Seven Elements Every Inbound Marketing Campaign Needs

In recent years, outbound marketing (when businesses tried to cold call or reach out in some other way to potential customers) has taken a back set to inbound marketing (where businesses focus on offering value and letting customers come to them). Part of it is that consumers today are savvier and inherently suspicious of people trying to sell them something. Today’s average consumer prefers to seek out the product or service they need themselves. The following seven elements are all things your business’s inbound marketing strategy will need to succeed.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Long gone are the days of flipping through phonebooks to find local businesses. Search engines are the new gatekeepers in the world of business and your success will directly correlate to how far up or down the search results page your business is. It should be every company’s goal to be at the very top of the search results page. One option is to target specific keywords and pay to make sure your website is listed in the sponsored search results at the very top. But the most important way is to have a solid understanding of how these search engines’ algorithms work to prioritize certain websites over others so that you can increase the odds of being at the top of the list.

Social Media presence

After search engines like Google, social media platforms are the next place people go to find local businesses. Social media is no longer just for friends and family to stay connected. It’s a great way for businesses to stay in the public eye and interact with customers on a daily basis. You need to make it easy for customers to find you across all of the relevant social media platforms.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing

Though PPC could be considered outbound marketing since you’re paying to place ads, it has some overlap with inbound marketing since you’re usually trying to place those ads on influencer blogs where your ideal customers are already looking for info relating to your business’s industry.

Excellent landing pages

Whether they’re clicking on a link in an email or text message, clicking on a link from an affiliate site, or finding you on Google, when they click on that link to get on your website, the landing page needs to keep them from leaving. A good landing page will be rather minimalistic usually containing just one key call to action that you need to get them started on the path to eventually purchase and become a customer.

A good content strategy

A good content strategy is at the heart of an inbound marketing campaign because it’s where you’re offering value to your potential customers and asking for nothing in return. The goal of content marketing is to take the time to produce high quality, relevant, and valuable content that people will want to seek out and see more of in the future. You want people to subscribe to your blog and newsletters, and to go to you when they want an opinion from good authority about a given subject.

Email marketing

Through email marketing, businesses can compile a database of loyal customers who have given their permission to receive regular correspondence with a business. It’s a great alternative to printed mailers and newsletters and can be a great content marketing channel and coupon distribution method.

SMS (text message) marketing

Like email marketing, text message marketing (or SMS marketing) allows businesses to build up a loyal customer base. While it’s more expensive per message than email, it’s also much more effective because of the significantly higher open and click-through rates. SMS can be used to distribute mobile coupons as well as micro content, order status updates, appointment reminders, and any time sensitive information that a business might want to communicate with their most loyal customers.

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Source: forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/09/13/six-key-elements-of-an-effective-inbound-marketing-strategy/#131bdc88326f

Chatbots and the Hospitality Industry are a Match Made in Heaven

Businesses of all kinds are discovering the many benefits that chatbots have to offer them. One industry in articular that’s especially well-suited for chatbots is the hospitality. Here’s a look at five ways that chatbots can help with businesses in the hospitality industry.

Automated reservations

Making reservations at a hotel is already pretty easy thanks to the internet. Either visit the business’s site directly or choose any third-party booking site to make your reservation. But some people prefer the experience of talking through a reservation or they have questions that need to be answered before booking. Instead of having to call up the property and tying up a front desk clerk, the person could open up a messaging app on their smartphone and initiate a conversation with that company’s chatbot. The person can ask questions, compare pricing for different days, make a final selection, and make the reservation all with the help of that chatbot who will communicate that booking to the property’s reservations software.

User behavior analysis

Another advantage of chatbots over front desk clerks are their ability to remember every detail about every customer they help, ever. Chatbots can get a sense of a person’s preferences. Are they typically traveling with pets. Do they require a smoking room or a non-smoking? One larger bed or two smaller ones? This creates a more personalized booking experience as a chatbot can come into the interaction with a pretty good understanding of what the customer wants.

Upselling

Upgrades like a room with a better view or a multi-room suite complete with jacuzzi tub are where many businesses in the hospitality industry really make their money. But customers are wary of upgrades especially when they can sense the urgency in a reservations specialist’s voice. Live representatives can get a little anxious about upselling when a commission is at stake. Chatbots don’t need a commission and they can offer various upgrades to customers in a less-pushy tone.

