TWP Publisher, Author at TotalWeb Partners • Page 3 of 27

September 21, 2022

Experts Share Tips on Strategic Web Design for Successful Digital Marketing

Website is the second most popular channel used for marketing purposes in 2022, according to HubSpot. While it’s important to note that 59% of users, as per Adobe, prefer “beautifully designed’” sites compared to “something simple and plain,” 88% of users won’t return to a website due to poor UX, as reported by Amazon Web Services. Hence, businesses need a website design strategy that combines visual appeal and usability to engage and convert users.

DesignRush, a B2B marketplace connecting businesses with agencies, leveraged its 13,000-agencies-strong network for quick insights – or “QuickSights” – on the strategic web design tips for digital marketing.

1) CAPTURE ABANDONED CARTS VIA EMAIL SIGNUP

Forge Digital Marketing CEO Erin Schnittker Siemek states that installing email integrations and leveraging exit and shopping intent popups to collect emails on websites is a winning combination to capture abandoned carts.

“If you have an eCommerce business, we stress the importance of creating integrations with Klaviyo on your website,” said Siemek. “Design a user experience that converts first and foremost, but the second best thing to [help increase] sales conversion[s] is email signup. [Therefore] structure your website and email integration to capture abandoned carts and use strategic exit intent and shopping intent popups to grow that email list […] A website that uses these techniques can expect to add 30% to their bottom line of revenue by correctly deploying email capture within your web design and development plan.”

2) DECLUTTER YOUR SITE FOR FASTER LOAD TIMES

In the opinion of Rahul Jain, founder of SlashMonk, decluttering is a key tactic to incorporate on websites because it helps improve usability and search engine rankings.

“Speed is key when it comes to website usability,” said Jain. “That’s why one of the best ways to improve [it] is by decluttering your site. By eliminating unnecessary elements and formatting, you can significantly reduce the time it takes your website to load. Not only will this make your website more user-friendly, but it will also boost search engine rankings. So go ahead – clean up your site and see the dramatic improvements it makes in both usability and search engine rankings!”

Tabitha Jean Naylor, owner of TabithaNaylor.com, adds that optimizing websites for fast speed is essential since delays can cost businesses a significant number of leads.

“An extra 5 seconds on your page load time can mean losing 20% of your leads,” said Naylor. “Optimizing website speed will ensure your potential customer stays long enough to engage and realize that they need your product. Compress images, get rid of unnecessary plugins and minify website code for faster speeds.”

September 19, 2022

by TWP Publisher

What Challenges Do Entrepreneurs Face In Digital Marketing?

Marketing Digital Marketing

If you are stepping into the field of digital marketing as an entrepreneur to grow your business then know that it is a great field that can increase your brand awareness but there are some enormous challenges and obstacles for people who are new to this field. Digital marketing is becoming popular with every passing day as its results are better than traditional advertising and it is cost-effective. Plus, the increased penetration of the internet has further helped in the growing popularity of digital marketing.

But there are a lot of challenges for beginners in the field of digital marketing that we are going to discuss shortly. Those entrepreneurs who are new to the field of digital marketing aren’t able to get promising results and their startups fail to do much in digital marketing but worry not. You just need to be careful in this field, keep your ground in front of the challenges that await your way and you will be able to succeed in digital marketing campaigns. So, here are the common challenges that entrepreneurs faced in digital marketing as a beginner:

Insignificant Knowledge About Digital Marketing
Most entrepreneurs and startups don’t have enough knowledge about the field of digital marketing due to which they struggle and mess everything up. It is a common problem, not in the field of digital marketing but in any other field. If you don’t have significant knowledge about a field and you jump right into it then you are going to make things even worse.

To be able to come up with promising results in the field of digital marketing, you should learn more about this vast field, gather some knowledge, and stay updated with the latest digital marketing tools and trends that are being used in this field before you actually jump into this field.

Low Budget
Budget and Capital, are the two things that play a significant role in any business category. Without a budget, no campaign or business can run. In the field of digital marketing, you must have a budget for your marketing campaigns that will help you reach your estimated target. Sometimes, it may be required to boost your content which also requires a budget. So, you have a budget pre-planned for digital marketing or else you will struggle.

