Local Marketing Tips: Visibility and Consistency Must Go Hand-in-Hand

There are businesses that provide products and services to geo-specific markets. These businesses employ various means of marketing their products and services to their customers. According to local marketing news from Marketing Digest, while producing credible, high-quality content is a must, this alone is not enough. It has to be accompanied by effective local marketing practices—as noted by writer Jayson DeMers in an article for Forbes (@Forbes). Pinpointed One of the most important local marketing tips to remember is to make sure your NAP (name, address, and phone number) is consistent across every official online account or every listing for your business. According to another Forbes contributor, Neil Patel, your listing also needs to be visible in as many local directories as possible, including Google, Bing, Yelp, and Foursquare, etc. As DeMers says, not being in these local listings will mean failure for your local marketing efforts.
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Web Design News: Effective Website Makeovers Involve Thorough Analysis

Many businesses seeking an online presence can stake their claim by setting up their own website, first and foremost. The real question, however, is whether the website is providing customers with all the information they need in making a decision to buy the company’s product or service. The object is to ensure that any visiting online user is converted into a satisfied paying customer. MarketingSherpa (@MarketingSherpa) contributor David Kirkpatrick features a case study showing how the transformation of a website that has been static for 17 years has increased conversion by 470%. The site was nothing more than a virtual company “brochure” until a website redesign team gave it a makeover, changing not only the site’s appearance, but adding SEO elements and making it mobile responsive as well. Many other web design news talk about similar transformations that have contributed immensely to improvements in the owners’ bottom line.
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Creating Simple yet Striking Pages and Other Timely Web Design Tips

One design style has been recently taking center stage among web platforms and getting featured by various online marketing niche sites: minimalism. This classic way of visual presentation has been around for ages, but it has always been a reliable technique across numerous industries. The article Say Goodbye to These 5 Web Design Trends by Tech.Co (@techcocktail) cites minimalism as one of the design philosophies to adapt as you veer away from past trends where pages are complex and filled with visual noise. If you want to harness the potential of minimalism in making a great impact with your online presence, you must make your interface simple yet striking by using elements rich in quality and not necessarily in quantity.
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SEO News and Insights: Why Keyword and Content Really Matters in SEO

Search engines are complex internet tools that show search results based on analyzed and indexed webpages, blogs, and other online content. They are able to do this through the use of scouts called ‘robots’ that sift through tons of data to grow their database of information about the Web. Search engines then present the results according to their ratings so that users can find the most relevant information quickly and conveniently. For online marketers, this is where SEO finds its purpose. SEO is a series of online marketing techniques designed to make a web resource more attractive to search engine bots and convince them to rank the site or page at or near the top of their results.
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Valuable SEO Tips You Need to Learn & Apply to Remain Relevant in 2015

Are you following an outdated SEO strategy that will only work against you? Or worse, you don’t have a solid SEO strategy at all? The major search engines are constantly evolving, and the SEO industry has to adjust to these changes to ensure the continued delivery of optimum results. Businesses that lack a solid SEO strategy, or are implementing an outdated one, could end up not only with poor organic rankings on the SERPs, but could also be slapped with penalties. These can negatively impact a business’s bottom line in the long run. It would serve you well to review your current SEO strategy and follow these SEO tips on how you can remain relevant online for years to come.
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Video Marketing Content Tips

People nowadays tend to become bored very fast. They want to be entertained, even when they are looking for information. Using videos is one good way to deliver information and entertain viewers at the same time. Aside from this, videos can also be more helpful than blog posts, when it comes to tutorials and DIYs as people would want to see visuals of this than read a long and boring article.

It’s no wonder videos have become a platform for marketing, too. People are more likely to watch an advertisement than to read one. If you haven’t started video marketing, then you are missing a lot in your campaign. If you have been wanting to try video marketing, but you’re unsure of where to start, here are a few tips:

Explain about your company

A good starter is an explanation of who you are and what your company does. Keep your videos short and as entertaining as possible so you won’t lose your audience a few seconds in.

Product demo

Introduce your product. Show your potential customers how your products can help them. Build their trust by letting them know what they are buying and how to work them.

Feature success stories

Involving your customers by featuring their success stories will make your product more credible. It makes a compelling story, increasing the probability of potential customers to try your products.