Top-of-mind awareness (TOMA)

Top-of-mind awareness (or TOMA) is something that every brand strives for, even if they’re not familiar with the term. TOMA is about being the first company on a person’s mind when you mention the industry that company belongs to. When a customer thinks “hotel,” you want them to think of your brand immediately. Chatbots can help with TOMA because they’re ever present on customers’ favorite messaging platforms and are always just a couple of taps on a smartphone away.

Customer support

Finally, chatbots are great for the hospitality industry because it’s an industry where customer service is especially crucial. Customers are quick to write a bad review for any business who doesn’t provide excellent service. Need to modify or cancel an existing reservation, a chatbot can walk you through it. Already in the hotel and need something brought to the room, tell the chatbot. This frees up hotel staff to handle only the most challenging situations since chatbots are taking care of everything else and keeping guests happy.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter .com

Source: rnews. co. za/article/16228/chatbots-and-the-hospitality-industry

Eight Things Your Small Business Needs To Be Doing To Increase Content Marketing Engagement

The goal of any content marketing campaign isn’t to get readers to read any one specific article, you want to create loyal followers of your brand who will await every new article or video you publish, who will share your content with friends and family across various social media platforms. To create this kind of user engagement with the content you publish, you need to do more than just create awesome content. Here are eight other things you need to be doing.

Faster loading times for webpages

In marketing lingo, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing just one page on that site. Ideally, when someone ends up on a blog article, they read another and another. Or even better, they go to other parts of your website to learn more about your brand and maybe check out your products. The bounce rate doubles when load times increase from one second to six seconds. People don’t want to stick around if they have to wait more than a few seconds every time they try to click over to another page.

Mobile website load times

If you think load times are important, on traditional websites, it’s nothing compared to the importance of load times on mobile websites. Half of website visitors bounce after a load time exceeds three seconds. Mobile users are less patient than their desktop/laptop counterparts.

A high quality, mobile friendly website

Even if your content is attracting people to your page, they’ll have a negative opinion of your brand if the quality of your site doesn’t measure up to the quality of your content. Your site needs to be well designed, following principles of symmetry and organization but also contrast with an attractive color scheme. Your site should be easy to navigate so that the most important things are displayed prominently. You either need a completely separate mobile version of your website or at the very least, a responsive design site that will properly display your website on mobile devices. Images need to be of a high quality–no stock photos and no low resolution images that will appear blurry on larger screens.

A second set of eyeballs

Establishing trust is a huge part of content marketing. You want readers of your blog to see you as a reliable source of good information. If your content has typos or mechanical/grammatical errors, it reflects badly on your brand even if the content itself is solid. Even if you’re choosing to tackle the content marketing yourself, you should be paying someone else to proofread it before publishing.

Clear key performance indicators (KPIs)

One of the challenging things about content marketing is that it can be hard to measure the direct effects that your content marketing efforts are having on your brand. Part of the problem is that many companies start a company blog because they know it’s what they’re supposed to do but they don’t really know why and what they’re trying to accomplish. A good content marketing strategy will have well-defined key performance indicators that are monitored to track effectiveness of the content marketing. If new customers are what you’re after, then unique visitors is going to be a more important metric than total website visits. If a solid, loyal customer base is the goal, then fewer unique visitors and higher overall website visits is what you’re striving for.

Cast a wider net

Just because you’re publishing great content, it doesn’t mean your target audience is finding it. You need to make sure your content is reaching the people you’re targeting. You may need to do some influencer and affiliate marketing so that bloggers social media personalities with a more established viewership can help you get recognized.

More channels

Another way to cast a wider net is to diversify the channels you’re using to publish content. The company blog on the the company webpage is often the only form of content marketing that a company invests in when this should be seen as just one part of a wider effort. Video content can be uploaded to Youtube or directly to social media platforms. Live streams, tutorials, infographics, and even micro-content sent via SMS are all great ways to diversify your content marketing and reach a wider audience. You can even recycle some of your content to reuse it on various channels.

A “you’re-never-finished” attitude

Even when you’re pleased with the results you’re seeing from your content marketing efforts–you’re getting plenty of web traffic, customers are coming back for more, and your posts are being “liked,” commented on, and shared across social media platforms, you can’t stop improving your content marketing efforts. You should always be paying attention to metrics and fine-tuning your strategy.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: inc.com/molly-reynolds/7-impactful-ways-to-increase-content-engagement.html