Fail To Draw The Attention Of The Targeted Audience
People who don’t have knowledge about the field of digital marketing aren’t able to draw the attention of their targeted audience. To succeed in generating leads, it is important to draw the attention of the targeted audience to your products/services. It is beneficial for your business as it increases its popularity and you also get the attention of the audience that you were targeting.

Based on the products and services that your startup provides, you should have a rough understanding of the interest of your potential audience. Therefore, you should understand the interests of your audience and provide them with content that will catch their attention and will help generate leads. For instance, if you have a startup program similar to Omegle then targeting those people who wish to meet new people would be the ideal choice with content that they wish to see.

Ignore ROI
Another challenge or mistake you can say that startup owners make is that they ignore the ROI or Return On Investment. They start a marketing campaign and don’t even measure the progress of their campaign and whether it is generating results or not. Determining the ROI is helpful to measure how good your investment is turning out to be or not. If the ROI is good then it shows that you are going with a good strategy but if ROI is bad then you need to change your marketing strategies.

Unfortunately, people who are new to this field ignore the ROI due to which they are unable to predict the appropriate return on their investment and don’t make any changes to their marketing strategies. You wouldn’t see startups like Chatroulette making such a mistake.

September 14, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

E-Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing Email Marketing

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Marketers use various strategies for firms to market and raise brand awareness. Social media marketing and email marketing are two of the most popular and successful ways to accomplish marketing objectives. Both are magnificent in their own ways. As of 2021, there were around 3.78 billion users of social media and 4.1 billion users of email globally, according to Statista. This amount represents about 48% of the world’s population.

Social networking is becoming more and more popular every day. Nevertheless, we are unable to control how emails affect their users’ ability to transact. The issue at hand is which is superior. Which of the two can influence the target audience more effectively?

What is Email Marketing?
A type of digital marketing called email marketing uses emails to spread brand recognition. It informs customers about the newest items, discounts, and services to help them remember the brand. The following are some advantages of email marketing:

Strengthen Relationships, Loyalty & Trust
Building individualised interactions with present and potential clients through email marketing is a terrific strategy. The readers of your newsletters and emails will come to know, like, and trust you and your business if you write them well. Consumers also do business with trusted companies.
Increase Brand Awareness & Stay Top of Mind
Consumers are reminded of your business, products, and services every time an email is delivered to them. This helps customers remember your business when it’s time to make a purchase.
Segmentation
Email marketing allows you to establish lists of each market segment based on demographics, interests, previous behaviour, etc. This allows you to develop marketing messages that are specifically tailored to each target audience. With the help of this incredibly successful marketing strategy, each segment will closely relate to your marketing message.
Low Cost & Good ROI
Comparatively speaking to other marketing strategies, email marketing is relatively affordable. For every dollar invested, email marketing typically returns $44.25 in profit.
Easy to Use
An email campaign may be set up quite quickly. You may upload subscriber information, segment your lists, use email templates, fill in your content, and send out emails to subscribers regularly using the many resources and software providers for email marketing available online. Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are two of our preferred email marketing services providers. Instead of using a pre-made template, having a customised email template that aligns with your company’s brand can be much more successful.

September 12, 2022

by TWP Publisher

What Digital Marketers Should Know About Direct Mail

E-Marketing, Marketing Digital Marketers

Since I founded Gunderson Direct roughly 20 years ago, I’ve had a number of conversations where I’ve defended direct mail to digital marketers. It seems that our channel is just not as well understood as most others, so I’ve done my share of explaining.

Here is just some of what I say to help them understand how direct mail can help them.

• It has unique targeting capabilities: Cookie concerns? IP identification issues? A physical address is the most reliable contact information for prospecting. Direct mail datasets are appended with thousands of attributes—both demographic and behavioral—that are available for targeting. And you can apply AI and machine learning to model builds across numerous databases to constantly improve direct mail’s look-alike targeting capabilities.

