Christmas seems to be around the corner, and all of a sudden, the status of your marketing calendar is giving you a shock and your Google Calendar starts to explode with a holiday marketing reminders. The unavoidable question is “How am I going to capitalize on the holiday sales to increase traffic?

With the coming of Christmas, the festive season is around the corner. Thus, it is time to shop online and get the best discount and attractive offers proposed by leading brands for their products and services too. To increase sales and brand awareness, many e-commerce companies have announced a number of exciting holiday plans or offers for their potential customers. These e-commerce companies have designed useful email marketing campaigns that help them to target the audience online and let them know about the new launches and discounts that are offered on buying specific products online. Not only this, but it also allows them to take part into some of the online marketing programs with great zeal. Despite the rise in popularity of social media in e-commerce, email marketing remains one of the most powerful ecommerce marketing tools to engage prospects and customers. Creating an effective marketing campaign can be quite daunting, especially for smaller businesses that are limited in resources. It is seen that November and December bring in 30% more revenue than non-holiday months.
Here are some tips to stay ahead and ensure that your holiday marketing strategy is a successful one:

• Strategize with SEO

If you are looking out to make this holiday season a successful one, executing an SEO Strategy is an absolute must. To ensure success, you must use the SEO platforms that you are comfortable with such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, and/or Bing Webmaster tools. Now, it is time to start creating your holiday promotional content that includes new landing pages, banners, and other designs. Content is seen to be the key to SEO success, so one must make sure that all relevant holiday content is covered.

• Use Social Media

Some people use social media marketing techniques, now is the time to market these channels for maximum brand awareness. Social platforms have become a part of our everyday life and you can use this platform to advertise your upcoming holiday deals. To make it more attractive and to ensure that you crack more deals, make sure that your marketing campaign reflects it all. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, etc are a few famous social platforms that will be useful to promote your marketing campaign.

• Email Marketing is a good option

Email marketing is seen to be one of the most effective methods for promoting your business and that too especially during the festive season. A valuable method that allows you to connect, engage, and promote efficiently across a wide expanse. This marketing strategy can be used to advertise your holiday promotions and discounts. You can even send promotion flashing emails.

• Personalized user experience

Personalizing emails is also one of the most effective ways to grab the attention of your customers. Personalization improves click through rates. Personalized subject lines and calls to action are especially convincing. As per studies, emails with personalized subject lines have 26% higher unique open rates than non-personalized emails.

• Use paid Advertising

Paid Advertising guarantees more traffic on your website. You can also promote your products and services on Google Shopping ad services.

• Offer competitive discounts and promotions

The holiday season is a tough time that has a tough time going on between organizations. Therefore, in order to stand out from the rest of your competitors make sure that your business stands apart by offering some flashy sales and attractive prices. Create promotional banners to ensure that customers do not miss your various sales. During the holiday season, everyone is on a bargain hunt, so dedicate a lot into this area to ensure maximum profits.

• Test Site Speed

The best thing that can help you to achieve extraordinary success is to make sure to have an e-commerce site with the fastest site speed. Most of the customers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

• Prepare for SEO changes

As brands approach this holiday season, everyone wants to re-optimize their SEO strategy to earn higher rankings and more conversions to let your products sparkle in the market. Go over the list of previous years and plan your keywords accordingly. Once the keywords have been selected, start writing relevant content on the same.

It is never too early to start planning your holiday marketing strategy from today. Get started now to ensure that your 2016 Festive Season becomes a successful one. Keep the above mentioned tips in mind and design a perfect holiday marketing campaign for your potential customers all across the globe. To have successful email marketing campaign make sure to take care of the email’s design, content, subject lines and a lot more.

SEO

Capitalize on Search Plug-ins for Your WordPress Site

December 18, 2015 brainwork Leave a comment

In case you use a WordPress site, with gazillions of articles residing in the repository, then there is a need to integrate it with a powerful search feature, intended for simplifying the search of specific posts by regular visitors. In many instances, the default WordPress search feature renders the purpose of visitors, who visit the site for a specific post, futile. As a result, you would need a customized solution, especially when you turn out loads of posts every day. Search functionality and user’s search experience, both can be improved with plug-ins, available with WordPress.

Here are some of the top search plug-ins for an enhanced visitor experience:

Relevanssi

Counted among the most widely used search plug-ins for a better search experience, Relevanssi is equipped with a feature for an improved display of search results. Also, it lets visitors employ search based on partial results. For instance, when you search on “append”, it will render the results for “appendicitis” as well. As the name suggests, it churns out the sorted results, based on relevance, instead of date. It comes handy for visitors aiming for better posts for a keyword, regardless of date.

