You might have the world’s ultimate product. Or record-setting service. But unless you also have a solid digital marketing plan, you’ll strike out before you reach first base. You can bet your competition has done some planning. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be so far ahead. Now it’s your turn. What goes into a well-wrought plan? Generally, three elements — The first …

E-commerce marketers can be sure of one point — browsers aren’t necessarily buyers. Even if visitors are planted in your shopping cart. Many will abandon, leaving merchandise woefully un-purchased. How can you minimize this risk? By creating irresistible brand appeal before the cart is accessed. Once shoppers are in, brand-pumping options are virtually zero. One known brand booster is the …

Think your brand content is untouchably unique? Well, guess again. Unless you’ve cornered the creativity market, your content probably shares many similarities with competing content. As a result, finding ways to stand out must be high on your to-do list. Don’t worry. It can be done. Racking up plenty of glowing reviews is one way to get it done. But …

You’ve got web traffic galore. And now you’re dancing in the street. Well, strut your stuff later. Your digital marketing crusade isn’t even half done. That’s right. Visitors still must take action after they arrive. If enough of them do, conversion rates will climb. Which is what you’re after. Big conversion numbers. This requires major conversion rate optimization, or CRO. …

We all know the power of positive thinking. But in the world of SEO marketing, the negative can be remarkably positive. Sound like a contradiction? It isn’t. The proven positive element is the negative keyword. A staple of many SEO strategies, negative keywords target a very common problem faced by digital marketers – how to eliminate the extraneous and irrelevant …

What marketing-related trend has surged about 70% in fewer than two years? Many would respond – the use of mobile devices. While this is an excellent guess, it’s not the answer presently sought. That answer is — the use of video chat for customer service. There’s good reason for the rapid rise of this phenomenon. As it turns out, video …

As online searches proliferate, digital marketers must keep pace. Answering their need is a barrage of helpful information, both online and off. But all is not rosy. Cutting through the intel is a river of rumors, inaccuracies, myths, and speculations. Separating the wheat from the chaff becomes a monumental — and worse — time-consuming chore for the average marketer. To …

From websites to social platforms, digital content is proliferating. The upshot, of course, is a drastic state of oversupply. Like it or not, the digital universe is facing a glut. As a result, getting noticed these days is mighty tricky business — even if optimized to the hilt. Still, certain brands consistently grab the spotlight, despite the glut. Are they …

How do customers and prospects see your brand? Good, bad, so-so, wow? Their perceptions, of course, depend on the impact of your brand positioning. But is image-building the only objective of a positioning strategy? Despite what certain people profess, the answer is ‘nay’. Image creation is just the first step en route to a bigger goal. The next and most …

Let’s face it. When it comes to fast shipping, it’s tough to top the big guy in the bright red suit. But then, he has plenty of skilled help and no supply chain issues. So how do you compete with S. Claus if you’re an e-commerce merchant? … You do everything possible to reduce delivery times. Let’s face it. In …

It’s one thing to create powerful marketing content; quite another to ensure the words and images are remembered. Currently, many brand marketers are engaged in a crapshoot — some of their messaging sticks; some doesn’t. The kind that doesn’t rarely has an impact. Which means somebody has wasted a great deal of time and energy.Don’t be a resource waster. Instead, …

Are you marketing your brand on Amazon? Then you’ve grappled with mighty stiff competition. Sure, shoppers flow in by the thousands. But so do competing brands. Which makes it somewhat of a standoff. Your job is to break out of the jam and take your sales to new heights. Seem impossible? Not if you employ a few juicy strategies. First …

It’s been said that one picture is worth a thousand words. But thanks to digital technologies, it also may be worth a thousand products. At least, that’s a distinct possibility thanks to a new twist on visual search offered by certain ecommerce brands. Here’s how it works – An individual desires a certain item from an online brand. Rather than …