• You can go bigger and cheaper (per impression): Scaling in digital typically means upping your bids to compete for a relatively fixed ad inventory. There is no bidding war to get into your prospect’s physical mailbox. In fact, the direct mail industry is set up to reward companies that scale, offering ever-improving manufacturing and data efficiencies as quantities increase. Scale a DM program, and your cost per impression typically drops.

• Omnichannel DM strategies can boost your response: The same data used to target a prospect’s mailbox can be used to target them digitally. Automated display (no cookies needed) and email touches, combined with the USPS’ free Informed Delivery program, can strategically surround the physical delivery of printed mailing withs additional impressions. We’ve found that these “digital surrounds” can improve overall campaign response by as much as 40%.

• Direct mail stands out: It’s often said that the average consumer encounters as many as 10,000 ads a day. Compare that to how many pieces of mail are delivered to your home each day. Importantly, ads in digital and traditional channels often interrupt your entertainment or information consumption, so they are often missed and easily dismissed. But direct mail consumption takes place away from a screen and can be reviewed at a prospect’s leisure.

• It makes an impression: People depend on physical mail to receive information from government and business institutions, making it a trusted source of communications. Furthermore, research shows that physical ads are remembered more quickly and elicit a stronger emotional response than digital ads.

August 3, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Which Is Better For Ecommerce: On-Page SEO Or Link Building?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO

Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Taha in Chicago, who asks:

My question is on ecommerce SEO. Currently, I am working as an SEO Executive for an ecommerce brand. They have zero content on the site and their total backlink profile is around 1,000 links (which is nothing compared to competitors).

Which area should I focus on first in order to rank category pages? Should I go for the content and on-page optimizations or create backlinks to compete with my competitors’ profiles?

Taha, great question.

The short answer is: you should start with content and on-page optimization.

Now, let me give you the long answer, which applies to more than just the category pages you mentioned.

Start With On-Page SEO
Backlinks are important and we know they are part of the ranking algorithm.

However, you must have optimized content on the website so the search engines know what to rank your website for.

Below is a brief checklist on what to focus on in terms of on-page optimization before you start investing time in link building.

Determine Your Keywords & Themes
If you haven’t already, spend some time identifying your keywords.

Go from broad to narrow as you create your list, but keep in mind that relevancy is the most important consideration.

Even as you identify broad terms, though, they should still be targeted and relevant to your categories and products.

August 1, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Why Having A User-First Approach To SEO Is Important

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Optimization

In the search engine optimization business, we spend so much time thinking about Google algorithms, sitemaps, and backlinks that we sometimes lose sight of the primary goal: providing useful information to human visitors.

In the past, it was easy to understand why. You could cram your page with keywords, slap on a few meta tags, and voila! Your page was on the first page of search engine results.

Google rightfully recognized this wasn’t the best way to provide top-quality answers to search queries, so it adapted its algorithms. Evidence of Google’s interest in improving user experience (UX) is found with updates like Panda in February 2011, Core Web Vitals, and other core updates that happen regularly.

That’s not to say you can completely forgo aspects of traditional SEO and that keywords no longer matter. Search engines still take foundational SEO attributes into account.

But organic search now also depends on implementing a user-first approach.

So how do you do that? Here is a list of five steps you can take to make your site more user-friendly, and hopefully climb further up the search engine results page rankings.

July 27, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Web hosting for SEO: Why it’s important

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Website Content, Website Design Practices Web hosting

Want to know an easy way to speed up and improve the overall performance of your website?

Invest in good hosting.

Ignorance is no longer an excuse for any company to use a cheap web host.

Website performance is a critical element that can help improve your rankings, traffic and conversions.

This guide will cover everything you need to understand about why web hosting is important for SEO.

What is website hosting
A website hosting service provider, or web host, is a service that offers the technology required for a website to be viewed online.

Think of a web host as the home base of your website. Websites or webpages are stored on special computers called servers, and through the server your webpages get connected and delivered to internet browsers.

So, when users want to view your website, all they have to do is type your website address or domain into their browser.