Make a series of Q&A videos

Designate a spokesperson to be in front of the camera and make a series of Q&A videos that address the inquiries your customers/viewers frequently ask you. Imagine doing FAQs as a film version. Questions that fall under one category can be answered in one video, until you have made a series of compelling categorical videos providing answers to all the questions. 

Digital marketing is a vast network where ideas and strategies are constantly changing. There are always new marketing strategies to be discovered along with endless possible marketing platforms. For more information in the hottest news and insights, don’t hesitate to visit the one place that is your source for the hottest and latest marketing news and more: http://marketingdigest.com/

Reputation Marketing Insights: Listening to Customers’ Needs Is a Must

Every business owner knows that listening closely to what their customers have to say and knowing what their target market really wants are a must to succeed. There are several ways to determine the preferences of one’s customers, and such ways are often in the form of conducting online surveys or even asking questions personally. Surprisingly, businesses often forego identifying what the needs and wants of their customers, which can hurt their bottom line. Start achieving business goals by getting to know your customers and attaining a clear understanding of their expectations. If you need more convincing, here are some reputation marketing insights to ponder on from some examples of companies that listened to their customers and enjoyed success, as listed in a post by Philip Axelrod of MarketingSherpa blog (@MarketingSherpa) entitled Customer-Centric Marketing: Listen to your customers if you want to live.
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Reputation Marketing News for You: Smart Tips for Reputation Marketers

Few things can make or break a company the way an online reputation can, and positive brand recognition is one part of ensuring that a company remains well-regarded. To get this result, you’ll want to implement an effective reputation management strategy. Doing this means reading up on the latest reputation marketing news being offered by sites like Marketing Digest. After all, who better than the experts to ensure your rep stays good? Advice on Taking the First Steps An article by Forbes (@Forbes) staff writer Susan Adams has a few sound reputation marketing tips. Her piece outlines the first six steps that companies should take when managing their online reputation. The first step is the easiest. You just open a browser window and Google your company. The first page results will usually be what anyone looking for your company will find.
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Social Marketing News Provides Insights That Can Guide Your Strategy

Online marketing is a free-for-all environment. This forces marketers to seek ways to gain an advantage over their competitors, prompting them to read up on the latest social marketing news from sites like Marketing Digest. Such sites often have articles that perceptive marketers can use to their advantage; this is especially important in emerging fields like social media marketing, which has boomed in recent years. Go Where the Audience is A MarketingSherpa article (@MarketingSherpa) by Editorial Content Director Daniel Burstein provides great social marketing insights. Social media platforms have seen explosive growth in recent years, and this has been a boon for many marketers. After all, the more platforms that are available, the more places you have to promote your products, right? The problem is that a lot of businesses attempt to cover all the popular social media platforms.
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Manage Your Online Reputation

Search engines could be your best friend, or your worst enemy. What people see on the internet about you could make or break your business, that’s why it’s really important to be knowledgeable about managing your own online reputation. Learn the basics of handling your internet standing with these tips:

1. Utilize Google Set up a
   Google alert of your name to keep track of any new content. You could also search for your name on Google as well as Google Images. Also, check your social media accounts and blogs to make sure that there are no incriminating posts that you failed to remove.


2. Create your brand
   They say that the best online reputation management strategy is a proactive one. Concentrate on building your future and boost your professional identity by creating high-quality content on your blogs and spicing up your social media accounts.


3. Purchase your own domain name
   Pick a domain name and start putting effort into creating content that will draw some positive publicity onto your site. You could also include links to your social media accounts to increase your number of followers.


4. Own up to your mistakes
   Personally investigate certain issues or accusations people make regarding your company. If you find that these claims are accurate, the best thing you can do is to admit the mistake publicly, apologize and move on. Practice excellent customer service; make it up to them with a giveaway, a discount or a free voucher. Most of the time, customers just tend to forgive and forget, but make sure to not let the incident happen again. 