For any expert in any field, ‘knowing your stuff’ is essential. This requirement certainly applies to video marketers. If you’re playing to win, deep knowledge is imperative. Without it, you’re a dabbler. Dabbler or not, knowing your stuff is only half the battle. The other half is knowing your audience. We’re talking profound understanding of the shopper mindset. What makes …

The nerve of website shoppers! With so many buying options at their disposal, they’ve become finicky and demanding. So, they take their sweet time, buying only when good and ready. Digital marketers can wait and hope. Or they can chase these shoppers around the web in a practice known as ‘remarketing’. The ultimate hot pursuit, remarketing gives brands a second, …

Patience isn’t a common virtue among website visitors. In fact, impatience is their predominant trait. Whatever a website does must be done quickly. Case in point is the load speed of home pages. Lightning fast is the minimum, with acceptable timeframes measured in seconds. Go too slow, and visitors will bounce. Digital marketers must prevent this abandonment at all costs. …

Website visitors aren’t keen to play Sherlock Holmes. So don’t give them a mystery to solve. Users want to know where exactly they are and where to go. Which means ecommerce marketers must provide a seamless, easy to navigate experience. Breadcrumbs will help them do it. In the digital world, breadcrumbs are navigational links that represent various locations within a …

Which activity do people spend more time on – watching online videos or watching the typical comedy movie? Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) folks devote more time to online video content. The average consumption is about 100 minutes daily. The average comedy video, on the other hand, lasts about 90 minutes. For those who keep track, the online choice …

When it comes to value-per-word, captions are hard to beat. Demanding minimal verbiage, they utilize concentrated power to grab attention and spur action. Just try to resist a catchy caption. You just can’t do it. What makes the catchy caption? Clearly, brevity is a crucial starting point. In fact, social media marketers don’t have much choice. All prominent social media …

A house guest who overstays is among the major domestic irritants. Not so with the well-planted website visitor. In fact, digital marketers should go the distance to encourage extended stays. The longer, the better. The advantage of the long stay is universally known in the marketing community. Generally, the more minutes spent on the grounds, the more solid the engagement …

It’s the truth all brand marketers must face on their quests for fame and fortune … In the realm of email communications, once rarely is enough. In fact, most of the time, twice or even three times doesn’t cut it. To be effective, an email campaign must launch a series of personal touches. Doesn’t matter what the product or service …

These days, short n’ sweet unquestionably applies to the average marketing video. Sure, the long form is gold for purely informational content. But when it comes to connecting time-crunched users with your brand, nothing beats brevity. Instagram Reels offers brand marketers a dynamic option in the short video sphere. With 30 seconds pegged as the ideal running time, Reels-generated output …

Brand marketers have harnessed the power of this promotional tool for eons. Amazingly, the tool is no less effective now than it was decades ago. This enduringly successful wonder is known as a contest. Its message is beautifully simple — enter and win, win, win! Doesn’t matter what the prize is. A jazzy new car, cutting edge computer, dream trip …

While video marketing soars in popularity, another lesser-known visual format is pushing its way into the limelight — with equally promising possibilities. That medium is 3D imagery. Thanks to ongoing advancements, this imagery is giving digital marketers a robust alternative to conventional video and photographic presentations. In a nutshell, three-dimensional imagery is a fully rendered graphic that emulates rounded reality. …

What do social media and Santa Anita have in common? Both have a variety of post times. That’s right. There are right moments and wrong moments to publish your glorious content on Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest. During the right moments, users are available and ready to receive everything you’ve got; during the wrong, you might as well talk …

A single, tiny mark … that’s all it takes. Once it’s blazing on your brand’s Instagram page, expect to grab more users than ever before. While grabbing, you’ll be giving yourself a splendid opportunity to rack up new conversions by the truckload. The all-important mark is a checkmark – the one, true sign you’ve been duly verified by Instagram. Acquiring …

Throughout the known universe, one of the rock-solid truths has been — you never can have enough of a good thing. It’s only proper, then, that digital marketers adhere to this principle in the interest of maximizing success. Implementing this worthy principle certainly can provide a big boost to digital content. A dazzling post shouldn’t be dropped into a slot …

