Why is it Essential for Your Business to Have a Responsive Website?

Business websites have become an asset since the dawn of the digital era. It has become imperative for small business owners to maintain an active online presence. And to fully enhance a business’ marketing efforts, a website must be mobile-optimized and responsive to drive traffic, convert leads into customers, and boost conversions.

Today, people are using their mobile devices and tablets to browse the web, find businesses, and purchase products and services. There are many reasons why having a responsive website is important and here are just a few pieces of news and insights:

A responsive web design provides a great user experience

If your website employs a responsive design, users can easily browse through your content. Offering a great user experience is key to converting leads and keeping existing customers.

Websites load faster when they are responsive

If your site takes too long to load, search engines will perceive it as low-quality, and may assign it to lower rankings.

Google prefers responsive websites

Going responsive means having a single URL, making it easier for search engines, particularly Google, to crawl through and evaluate your site.

Majority of social media referrals come from mobile.

Users regularly share social media and blog content via smartphones. When they see that your content adjusts properly to their smartphones, or is properly optimized, visitors will turn into customers.

What are the other advantages of having a responsive website for a small business? For a weekly dose of web design related news and insights, subscribe here: http://marketingdigest.com/

Digital Marketing in 2015

Marketing has evolved into many forms. The old adage “There is nothing permanent except change” applies to many things, and it applies to digital marketing as well. Over time, we have gathered news and insights about what we see as avoidable mistakes.

Seeing online marketing as a marketing “Add On”

Online marketing is often bypassed by some businesses, and this attitude is no longer acceptable. Online marketing is not an option anymore; in fact, in today’s world, it can often be the central consumer awareness and engagement platform.

Ignoring conversions

You may have built websites, social media networks, and top rankings, but you don’t have to stop there. Convert these into useful data and take the opportunity to collect contact information from them. These can even be collected through subscriptions or interactive banners.

Inactivity

You have launched websites, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest to make sure consumer touch points are available. If you remain inactive, it is much better to launch fewer assets, keep them updated, and be more skillful in leading consumers to these social media accounts.

Not doing mobile and tablet optimization

Mobile optimized websites and apps are the crowning glory of your online marketing strategy. Many sites that are not mobile and tablet optimized get buried at the bottom of search engines rankings; if your site is not mobile optimized, it could be one of them.

These are just a few online marketing mistakes that we’ve observed. To stay on top of your digital marketing game in 2015, subscribe to weekly news and insights here: http://marketingdigest.com/

Successful Video Marketing Tips

In today’s marketing scene, video is becoming a prevalent form of advertising, especially since almost all social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tumblr and Pinterest) support video content.

In this article, let Marketing Digest help you learn the secrets to creating an effective video marketing campaign for your business.

Have a clear goal in mind

To be perfectly honest, just coming up with a clear goal in mind is already a long way to go. Though this could imply a lot of pressure, at least you could expect a better end-result from a goal-driven marketing video. Are you trying to sell your product or service? Increase customer retention? Improve brand recognition and reputation? Educate a viewer about your product and its features? What is your target demographic? Establish a clear goal in mind and make this your basis in creating the video.

Keep them short

You may want to show your audience everything about your product or service (even the littlest details) but unfortunately, due to the hectic world that we’re living in today, viewers have even shorter attention spans. Because of this, it is advisable to come up with a short and striking video advertisement, yet informational and entertaining.

Create a call to action

One common mistake many telemarketers make is creating a great video without attaching a call to action. Your audience may enjoy the video, but if they have no idea where to go after watching it, the video advertisement failed to be successful. A call to action could be something simple, like a simple link to your website of an offer of a discount for any customer who mentions the video in your store. Be creative.

They say the year 2015 has been dubbed as “The Year of Video Marketing”, since businesses are learning to think of fresh and inventive ways of using the medium to their advantage. Video marketing provides a wide range of directions where you can go, so have fun in experimenting and searching for the right format for you and your business!

For more sizzling marketing news and insights, please feel free to visit our website at http://marketingdigest.com/

The Importance of Infographics in Content Marketing

Do you know how many people are visiting your website every day? Are you aware of what makes them stay or leave your page? With the fast-paced advancement of technology in this era, people value multi-tasking more than focusing on a single task that too many words might exhaust them. This welcomes the advantage of using infographics for content marketing and other SEO campaigns.

An infographic can definitely make your business goals attainable with well-researched information, edited data and compelling graphic design.

Reasons to Get on the Infographics Bandwagon

Here are the top reasons why infographics positively contribute to online marketing campaigns:

• Your targeted audience don’t have enough time to read a thousand words 
• Infographics are more attractive and compelling 
• They establish greater brand awareness 
• Infographics are easy to share and can really go viral 
• These materials are more comprehensive 
•  People believe in numbers and visual proof 
• Using significant statistics positions you as an expert

Visual Content: Driving Success in the Mobile World

In this age of mobile screens, Instagram, and Twitter, people’s attention spans are getting shorter, so they demand content that can be easily digested at a glance. At the same time, businesses should not be filled with fluff content. A good business site provides news and insights for their customers to consume. It’s not good enough to make people come to your site; you’ve got to give them reasons to stay, and you can do that with great, informative visuals.

A Place for Everything, and Everything in That Place

The Internet is a wonderful place. With its sheer diversity of information, coupled with the power of search engines, it has made life so much easier, and is arguably the driving force behind the Information Age. As more and more people get connected to the Web, the information it contains can only increase.

Information Overload

However, with the increase of information, there is an increased risk of overload. With all the sources of content that are presented to the average netizen, even with just one simple Google search using one keyword, there is so much to process and sift through. The natural tendency is to just check the first few search engine results, of course, but this method is often inefficient when you want to look for news and insights on particular subjects.

Have a One-Stop Marketing Site

Online marketing is one such example: while a business owner or marketing professional might want to find out more about online marketing by doing a search about it, it will likely be difficult and time-consuming to process and filter out the most relevant and timely articles. In a speed-oriented world, this will not do.

That is why the idea of content curation came about. The idea is very simple: just like museums show only the most valuable and choice pieces that are related to their focus, content curation sites feature only the most timely, relevant news and insights related to their topic.

Small business owners or digital marketers may want a place to get their fix of online marketing analyses and information. While the old maxim goes “a place for everything, and everything in its place”, there are certain subjects that are so important, even having several places to look at and check can be a hassle. With the power of content curation sites, the ideal point of having a “one-stop shop” for content related to an industry has arrived.