Four Essential Ways for Small Businesses to Boost Sales through Digital Marketing

When it comes to increasing sales, nothing can compare to the power of the internet. Whether you have a local place of business or an online global presence, there is no better way to reach millions of people, literally overnight. Small businesses looking to boost sales should really investigate how to accomplish that through digital marketing. Here are four essential ways for small businesses to boost sales through digital marketing.

1) Go Mobile

Recent statistics indicate that more people shop from their mobile devices than they do from their home PCs. In fact, it is such a huge portion of the market that Google even changed their algorithms to better serve mobile searchers. If your site isn’t mobile friendly, now is the time to act. Make sure your online marketing is mobile friendly. Not only will you rank better with the search giant, but you will reach a significant portion of your market that you would have otherwise missed out on.

2) Online Discounts & Vouchers

Another great way to boost sales online through digital marketing is to advertise great savings with online discounts and vouchers not available at physical locations. People love a bargain and when they feel like they are getting a product at a saving they wouldn’t get at their local retailer, they will jump on the chance to save money. You can even find out which discounts and vouchers to offer with online tools that show in real time UK retail spending trends. This is perhaps the best way to boost sales based on buying trends.

3) Social Media

It has become almost cliché to hear marketers saying “We are social creatures.” But, in reality, that is exactly what we are. Marketing experts tell us that people will spend more money with someone they trust than from some unknown person or entity. In other words, they aren’t really spending money as much on your product as they are on you. If they trust you after having built a relationship through social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) they may even pay more for your goods than they would at another shop. Why? Again, the trust factor. Social media is great for establishing trust and if you don’t employ this as part of your digital marketing, you are losing a huge portion of the buying public.

4) Pictures, Videos and Infographics

Finally, people want to see what they are buying. Use pictures, videos and infographics to display products and to show why a consumer should buy them. Many innovative ecommerce sites have gone to 360 panoramic views of products so that viewers can see all sides in one shot. This is especially important in the fashion industry as the shopper can see both the front and the back of a garment as opposed to a stock shot of that item in a box.

Again, whether you are looking to build foot traffic in a physical location or to increase online sales, there is nothing like the broad and rapid reach of the information superhighway, the internet. Use these four essential ways to boost sales and you will see just how quickly digital marketing campaigns can make a difference.

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Calling all Innovators & Entrepreneurs, we need your help & your green VOTE !!

As with any Irish technology company, we all suffer unique challenges when growing business internationally. As a country we have a small population so we struggle when trying to make as much noise as our International competitors. Even places we assume are tiny states such as Haiti & Togo have twice and three times our population.

Hence we need your help…

One of our company’s, Surface Power HONE which has developed a revolutionary “daylight” powered Nano-heat engine technology is short-listed (final 18 was judged by experts) for the 2Degrees Champions Award –  “Innovation of the Year” which is the world’s leading collaboration platform and service for sustainable business with over 46,500 members from 177 countries. https://www.2degreesnetwork.com/

Surface Power HONE has nearly 7,000 installations of this patented technology over 8 countries to date and it has been kept fairly secretive until recently. The technology was field tested in the West of Ireland & New Zealand as the daylight levels are some of the lowest in the OECD. In short, it replaces the use of oil and gas for heating and cooling with free daylight. Have a look at LIVE customers on our website such as the UK National Health Service running their hospital’s central heating on free “daylight” (sounds mad but true !!)

The next phase of the 2Degrees “Innovation of the Year Awards” is a voting stage which will reduce the final 18 to 5 for the big awards ceremony and we need your help and your vote. 

Although already in the short-list of 18, we are the only Irish Technology company in this shortlist and are up against huge players such as Nestle, General Motors & B&Q.

You can vote for us by clicking the link below to get us into the final 5 and we thank you in advance for that vote. Be sure to tweet it afterwards using the link so we can personally send you a thank you tweet. Go raibh maith agat as do chabhair.