Custom Google Search

This plug-in feature replaces the standard WordPress search with a Google-powered search. Some of the notable features are:

Customized interface for more appealing search
Facility to limit the search to any number of sites
An inbuilt widget integrating a search box to sidebar
Numerous options for the display of search results, pop-up, for instance

With numerous styles and themes to make a pick, you can accommodate your page style into a search box, resulting in consistent layout and appearance. Further, it is worth noting that as the results are Google-driven, you are assured of the accuracy of search results.

Dave’s WordPress Live Search

If you seek something which delivers instantaneous results while typing in expression in the search field, then you should contemplate Dave’s WordPress Live Search. This plug-in triggers an instantaneous query into the WordPress database while visitors type search words. Also, it turns out the sorted list of posts in response to the words typed. This indicates that you will be yielded refined results, as deem fit what is typed.

SEO

Real-Time Content for Overwhelming Traffic

November 30, 2015 brainwork Leave a comment

“Content is King” is a dictum that has held the field since the digital landscape grew out of its cloistered dimensions to gain a wide prominence. However, it is not the case that content strategies, combined with painstaking efforts, always bear due fruits. Some marketers live in fool’s paradise and overlook the fact that content creation is principally geared towards directing the traffic to a targeted location. Further, if the traffic goes off the drift, purpose of content creation is defeated. Considering the fact that competitors endeavour to occupy a major chunk of space on the digital terrain, marketers struggle to counter them in a lack of content ideas to steer their boat. However, real-time live blogging grease the skids in this regard, to a significant extent.

Exploit Real-Time Twitter Chats Recaps

Twitter chats serve as a connecting link to an audience, engaged in a conversation, relevant to your brand. In many instances, twitter chats feature more than 3,000 tweets within their scheduled time slot. In addition, twitter recaps cut down on time and efforts invested into creating relevant information content.

Here are some of the points that should not be overlooked:

Make it a point to jot down good notes during the twitter chats. It may seem challenging in the first instance if you try to participate at the same time. However, your efforts would get doubled if you sift through the information later.
If your post is due for the next day to get live, just ensure that people, you have quoted, are acquainted with the fact that they have been featured. Further, prompt them as well into passing the words down.

Newsjack Relevant Topics

Fundamentally, newsjacking means pitching into a trending topic and contribute something valuable to the thread of conversation. As a result, you need not rummage through a stream of internet marketing ideas and simply share your perspective. Some of the eminent brands in the industry have mastered the art of exploiting newsjacking to their SEO purpose and have born due dividends of it.

Newsjacking, being a potent social media instrument, can double up as a major driving force to direct traffic back to your content by live-blogging the concerned post. News sites like Search Engine Journal, for instance, are adept at creating content on the trending topic and spread the information across wide, sprawling digital overland.

Here are some of the tips to employ newsjacking in the best way possible:

Act on your Feet

Invest painstaking efforts in widening the reach to your content. Further, get acquainted with content creation hierarchy ahead of time to get the content out quickly.

Show your Acumen

Although edgy campaign through newsjacking will steer your ship in the right direction, so not turn a blind eye to the fact that newsjacking something which projects the weird image of your brand will be damning to your prospects. So, act shrewd while newsjacking.

Wrap up with Call-to-Action

Once your brand goes viral in a conversation, make it a point that you incorporate something which leads the viewers to the concerned location. A call-to-action will serve your purpose in this regard.

These two aforementioned strategies will pull your content down across the audience and simplify the content creation process. As a result, you can commit the time thus saved into distributing your new content.

SEO

Strategies to Optimize B2C Lead Generation

November 5, 2015 brainwork Leave a comment

In case your business employs paid search for the B2C lead generation, you must be acquainted with intricacies and overheads associated with paid search options such as Google Adwords. Drawing in visitors to your website and prompting them into clicking on your ad before following it up stresses on a highly strategized paid search campaign.

Here, we have set out effective strategies to seize leads through search advertising:

Align your Campaign with RLSA’s

RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) is a feature, which comes with capabilities abound and makes use of your website’s remarketing lists to reel in leads to your website. RLSA bid adjustments convey Google that you are not hesitant to shell out some percentage more for the click generated by a former site visitor.

Test an RLSA-Only Competitor Campaign

Once you have gained an once-over of RLSA, the next step involves reaching out to visitors, who have overlooked you in favour of your competitors. As running advertisements on competitor terms can be an annoying proposition, and it might trigger a string of CPC (Cost-per-click) hikes among every participant involved. The only feasible solution to regain potential leads amidst all this digital chaos is an RLSA-only Competitor Campaign.

