the power of developing strong user engagement hence this metrics should not be overlooked.
• Organic Search Traffic – In the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics dashboard, you get an insight into whether your traffic is from organic search, paid campaign or direct type in. You should focus on Organic Search traffic as it will give you an idea of the keyword phrases that brought visitors to your website. Increasing organic visitors is a great way of increasing traffic to a website without increasing your paid advertising.
• Bounce Rate – Businesses should focus on retaining visitors to their website, and keeping them engaged. Hence, Bounce Rate metric is very important. Bounce rate of a web page gives percentage of users who left immediately after landing on that particular web page. If the bounce rate of a page is high, it indicates that the web page does not offer what visitors are looking for. So, you need to optimize content for that web page.
• Exit Pages – Just like the landing pages of visitors are important to know from where visitors are entering your website, you also need to know the pages from where visitors are leaving the website. So, you should watch out for the Exit Pages metric. If the visitors are exiting from the Thank You or Order completion pages, it means those visitors were converted to customers. If visitors exit from any other page, it indicates that you need to optimize those pages.

Google Analytics metrics and reports are very important for businesses. So, they should have sound understanding of these metrics and how they can be improved. 

For every business, acquiring and retaining customers is of utmost importance. With marketing techniques going digital, competition in the market has become intense. Businesses can take advantage of digital analytic tools and platforms to get better understanding of their audience. Small businesses can use powerful digital tools like Google Analytics as their software for web metrics and utilize its information to create rewarding marketing campaigns. Though Google Analytics is one of the leading tools to measure performance of a website, small businesses are apprehensive for using it. 

Google Analytics is not as intimidating as it seems, only businesses need to know what they want and make proper interpretation of the information. 

Here are few tips for small businesses to get started with Google Analytics -

• There are several metrics available in Google Analytics, but you should focus on actionable data. You should concentrate on reports like Organic Search, Referrals and All Traffic and others to optimize your marketing methods.
• Improve the Search functionality of your website. With Site Search, you will be able to get a better idea of performance of your internal site search and what visitors are looking for on your website.
• Use Page Views to get an idea of the popular pages of your website. When a particular webpage is more popular than others, you should emphasize on keeping that page in excellent condition, updating the content regularly and improving its performance.
• Create realistic business goals to track key indicators like number of leads, e-commerce transactions, cost per lead and others. If you do not have an e-commerce website or take payments online, set goals for number of people signing up or filling Contact Us forms. Your website should have at least 1 goal.
• Analytics reports are a powerful tool for actionable intelligence, so do not ignore the reports. Generate custom reports, and compare them to conversion data. It will help you to refine and optimize your campaigns.

Even if your business does not have an analyst or expert in digital marketing, you can utilize Google Analytics to benefit your business. By spending little time on Google Analytics, small businesses can analyze how their marketing efforts are paying off.

With the rising popularity of blogging, more and more businesses and marketers are trying to leverage the potential held by blogging. For any blog to be successful, it is very important that the blog reaches relevant and wide audience base. So, every blogger must know importance of blog optimization and need of SEO to boost their presence online. If done right, SEO can make significant contribution to visitors and increase engagement of the blog.

Every blogger needs to know following SEO tips for optimizing experience of their blog –

·       Blog titles should be clear, precise and relevant to traffic. While giving titles to the blogs, think over phrases and search terms that users would enter in the search engine while looking for information. Try to incorporate these keywords and phrases in your title.

·     Update your blog at least 3-4 times a week. One of factors on which search engines rank your website is its frequency of update.

·        Create a schedule of your blog posts. Create a list of blog topics and keywords you wish to focus on. Look for specific as well as generic keywords that you wish to rank for in the search engine. Maintain keyword density throughout the website.

·     Format and customize URL of the post. Make sure the URLs are user-friendly and meaningful instead of random alphabets and numbers. You can also add keywords to your titles to make them SEO-friendly.

·    Add internal links to your blogs. Linking is not only good for SEO, but it also a great way to reduce bounce rate of the site. By internal linking, you can direct visitors to other blogs relevant to their interest.

·        Add relevant images to the blog. For each image, give appropriate alternative text. You can easily add keywords to the alternative text. Effective use of images can bring significant traffic to the website. Use descriptive words for the image file name.

·       Look for broken links and clean them up. Also ensure that the website navigation works smoothly.

·     Focus on the loading time of your blog as even search engines value blogs that load fast. Avoid unwanted plug-ins and Flash-based modules on the blog as they hamper loading speed.

Blog optimization is very important! Don’t worry! SEO is not too technical, just understand the basics and start optimizing your blog!

Is social media all about personal networking and connecting with your family and friends? Not anymore as social media networks are being actively used by organizations too. Today, organizations, big and small, are focusing on building their online reputation and engagement with their online audience. Social media has become an essential tool not only to connect with your customer base but also your prospective employees. Social media has powerful influence on lives of people and employers are trying to leverage this influence to their advantage.  Several researched have been conducted on this topic and it has been revealed that in 2013, 93 percent employers already use or plan to use social media in their recruitment process.