Best Regards, John Quinn, CEO. (Twitter – @johnquinn_irl )

Read our story and VOTE from below.

https://www.2degreesnetwork.com/groups/2degrees-community/resources/surface-powers-nano-engine-harvests-light-generate-heating-and-cooling/

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On Page Optimization: Guidelines for 2015

For some of you this will be a nice reminder, and for others this quick guide will let you know the most common best practices that are still effective for on page optimization in 2015.

Search engine optimization is a form of business that constantly evolves. New technologies, tweaks to how search engines interpret data and the modification of how certain established factors are weighted make it so.

To start 2015 correctly with your own website, it’s imperative that your on-page SEO marketing optimization is both complete and up-to-date with regards to the factors the search engines consider essential.

This guide aims to look at the essential on-page factors that website owners tend to miss in a way that even beginners can understand and employ.

1. Your Website URLs

The URLs of your website’s pages reflect how easily people and computers can interpret what your pages are about.

If you’re going to purchase a new domain or create a subdomain of your website, then consider making it as keyword-centric as possible. This can including your brand or a main keyword for your subdomain (such as “guides.yourwebsite.com”).

As far as your individual pages’ URLs go, it’s important to ensure that they describe the content contained on your page. This means you want a descriptive URL such as “http://www.yourwebsite.com/category/keyword.html”.

It’s also important to remove extraneous data that may not be helpful to your visitors. Consider removing the date of posts, for example, if you use something like WordPress to manage your website. Dates are primarily helpful for blog content, but not static web material.

If you have a string of dynamic code for a ecommerce site, make static landing pages optimized for your KW’s and let the dynamic URL’s work for user generated search queries.

2. Your Title Tags

Title tags are relatively simple. They should include your page’s main keyword first with your website’s  main keyword, such as your brand or an encompassing keyword like ‘plumbing’, second.

It’s important to remember to keep your page titles to 69 characters or less. This is a situation where search engines truncate longer titles or simply replace them with more “appropriate” titles in search results, which may negatively impact your website’s presence in search engine results.

A bad example is this cool infographic about Ray-Bans (which is a great example of content marketing) but you will notice if you use a tool like Moz’s chrome add-on that the title tag, along with all other posts on the blog are simply the blog’s title.

No custom title tags for any posts?

This is such an easy fix, and I am always surprised to see even big companies neglect optimizing their title tags. This has been “best practice” for years.

3. Your Meta Description and Meta Tags

the meta content of your pages is also important. Ensuring that each field is complete will help your website perform better.

Of all the meta content on any given page, the meta description falls just after your page title in importance to your SEO. Ensure that your meta description is 156 characters or less and that it relates highly to the rest of your content on your page, as this will allow it to perform better in search engines like Google.

As far as other meta content goes, you should add things like keywords and content type to your pages. You just need to be aware that very few search engines heavily weigh these things, and some search engines, which includes Google, tend to ignore them outright.

Now some of you may be saying “Didn’t Google announce forever ago that Meta tags don’t factor into SEO rankings?” Yes they did. It is true that Google doesn’t factor in meta tags directly, however, when you are listed in a google search the meta tag is what people read before they decide which search result to click. If your meta tag is bad, and people don’t click through to your site when your listed, Google will take that as a sign that your page is not relevant to the specific query that triggered your listing in the first place.

In other words, the meta tag gets people to click your site, if nobody clicks your site, you lose rankings. So meta descriptions are still very important to SEO.

4. Keyword Density

Keyword density is a tricky subject, as there is no set limit for how many times a keyword should appear within your text to be considered relevant. The only thing that is for certain is that mentioning a keyword too many times may make your page perform poorly in search engines.

To both guard against this and improve your keyword-related performance, instead opt to use synonyms and other closely related keywords when possible. This will make your pages’ contents perform better both in the eyes of search engines and your visitors.

It’s also not a bad idea to see what the density for your top 5 competitors ranking is and try to use that as a standard. It’s pretty easy, just pop in the top 5 search results for your keyword into a tool like text analyser and if you find the top 5 results are all around 40%, it’s safe to say you can optimize to 40% and not worry about being penalized.

5. Content Length

Just like with keyword density, there is no set content length that will perform better in the eyes of search engines. The only thing that is for certain is that longer content that has a clear purpose behind it tends to perform far better than short-winded content.