Ask anyone to name the origin of digital communications, and you’d probably get answers ranging from Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and maybe even Xerox. All excellent guesses, but way off the mark. The origin of digital communication took place decades before Jobs and Gates founded their respective companies. Most information theorists place that important date in the year 1937. During that …

When brand marketers get to work, products and services rule. Features, benefits, cost-savings, and other relevancies are stressed to the breaking point. Should be enough for consumers, right? What more could they want? Plenty, according to current observations. Apparently, what these picky folks desire — besides quality craftsmanship and a mouth-watering price — is a chance to connect with something …

Snappy images might impress the photo-hungry; but, in general, only a few slick words will drive action. The action driver is known as a caption. A few words that go a long, long way… when done right. Captions determine movement – will visitors interact with the post, or will they take an early flight to another destination? The answer frequently …

Online reviews are a golden bonus for brands. But how do you persuade (hopefully) satisfied customer to let loose with the praise? Fortunately, there’s one surefire way to get the job done, a strategy proven to work through the ages – offer a juicy bribe. Works like a charm almost every time. So, you wish to avoid this questionable measure. …

For certain products, ecommerce brands offer customers a time-tested option familiar to many offline retailers – ‘try before you buy’. A good, practical policy, as it allows hours of fun-filled pre-buy sampling. If expectations are met, dollars are spent. When meeting those expectations, the trial product boosts comfort and trust levels to the buying point. Prior to this stage, however, …

Are you beefing up digital content with video? You’re not alone. More and more businesses and marketers are leaping onto the video bandwagon. Why the rush? User patterns tell a compelling story. People aren’t just watching video; they’re devouring it. Recent stats reveal that the average user spends about 16 hours per week watching videos. Research also shows that about …

What’s your most important web page? Many, if not most, digital marketers would answer ‘the one they call home!’ Here’s where the customer journey often begins, after all. Hard to argue with that. But what about where the journey continues? Marketers need some means of maintaining continued attention to their brand well into the future. For this purpose, nothing surpasses …

Many brand marketers cling to the consumer research principle; namely, most users conduct intensive product research before making a decision. No info, no response. Hence, the flood of product content to satisfy appetites. True, researchable data is crucial to many. Therefore, free flowing content is vital. New findings, however, suggest the inadequacy of information alone. Often, it seems, psychology plays …

Your social media posts are pulling in fans and followers by the truckload. Eyeballs are feasting on the content. So what’s going on? For some inexplicable reason, you’re not getting thee expected number of likes. Sure, some are sprinkling in. Still, the inflow is hardly cause for celebration. You anticipated a flood, and you’re getting a trickle. What gives? Could …

When it comes to popularity, one kind of Facebook video stands head and shoulders above the rest. This media champ is the native video, which usually takes the form of an update to a brand’s existing feed or to a designated page. Generally, native videos offer something of irresistible value, such as enlightenment about a topic of interest, or inspiration …

1.6 trillion dollars … that’s the yearly load lost by brands due to customer churn. A reliable measure of loyalty, churn rate reveals the number of customers ditching a company during a specified period of time. No problem, you might be saying. It’s just a matter of luring them back to the camp. Well, OK. It can and has been …

Who buys and who flies? For ecommerce marketers, an excellent indicator of purchase intent is the ‘pages per session’ metric. Calculating this figure is simple mathematics – just add up the total number of pages accessed during a given time period and divide by the total number of visitors. The resulting sum is the average pages visited. Pure gold when …

So, your bounce rate is low, and your world is sunshine and roses. The content campaign is a resounding success … Well, not quite. True, bounce minimalization indicates widespread visitor retention. But there’s more here than meets the screen. Bounce rate is merely an early signal. More work lies ahead. To maximize content effectiveness, strategists must go one better – …

They don’t snatch coffee breaks, ask for salary bumps, or grab quick naps between budget meetings. How do you find and hire such a rare gem? You don’t. You design it. The it is known as a chatbot – that ubiquitous assistant currently expanding the possibilities of digital marketing. For a salary of $0, the bot gets a whole lot …