Why Use Social Media for Recruiting

Social networking platforms have millions of users worldwide, with Facebook boasting over 1.1 billion users and Twitter over 500 million users. Research also states that 21 percent job seekers found jobs using social media. Thus, it has become a powerful tool to communicate as it brings people together and helps build relationships. There are various benefits of using social media in your recruitment process, the major ones include –

• Social media platforms increase awareness of your brand in active as well as passive candidates. It also allows the company to communicate with the candidates regarding latest openings and opportunities.
• Social media platforms allow employers to establish their reputation as an employer of choice thus gaining an edge over their competitors. It also lets prospective candidates gain insight into culture of the company.
• By advertising an ad on social media, employers can not only gain attention of job seekers but also those who are not looking for a job.
• As most companies are using social media these days, including your competitors, it has been seen that candidates sourced through social media are more competent.

Tips to Use Social Media for Recruitment

There is a common misconception among employers that social media in recruitment is all about publicizing their vacancies. Here are few tips to properly use social media channels for their hiring process –

• Select and prioritize the social media platforms you plan to use. While LinkedIn is considered to be the best network for professional communications, Facebook and Twitter are also helpful in reaching candidates. Remember, the type of message and format of communication will vary from one social platform to other.
• Develop a mission to create two-way relationships with your audience using social networks. From attracting potential talent to providing an insight into company culture, use social media platforms to create engagement with audience.
• Evangelize the mission, objectives and goals of your organization using social media platform.
• Monitor your conversations across social media channels to monitor performance of your social media efforts. It will also give you an idea of what methods work best in hiring talent, thus giving better returns to your social media efforts. Monitor effectiveness of your campaigns to gauge the influence of social media on your overall hiring strategy.

Social media has become the ideal way to attract high quality and competent candidates to join your organization. Utilize the power of social media to empower your organization with the best talent in the industry.

Every marketer constantly strives to stay at the top of the game when it comes to online marketing. As online marketing world evolves day-by-day, businesses cannot ignore latest online marketing trends and change their strategies accordingly. SEO is an integral part of online marketing plan of a business and algorithm changes by Google lead to drastic upheaval in the SEO world. So, it is very important for digital marketers, business owners and SEO experts to stay aware of key changes in SEO and to understand how it influences their website.

If you are planning your marketing and SEO strategy for 2016, here are few predictions you must keep in mind –

• Mobile searches will take over desktop searches as there is a constant increase in number of people possessing smartphones. With mobile searches reaching tipping point, businesses need to focus on mobile optimization of their websites and SEO efforts need to be focused on mobile devices too. Mobile design and mobile user experience become critical factors for a website. In-depth content on websites is expected to be replaced by short and precise content for better usability on mobile sites.
• There is an expectation that there will be a large update to the search algorithm by Google. This update is expected to shift balance of power while tightening the restrictions of search algorithm. Marketers need to be careful of their link building techniques and stay away from low quality backlinks.
• With increase in mobile searches, the importance of Google Local Pack and Google Maps is expected to increase. While searching from mobile, consumers prefer service providers within few miles of their current location, thus highlighting the importance of location based search results. Also, online reviews and customer feedback is also expected to play an important role in search results.
• Interaction holds the key for 2016. With presence of voice assistants, interaction with smartphones has become different. In 2016, text-based search is expected to become a thing of the past with voice search taking its place. SEO experts need to understand the difference in human behavior in text and voice search, and plan their SEO efforts accordingly.

For businesses, it is important to stay updated with the content marketing and SEO predictions for upcoming year. By predicting the changes, marketers can stay prepared and gain profit from the path where technology is taking the business. 

While setting up a new business, entrepreneurs face new challenges and difficulties at every step. From picking business idea to setting up infrastructure, there are several decisions that need to be made and each decision has the power to make or break the business. With so much attention of entrepreneurs is required in every detail, it becomes really difficult to focus on product marketing and brand building.

Are you one of these time-stressed entrepreneurs who wish to focus more on online marketing? Or have you heard a lot about benefits of blogging for entrepreneurs but never tried it? There is a common misconception among entrepreneurs that blogging is time consuming and tedious. Here are few quick blogging tips that will allow entrepreneurs pursue their passion for blogging –

• Success of a blog is not measured in terms of quantity of posts but in terms of quality of posts. Do not aim to update your blog every day. Even if you publish one quality post per week, it will be beneficial.
• Blogs do not necessarily mean text articles.  Try to find highly shareable content like infographics and images for your blogs. These types of posts are not only shareable and entertaining, they consume less time.
• Try to give impressive and unique titles to your blog. If you master the art of creating appealing blog titles, you can stay assured that you will find a loyal base of followers. Remember, the decision of a visitor to read a blog or not is usually dependent on the blog title.
• Do not treat your audience as readers, try to communicate with them and understand what they are looking for. When you engage with the audience, you will be able to find new ideas and topics for your blog.
• You need to find ways to make sure your blog reaches a wide audience base. SEO tags are not the only way to improve the reach of your blog, you should also use your social networking platforms to promote your blog.
• Use customer success stories in your blog. These are interesting, appealing, add value to users and do not take much time.