As a general rule of thumb, aim for your pages to have a minimum of 300 to 350 words. You should include other pieces of media and interactive content to keep your visitors on your pages for as long as possible.

It’s worth noting that longer content can be interwoven with shorter pieces. This supports a healthy interlinked URL scheme, which appeals both search engines and your most curious of visitors.

6. Image Alt Tags

Although image recognition is improving, there’s only so much that search engines like Google can accurately interpret. Alt tags allow search engines to quickly understand what your images on your pages are about, which is why it’s important to use them whenever possible.

When doing so, be sure to add in the keywords that describe your content. This will help both your page in SERPs and your images in image search engines.

7. Ad-Less Content

While ad revenue is always nice, it can significantly detract from your most valuable pages. Try to keep above-the-fold content that you want your visitors to read clear of ads and other potentially annoying or distracting content.

If you must put ads on your place, the best place to do so is either through contextual links or near the end of your content. This will reduce negative SEO factors like bounce rate while keeping your pages lovable in the eyes of your visitors.

Other Factors to Consider

What has been covered so far is just a start. There’s still countless other tweaks to your SEO that you can perform, but following the above steps will ensure that your website has a strong start in 2015 with search engines.

If you are wondering where “on page” optimization sits into whats known as ‘SEO Priorities” It sits as the #2 priority according to this article. Either way, on-page is relatively simple, and has been around for a long time yet many webmasters still neglect to optimize and miss out on easy wins that do add up over time. Stop worrying about links, and get your site in order first.

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Webinar Best Practices

Preparing a presentation through a webinar is only half effective as the preparation that goes into the webinar presentation. Webinars can be very cost effective and can reach a broad audience. The webinar can be as official, or as informal as the host wishes it to be. Depending on the sophistication of the marketing and IT departments, the webinar can be robust or elementary. Read on for Webinar Best Practices…

The goal is to effectively communicate with the intended audience. At this point it is presumed that the host has decided that the webinar is the most effecting medium to communicate the host’s message.

1. Select Your Presenters and Speakers

Your message cannot be effectively communicated if you chose the wrong communicators to convey your message. Understanding the type of medium that you are using with your webinar and the speaking style of your presenter. Your presenter may not be comfortable speaking during a webinar format. This should be addressed with a short test run prior to the actual presentation. Some speakers can be coached to present in the webinar format while others may find it difficult to adjust.

2. Determine Your Presentation Format

How you present your information is just as important as what you are trying to say. You will have to see you webinar presentation from the perspective of the your audience. Your presentation may be viewed on different mediums, including smart phones tablet devices, laptops as well as desktop computers. Again a test shot of how you may want to present your presentation is not as important as how your presentation will be received. If you ask two or three friends to view a five minute segment of your presentation you may receive valuable feedback regarding the proper manner to organize your information.

3. Plan Your Exhibits and Visual Displays

Your visuals are critical in a webinar. Depending on the receiving device graphics, it may not be visible to someone participating with your webinar using a smartphone or a tablet device. Some exhibits and visual displays may need to be distributed to the webinar participants prior to the presentation starting. Others may have to be simplified too so the images or graphics can be viewed easily.

4. Select Your Webinar Medium

There are many services that offer online meetings for free, and there are several for webinars as well. Most have a modest cost for their use, but will allow a free trial so you can see if the medium is easy to use and whether it is a site or program that you are comfortable with. Again you should decide on a webinar medium that is reliable and is easy for your audience to sign in to use. Also, you may want to compare the various features between the mediums. Use of graphics and playback ability are important in the communication of your message.

5. Determine Your Webinar Registration

If you have a specific guest list for your webinar you may want to ensure that your webinar facilities have the capability of easy registrations so you are able to tell who from your target audience is actually participating on your call. This will help you to determine if you need to take additional steps to advertise your webinar and the presentation subject matter. Webinars allow for very specific audiences and messages in a compelling way, with limited interaction. Ideally you’d want everyone on your business’s mailing list to attend, but don’t plan on it. You may also want to determine if you desire the registration list to be viewable to other participants of the call.