If only digital marketers could separate the buyers from the browsers – those who are just a marketing nudge away from plunking down the bucks. Short of a crystal ball consultation, however, there’s no available method for spotting the ready-to-convert. Consider yourself lucky if you have such a device. For the rest of us, penetrating insight is required; a window …

Every brand marketer knows this truth — it’s not just what you’re selling, it’s who you’re selling it to. And for that information, the field of demographics is indispensable. But where do you find the customer info so intensely desired? Among the options, three stand out. The first and perhaps most important data source already is at the fingertips of …

Surprised by the results of your digital marketing campaign? Targets missed by a couple of country miles? Don’t fret, sulk, hide, or heap tons of blame on your worthy cohorts. Plans sometimes go away. It’s part of the game. When that curve ball is thrown, brand marketers have two basic choices: ditch the finely-wrought plan, or make necessary adjustments. By …

OK, you know how your brand stacks up against the competition. Sales figures cover that territory nicely. But can you gauge how well the brand is doing internally? Are you progressing sufficiently? Or are you stagnating, or worse – stumbling backwards? You’ll be in the dark about all this unless you establish a set of internal goals known as Key …

Few nagging inconveniences are worse than intrusive marketing – ads that burst into view during content browsing sessions. Or equally agonizing, ads that, well, resemble ads, planted on a web page like a sore thumb – or a nose sticking itself into unauthorized business. For many, if not most, they’re obvious, annoying, and rejection-prone. Which, no doubt, has prompted legions …

Are your ads causing widespread hair-pulling while unleashing anguished cries of “Ugh … Not that one again! Can’t they think of something else?!” Expect this outcome if you’re the most beastly kind of brand marketer on the planet – the ‘one-ad wonder’; the messenger with nothing better up its sleeve than that same old ad repeated over and over on …

There’s no excuse. No brand should allow itself to go stale when it can capitalize on the abundance of transformative options currently available. Those options, grouped in a strategy called ‘rebranding’, can mean the difference between renewed success and abject decline. No question about it. When it’s time for a new you, rebranding is the answer. Now hold on. Before …

Website navigation isn’t measured in minutes; it’s measured in seconds — and nanoseconds. If a brand’s pages load at a snail’s pace, it’s driving away traffic at much more than a snail’s pace. So what’s too slow in the digital world? Believe it or not, the ideal time limit is two seconds. Yes, people expect a page to be fully …

How can brand marketers speak with ultimate authority when crafting content? By demonstrating they have all the answers – whatever the topic. In the realm of content marketing, a pillar page is an excellent means to this worthy end. Intended as a comprehensive overview of information, a pillar page displays clusters of neatly- organized data related to a specified topic. …

Are you overemphasizing the positive when building keyword strategies? Quite possibly. It’s entirely understandable. Every brand strives to identify the power keywords, those gems designed to increase visibility and boost rankings. After all, the closer to the top, the more likely to be seen and clicked. The problem is, during any search query, your brand could get found for the …

It’s the season of sharing. But for digital marketers, the season runs throughout the year. For this group, sharing is what people do with interesting content. Give it a look, then whisk it to your favorite recipients. What’s noteworthy about this phenomenon is the fundamental impulse that drives the generosity — people enjoy sharing data with others. So concluded a …

Where should your next cost-cutting crusade focus itself ? You might set your sites on that most important of assets – customers. Yeah, loyal buyers have a price tag – a price determined by the marketing energy expended to convert them. Generally, the bigger the effort, the bigger the budget dent. Now here’s the good news — big effort doesn’t …

Discover the road to success, and abundant rewards could be in your future. Brand marketers, however, can go one better. They have many roads to success, all of which can and should be traveled simultaneously. The multi-road phenomenon is universally known as omni channel marketing. Utilizing this strategy, brands can blast messaging along a variety of media pathways. The objective, …