Remember, a great blog does not sell products, it shows customers why your business is better over your competitors!

What is a meta tag? Well, it is a special HTML tag that gives information about a web page.   Meta tags are part of Head section of the website and describe content of the web page. They are used in HTML or XHTML documents, and lie between opening and closing tags of the code. There are several elements that influence successful search engine placement for a website, and meta tags is one of them. Meta tags can be used to highlight important keywords and build page relevancy to search terms. Though meta tags are traditional SEO technique and has been in use for a long time, it is still effective in influencing search engine rankings. There are multiple meta tags with different elements that can be used throughout a web page. It includes title, keywords, description and robot tags. But, mainly title and description are considered and displayed by search engines during listing of results.

A simple example of Meta tag –

<head>

<title>Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway </title>

<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here"> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">

</head>

Benefits of using meta tags

• They provide information about the web page, especially which keywords represent the web page.
• Normal HTML tags change the appearance of the web page, but meta tags allow adding keywords to web page without affecting its appearance.
• Several search engines use meta tag information to index and organize websites.
• Meta tags appear in search results, especially if it contains keyword that user searched for. It helps in building relevancy and attracting attention of user.
• Improve Click-through-rates CTR

Tips to Optimize Use of Meta Tags

• Choose your meta tags (keywords and description) carefully. Also, include them in a natural way rather than simply stuffing keywords.
• Try to keep each meta tag within character limit. For page title, character limit is 70 characters, meta description character limit is 160 characters and for meta keywords, it should not be more than 10 keyword phrases.
• Use your most important keyword followed by the company name in the title.
• Develop your meta description like a short advertisement that will encourage people to view your page. Meta description is visible in the SERP, so it should be meaningful, appealing and gives accurate description of your website.
• Fill as many meta tags as possible. While title, keywords and description are very important, other tags like Robots meta tag also influences ranking.
• Make sure the meta description includes a CTA (Call-to-Action). It influences click-through-rate and natural search traffic.

There are several aspects to online marketing, and content marketing is one of the primary ones. Content marketing can be defined in different ways; basically, it involves creation, sharing and publishing content to acquire and retain customers. Content is a powerful tool, and if used correctly, it has potential of striking a chord with audience. While developing content strategy, online marketing experts need to focus on SEO services as these two disciplines work together. An ideal content marketing strategy strikes the right balance between user-friendly and search engine friendly content.

Developing a content marketing strategy is really tricky. So before you start planning your strategy get clarity of your business objective. Here are few tips for developing successful content marketing strategy –

• Aim to develop content that will help to create connection with your visitors. Content has the power of developing engagement, and engagement is essential to drive online traffic.
• Do not focus on just developing ‘shareable’ content. No doubt content should be shareable, but it should also be able to initiate conversation. Content be able to trigger discussions, comments and feedback.
• Ensure that you include different forms of content delivery to make content unique and creative. Along with text blogs, utilize images, audio, video, infographics and advanced guides.
• Remember, you are marketing your content so make sure your content provides insight. Content that educates users and adds value to their knowledge is always appreciated, and your visitors will always come back for more.
• Invest in good content marketing tools for creating content and helping collaboration between teams.

Remember, don’t expect immediate results or get discouraged and give up within few attempts. Use content strategy to gain customers and build loyalty. 

Keywords! One of the most heard and most sought after terms in Search Engine Optimization. While choosing right keywords can make your campaign successful, wrong choice of keywords can completely ruin marketing campaigns. Wrong set of keywords or unplanned keywords can bring unqualified traffic to the website. 

What are Keywords?

Keywords are phrases or words that a user types in a Search Engine to find information he is seeking. Not just for search term, keywords also play an important role in indexing, cataloging and ranking of websites by bots. So, keywords are an integral part of SEO campaigns and need to be used with other on page optimization factors.

Search engines use robots or bots to analyze blogs, web pages and any other form of content available online. Then, these web pages are organized, using complex algorithms, according to their relevance to particular search terms. 

What does Keyword Research Involve?

Keyword research involves understanding different phrases that users might type into search engines. While doing keyword research, you must be able to peer into mind of the searcher and figure out their intention behind the search. So, every title you choose or content you write needs to have relevant keywords so it can be ranked for those keywords. Thus, with keyword research you can ensure that the website gets maximum exposure on search engines and maximize audience reach.

Keyword research basically consists of –

• Finding search terms
• Understanding how these search terms influence competition and traffic.

It is important to know different types of their keywords like long tail keywords, broad keywords, phrase match and exact match keywords.

Benefits of Keyword Research

Keyword research helps in understanding demand for keywords and keyword referrals. Some keyword tools also predict cost involved in running paid campaigns for those keywords. 

There are several benefits of keyword research –

• Bring qualified traffic to the website
• Lowers bounce rate of website
• Optimize website for keywords
• Increase search engine ranking
• Improve traffic to website
• Understand search behavior
• Develop effective marketing campaigns

Thus, keyword research is basically market research and getting better understanding of the customers. It is not possible to optimize a web page or lead traffic to a website unless you know which words and phrases are important to the website.