6. Prepare a Detailed Agenda

This is the most important part of your webinar. You must first decide how long your webinar will be and then literally script each segment of your webinar. If you plan to have a period for questions and answers you should plan a set amount of time for questions and answers and stick to that time period so you do not run out of time. Otherwise, members of your audience will start to fall off the webinar if they feel or sense that there is no structure to the presentation. Additionally, once an agenda is shared, your audience will know what subject matters are going to be covered and when to present timely questions.

7. Set and Execute a Dry Run in Front of a Test Audience

After you have put your presentation together you should do a real time presentation with a test audience to see if all facilities of the webinar work properly. This will help you to perfect your presentation and will keep your audience engaged.

8. Reserve and Check Your Equipment and Space

Prior to the commencement of your webinar presentation you or your staff should do a check of all of the systems to be used for your webinar. This includes making sure that call in or login numbers and passwords are working properly. This will avoid any unforeseen delays in the start of your presentation. Studies have shown that if someone has difficulty signing into a webinar then they will leave before 10 minutes and that audience is lost.

All and all, with these tips you’ll be on your way to a better, well-prepared webinar presentation.

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Digital Marketing for Small Business – the Basic Practices

Small businesses are faced with more than a few trials, especially in the first couple of years of their inception. According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 businesses fail in the first 18 months of their existence. There are numerous reasons why people lose their business investment, and why small businesses crash and burn so fast, but we are not here to discuss that. We are here to discuss how you can actually keep your business alive. In recent years, more and more businesses focus on digital marketing, and the Web itself keeps evolving to meet their requirements. There are numerous benefits to digital marketing that fit the purpose of SMBs like a glove. Still, many resources would have you believe that there is nothing to it and that anyone can do it, which isn’t entirely true.

Digital Marketing and Your Web Presence

It is only proper that we start from the basics. Your website is the digital equivalent of your office or shop, depending on what kind of a business you are running. It needs to serve the purpose and look good. This is something that you need to keep in mind during the creation process. Make sure that you consider the profiles of people that are most commonly going to visit your website, and their IT proficiency as well. Furthermore, you need to identify the right platform to build your website on, and this will depend on the functionalities that you require. WordPress is a universal choice for general use, Magento is a popular choice for eShop purposes. If you are really planning on putting up something big, then a customer solution might be in order. All in all, make sure that you hire some experienced developers to help you out. You also need to make sure that your website works without a hitch. It is supposed to be a valid presentation of your company, and if the users run into a buggy website, they will start doubting your abilities. It is probably better not to have website at all than to have a bad website.

Blogging

It is a standard procedure to include a blog within your website, but a lot of people are not aware of this. The reasons why you need to include a blog are numerous. First of all, it will help you with building a name for yourself as a niche expert and creating a voice for your company. Secondly, this is a great way to create sharable and engaging content in order to pull in new traffic and keep people on your website. There are also numerous SEO benefits that having a blog pulls in.

SEO

If you want people to be interested in what you have to offer, you have to deal with search engine optimization. There is simply no way around that. The amount of new traffic you will receive is directly related to your optimization, and there are a lot of SEO factors you need to satisfy in order to get results. Still, this is a process, and you shouldn’t rush things. Take it one step at the time.

Multimedia Content

We’ve mentioned blogs and textual content, but what about photos and videos? Well, video content is the most commonly shared type of content in the online environment, so it is crucial that you have at least some of it at hand. Your textual content needs to be backed up with videos and photos in order to increase its sharing potential.

Social Networks

The best places to reach new customers and engage with the old ones are social networks. Depending on the purpose for which you intend to use the social networks, you might want to target different ones. Facebook has great targeting ads, and is one of the most generally used networks. Twitter is generally used for business purposes but can be complicated to use, especially if you are new to it. LinkedIn is a must these days for any respectable company, and it is great for hunting new talents, connecting with competitors, keeping up with industry trends and so on.

Tie all of these together, and you are surely to reach a lot of people. Still, each of these things seems rather straightforward, but these are just the basic overviews of important aspects of digital marketing. There are tons of details you need to work on, and you need to put in a great effort to turn them into a perfectly functioning mechanism. Hope this helps!

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