Lay Stress on Query-based Campaign

A well-structured lead generation campaign will yield the proportional results. Also, it is worth noting that your campaigns and ad groups should be central to your target customer’s online searches. Due efforts should be employed into bringing the relevance of your campaign to your goal of widening the customer base. Such efforts will help you to dig up what lies underneath the rocks and deliver the message, which strikes the chord with prospective customer’s online searches.

SEO

Dig Deep into Capabilities of Google Analytics

October 14, 2015 brainwork Leave a comment

Google is way ahead of the pack when it comes to free analytics solutions in the market, despite the fact that it has some trivial limitations. A number of webmasters focuses their attention on the basic graphs and stats yielded by Google Analytics (GA) and can easily turn blind to other advanced features of this amazing analytics solution. Additionally, although it is equipped with capabilities abound, all the features are easily implemented.

Significance of Conversions over Traffic

Traffic is a matter of primary concern for a good number of webmasters. However, it is worth noting that conversions take the precedence over traffic if you seek to establish a strong web presence. Regardless of the number of visitors on your website, it will render your purpose futile if they opt not to subscribe or buy from you. As an aspiring marketer, you work relentlessly towards the improvement in your conversion rates. However, it is imperative to keep a close watch on conversions in order to gauge statistically significant improvements over a course of time.

Goals in Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, conversions are called “goals”. These are specific actions by visitors on your website, which are worth tracking. There exist only a few options as far as goals are concerned. However, it comes with a facility for customized features. Activities or actions prompted by a visitor, including loading an exclusive page, rendered following a sign-up for an email newsletter, are deemed as the best for a webmaster to keep a tab on.

SEO

The Untapped Power of Online Marketing

July 7, 2015 brainwork Leave a comment

With more and more lives plugging into the digital sphere, most reputed brands have started realizing the importance of establishing an online presence. However, saying that, it is worth pointing out that many of these brands still lack the power to carve an effective presence online.

Reasons Why Your Business Needs Online Marketing

The online world is dynamic, fluid and evolving at an incredible rate. Therefore, brands that wish to drive potential consumers through online marketing channels are at boom. Here are the top five reasons why businesses across the globe are looking for a strong online marketing campaign.

Personalization: Unlike other forms of advertisement, where promotional messages reach a wider audience. Online marketing campaigns are far more customer-centric. Based on the browsing, purchasing history and preferences, such campaigns reflect highly convertible, targeted ads.

Reach consumers with specific interests: Online marketing appeals to specific interests, rather than a broad demographic. Therefore, through online marketing, advertisement can be served according to the age, gender, geography and other general factors.

Cost effectiveness: When compared to conventional modes of advertisement, online marketing campaigns are extremely cost effective. For example: a free listing on Google Locals can be just as effective as a costly Yellow Pages advertisement.

Long-Term Results: Online campaigns increase web visibility, thereby giving a brand significant head start over competitors.

When people view an advertisement, either on a newspaper or magazine, they usually tend to discard it for an interesting article or news. Online marketing campaigns encourage visitors to take action, visit their website and read more about the product or service being offered. Give your business a boost and kick-start your advertisement campaign by contacting a reputed online marketer right away!

SEO

3 Reasons Why SEO Still Rules The Roost

June 12, 2015 brainwork Leave a comment

Turning the clock a few years back in time, business owners were really concerned about Search Engine optimization. They would spend countless hours on manual link building and White Hat SEO. But that all seemingly faded away with the advent of automated tools such as: Penguin, Xrummer, White Hat SEO etc.

From being a necessity at one point in time, today many rumors have started floating about the usefulness of SEO. Many experts claim that SEO is dead and that all you need is a good website for promotion.

Against these and other myths associated with Search Engine optimization, here are the top three reasons why you should be willing to invest in digital marketing campaigns and White Hat SEO.

Debunking the SEO Myth

It is worth pointing out that in 2015, SEO still stands at the forefront of digital advertisement. Consider SEO as an investment that takes time and money to attract quality traffic. If money and time are properly invested, SEO helps in increasing the ROI due to the following three critical factors.

Accumulating Traffic:

If you are building a website from scratch and looking for quality organic traffic, SEO is the way to go. Websites of small businesses usually experience a 30%, 50% or even 100% growth in organic traffic per year.So, for example a website has 100 unique visitors from organic traffic per month, it is quite realistic to assume that the same website may have 500,700 or even 1000 unique visitors per month through “white hat” SEO techniques.