Overall, just make sure that you’re giving your customers the service that they deserve. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, and don’t give false hope. For the hottest marketing news and insights, don’t hesitate to visit http://marketingdigest.com/

Dynamic Social Marketing Tips That Will Drive Your Business Goals

The leading social media sites have established innovative ways for businesses to target customers, helping them connect with audiences on a more personal level. As new platforms continue to emerge and evolve, the marketing rules of engagement have transformed as well. According to an article published in Examiner.com (@examinercom), entitled “How to execute an effective social media marketing plan,” the best way to get started is to have a clear definition of your business goals and then choose the appropriate social media management platform. This is because the right social media management platform will keep your various social media accounts updated and monitored. Whether you have an existing social media strategy or are about to devise one, keep these social marketing tips in mind to fine tune your promotional strategy and stay ahead of the game.
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Cutting-Edge Mobile Marketing Insights: How to Optimize Mobile Sites

Mobile-only Internet users have exceeded desktop-only Internet users in the United States for the first time in March 2015, reveals a recent report from comScore (@comScore). The article, entitled “Number of Mobile-Only Internet Users Now Exceeds Desktop-Only in the U.S.,” reveals that, as of March 2015, the number of mobile-only Internet users has climbed over the past year to 11.3%, while the number of desktop-only Internet users has declined to just 10.6% (from 19.1% last year). While it is safe to say that most of the U.S. population now consists of multi-platform users (who use both mobile and desktop to access digital media), the rise of mobile-only users indicates the vital role smartphones and tablets currently play in digital media consumption.
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Latest Mobile Marketing News and Trends: Chat App Usage is on the Rise

As consumers turn increasingly to mobile, chat apps have emerged as a new online marketing and content distribution channel. According to the latest mobile marketing news, users of messaging or chat apps increased 100% in 2014, the same year that mobile usage surpassed desktop usage. An article that appeared in Entrepreneur (@Entrepreneur), “The Future of Social Is Messaging Apps, But How Do Brands Fit In?”, recognizes that messaging apps like WeChat, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger have capitalized on the emergence of mobile and mobile chat apps at this critical juncture, and are now reaping the rewards, simultaneously opening up a new channel for content marketers.
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A Few PPC Insights for Small Businesses to Compete With the Big Boys

For most businesses advertising on the Web, the success of any pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign is largely related to the size of the advertising budget. The more money in store to place bids, the more keywords can be targeted and the more ad displays are awarded. Not surprisingly, a good number of the world’s biggest brands dominate the paid search market. Their often massive PPC budgets and routine campaign management strategies, after all, allow them to target numerous searchable keywords. This observation may lead one to believe that smaller businesses have no chance of competing in the PPC arena. Fortunately for smaller businesses, this assumption simply isn’t true. As reported in “From Keywords to Analytics: 5 MarketingSherpa PPC case studies,” however, a specialty hotel in the Pacific Northwest could have had a successful PPC campaign were it not for overly broad keywords.
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The Edge of Web Design

Whether you like it or not, people DO judge a book by its cover. When it comes to running a business and promoting your brand, people’s first impressions matter. This is where the art of web design enters the picture. Let Marketing Digest, your online marketing news website, disclose why web design is an important investment and why seeking web design services is good for your business.

1. You’ll sport a more consistent brand identity
   
   Professional web designers think about the big picture and take your website seriously. They construct a unique theme for your brand to make a lasting impression. Your website, logo, business cards and even your social media sites also have to be designed based on your theme to form a coherent whole.


2. The littlest details are taken care of
   
   The font style, color, paragraph spacing, layout and contrast might seem trivial, but they affect the overall appeal and quality of your site. Web design experts make sure that these little things are all well-taken care of, so you don’t have to worry.


3. Increased search engine publicity
   
   One of the many advantages a professional designer can bring to your business is the increase of your search engine rankings and visibility. Professional web designers can guarantee clean and easy-to-read code markups. Plus, having a professional website design means having the ability to submit the website to galleries around the web, thus bringing added traffic and attracting potential clients.


4. It saves you time and effort
   
   Learning web design skills would take much longer as opposed to having web design experts build or reinvent your site. Save your precious time and focus more on your core business by leaving your web design concerns to the experts. 

Have we convinced you yet? Visit http://marketingdigest.com/ for the hottest marketing news and insights.