Multiplier Effect

While there is no sure-way to predict the exact search queries, SEO gives your business a distinct advantage with its multiplier effect. White Hat SEO helps you to exploit search engine algorithms to your advantage. A well planned SEO campaign targets certain subsets of keyword terms relevant to the website’s niche. It automatically targets 100s of different keyword terms that your website will rank for.

Long Term Gains

If you’ve ever spent on Google Adword campaign, you would known that the moment the campaigns are off, the paid traffic that flows also stops. The only way to build a smooth inflow of web traffic is by investing on SEO. SEO campaigns can help you dominate the Google rankings much easier.

SEO

White Hat SEO: An Important Facet Of Business Advertising

May 28, 2015 brainwork Leave a comment

When it comes to web development, you must have heard different pieces of technical jargons such as HTML, PHP, Hosting and VPS etc. SEO is one important aspect of web development that you will hear a lot. As a matter of fact, the whole web-designing industry revolves around it!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and that pretty much sum it up. At its most basic, SEO means optimizing the web page in such a manner that search engines can understand the page more efficiently. Optimizing the page helps you rank your website higher on the search engine results.

That sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are many different factors that an SEO expert has to deal with. For instance, focusing on social media campaigns, Pay Per Clicks (PPC) ad campaigns and link building techniques.

Moreover, the Search Engines keeps changing their algorithm consistently. This not only means that the advertising campaigns need to be reframed, but also that the conventional methods need to be invalidated for optimizing a website. These sorts of changes have lead to terms such as “White Hat” and “Black Hat” in SEO.

Significance of White Hat SEO Techniques

The term hat in SEO has been derived from the old Western concept, where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys had a black hat on. White hat pretty much involves playing by the rule and not trying to game the search engine crawlers. On the other hand, Black Hat SEO is about inciting short term gains.

If you’re looking for quality SEO services, you should look for reputed organizations that abide by White Hat SEO techniques. Of course Black Hat may give your campaign an initial traffic boost, but as soon as Google or any other search engine finds that you’re employing dubious tactics, your rankings may be reversed and in the worst case your site may be de-indexed completely.

If you are approached by an SEO firm that claims to get you on the first page of Google search results in a week, it is advisable keep continuing with your search. Remember, SEO is an exhaustive process that takes a lot of time. It is not a one person process that can be set and forget. It can take months or even years to build your reputation, that depends on the gravity of your targeted keyword.

Internet, SEO

The Effect of Google Algorithms on Marketing

April 24, 2014 brainwork 1 Comment

Without a doubt, Google is one of the most popular search engines in the world, and that is why it comes as no surprise that almost anyone who has a website wants to feature high here. However, at Google innovation is the name of the game, which is why there are constant changes in the existing algorithms that it uses. However, these changes often wreak havoc on the strategies established by other companies.

Here’s a look at how a simple change in Google’s algorithms can affect your website:

Your website might suddenly start looking obsolete and all your SEO strategies might go down the drain.
Your entire website design might suddenly seem out of place.
While all this time, your website used to rank high on Google, now it has gotten pushed to the back of the line.
The content which was considered really good and keyword maximised, is now not as effective as it was.

The knowledge of certain basic factors should make things easier for you:

All the information that you have is still valid and credible. Only certain fundamental basics have changed and what you knew has become slightly more amplified. While certain links might have to be removed altogether, certain will only have to be tweaked.
Marketing using good content will always be important, especially in the days to come. So, if you don’t have an in-house content development and management team, perhaps it is time to get one! It would not harm you to have some guest bloggers on your site, who will keep the general public updated, even if your in-house team does not!
There is no denying that the social media is growing and will continue to rise at a rapid pace. If you are not on the train yet, it would be best that you do it, as soon as possible.
Gone are the days, when marketing was done only via the internet, because today, it has moved to a larger arena. It is important to offer mobile marketing and apps that are mobile friendly as well.

While everyone is in a constant scramble, as to ensure that despite the changes made by the Google team, their website stays on top, there are some things that are in your hands. By taking a few simple steps, there are steps that you can take, to ensure you stay that one step ahead!

It would be best that you hire a professional or a team to handle your website and all the requirements associated with it. While your team might be good, a professional team will know how to tackle issues, much better.
There will be financial expenditures and you need to be prepared for it. This could include expenses incurred for pay per click advertising, social media marketing or something as simple as getting new content developed.
Your website should include information that is absolutely current and ever changing with the emerging trends of the domain. It would be good to include reviews from clients as well as positive testimonials.