Timing It Right and Other PPC Tips: Zeroing In on the Right Audience

PPC remains one of the most widely used online marketing tactics, and for good reason. According to the Small Business Trends (@smallbiztrends) article, “3 Best PPC Reporting Examples To Improve Results,” PPC advertising can be very effective, especially for small businesses, because it can present products and services to those who may need them at the exact moment when they’re needed. As you might learn from PPC news in sources like Marketing Digest, PPC is so powerful that it was Google’s main revenue source for 2014, contributing a total of $66 billion. To put it in perspective, PPC’s main purpose is actually a representation of marketing’s main goals. According to the article “When Is The Best Time To Run PPC Ads?” marketing’s foremost objective is to reach the right people with the right offer at the right time.
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Tips for Reducing Page Load Times

With the fast-paced lifestyles of people today, the majority has short attention span for everything they see in the internet. Netizens have the most incredible multi-tasking ability when facing their mobile phones or their laptop computers – switching from website to website at an astonishing rate. This means that a long-loading website can be irritating and has less ability to catch more online visitors.

Worry no more because there are ready-made solutions for a more effective and functional website:

• Disable unnecessary plugins – Try to opt for one plugin that can do multiple tasks. You might also stop using separate analytics, sitemap and SEO plugins by using Yoast or other plugins that can perform all the necessary functionalities. 
• Optimize your images – although great images can make a website more compelling and presentable, we should be aware that they too can increase the loading time of a website. For this, the solution we have is to choose the “Save for Web” option after you finish your work in Photoshop of Fireworks. You may also use image quality slider like smush.it or Yahoo. 
• Manage your Cache – use plugins that can cache your latest version of your page and display it to users to avoid dynamic generation of every single pages. 
• Minify your codes – when you analyze your website, you will see the factors that consume the most of the loading time. There are certain HTML codes that eat up more time to load. Some are flashy subscriber widgets, CDATA sections and other java scripts. Remove these unless they’re absolutely necessary. 
• Enable compression – it works by reducing the bandwidth consumed by your pages using a tool called. Gzip. It is a great tool for speeding up your website. 

These are just basic ways to boost your website’s loading time. You don’t want to stress out your clients, right? Read more news and insights on website optimization that will establish a hassle-free connection between you your online visitors. http://marketingdigest.com/

Foolproof Ways to Boost Facebook Fan Base

Increasing the number of your Facebook followers is essential in marketing your products and services. However, this alone is not enough. Establishing a strong community fan base will greatly contribute in your business’ success. Take note of these foolproof ways to gain a wider Facebook fan base.

• Install “Like” button to your website – this technique provokes a larger number of followers for your Facebook Fan Page. If customers are dearly interested to your product or service, they would love to know more about your website by reading most of your content and probably share it on social networking sites.

• Add social share button to your blogs – if your visitors find your content appealing and undeniably engaging, this will help them share the content to their friends and followers hassle-free.

• Attach your personal profile to your business page – help your clients find your business by linking your website at your “About” profile. State the year you started working for it and put “I currently work here”.

• Create an appealing email signature – email is one of the most conventional ways of communicating with our customers. Formulizing a good and attractive signature helps your business reach more potential clients. By having a good call to action such as “Find us on Facebook” and “Follow us on Twitter”, you can expect higher percentage of website visitors.

• Don’t be shy to ask – let your LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram friends and followers know that you want an engagement by asking them to follow your Facebook Pages. A casual invitation would do great help.

• Make strong participation in Facebook Groups a habit– most people on Facebook are proactive in groups where they share the same interests. That’s a good platform to connect with your target market. In addition, Facebook group conversations have better organic search due to notification system that was set default to users.

• Increase exposure through guest blogging – The very first step is to create your own blog where you’ll publish original articles and compelling contents. Showcase your professionalism in this area to establish a credible representation of your brand. This will help you build a community of followers that can be convertible to future loyal customers. You may also want to become a published author at Marketing Digest where you can share valuable information and tips through our Authorship Program. 

Marketing Digest actively shares latest updates in the online marketing world. Visit us for effective marketing news and insights. http://marketingdigest.com/

Online Content Marketing Publication Shares Ways to Capture More Leads

Content is king, and this has been the general tenor of the digital marketing world this year.

Content marketing is still one of the most effective SEO strategies for businesses to gain more leads and foster professional relationships. Unfortunately, most businesses are still unable to maximize the use of this strategy to reach their goals. An article from Entrepreneur cites a recent Forrester report that showed 87% of brands are still currently struggling from creating high-quality content that users care to read.
While these businesses may produce informative content, the delivery may be too technical for most readers to digest. Another reason could be an overtly promotional tone in blog posts, which should be engaging and relatable though ideally not to salesy.


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