When building a website, companies typically invest a lot of time and resources on design, development, digital marketing and SEO.

But web hosting is one area that tends to be an afterthought.

If you are willing to invest in making sure the website looks good and driving traffic to it, why not also ensure that the actual website is fast, functional and flexible?

Using a high-quality web host can maximize your conversion rates, along with other helpful benefits.

How web hosting benefits businesses
If you want a website for your business, then you will need a web host. Although web hosting is usually left at the back of a business’ mindset, it is crucial for your online presence.

A reliable web host can give your company a variety of benefits, such as:

Improved site performance.
Effective data management.
Enhanced security.
High uptime.

In short, investing in a reliable web host is wise – and should help grow your business.

July 25, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Web design trends for creative portfolio websites

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Design

As artists, we all have something in common: We need an online portfolio to showcase our (design) skills, talent and creativity. A portfolio website also helps clients or employers to imagine what they can expect when they hire you. But how can you make your portfolio stand out?

Before you start designing your website, make sure to complete these three things:

Step 1: Think about what goals you want to achieve with your portfolio website.
Step 2: Pick your best work.
Step 3: Tell a story.

In other words, decide what information your portfolio must include to speak to potential clients or employers. Then, wrap it into a story about yourself and your work.

Once you got that lined up, let’s start with the actual design of the portfolio website. The following UX design trends will make your website glow up in no time!

Choose a simple and minimal design
Too many visual elements can be overwhelming. A clear and minimal design, on the other hand, improves your website’s navigation. Uncluttered pages make your work shine, as they guide visitors to focus on the elements you want them to focus on. If your portfolio is rather cluttered, consider giving it a simpler design. In some cases, this can improve user experience, which also has a positive effect on search engine optimization and your search engine rankings.

Add interactivity
Today’s websites are more than static pages. Everything is getting faster and more dynamic, and so are websites. Adding interactive elements to your portfolio gives it a unique design and makes it stand out. If you’re rather inexperienced in web design, start out by experimenting with interactive elements such as color shifts or animated fonts.

Create a prominent “About Me” page
The first thing a visitor of your portfolio wants to see is your profile. They want to get to know you and your story. By prominently placing your “About Me” section at the start of your website, you can draw visitors in. They might spend more time on your website, which is also one of the factors that improve your website’s search engine visibility.

Add a headshot
To pep up your profile, you can add a large headshot. This helps your visitors to connect with you and your character upon opening your website. It also signals your visitors that they are looking at a portfolio. Next to your headshot photo, you can place interesting information about yourself and your work.

Whitespace
When it comes to designing the portfolio layout, make sure to add a lot of whitespace between the elements. The current trend of minimalistic design goes hand in hand with a clear layout. By adding lots of whitespace to your portfolio, you can highlight certain works and improve readability.

November 29, 2021

by TWP Publisher

4 Reasons to Use Dynamic Search Ads

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) search engine optimization (SEO), SEO

Dynamic search ads access your website content and deploy artificial intelligence to generate headlines, bids, and targeted search terms automatically. These easy-to-employ text ads are the Swiss Army knife of digital promotion: They work well in many situations.

Moreover, dynamic search ads (DSAs) are similar in concept to search engine optimization.

Something Like SEO

For SEO, you’ve carefully selected keywords and entities for all of your important pages. You focused on the technical side, ensuring that Google and other search engines can index your pages. You’ve also optimized the pages’ content, making them high converting.

In the end, you trust the search engine to present a specific page to a potential customer when that person submits a related query.

DSAs are similar.

When someone types a term into Google that closely matches the keywords and entities found on one of your pages, Google Ads dynamically creates a relevant ad and presents it.

Advertisers can optimize DSAs for sending traffic to a website or, if you have conversions set up, to generate ecommerce sales.

DSAs are a striking example of marketing AI. There are multiple reasons to use them.

4 Reasons to Use DSAs

No organic rankings. One of the reasons to pay for any search ad is to garner traffic for a term your website does not rank for organically — or at least not rank on the first page.

Unlike SEO, however, DSAs do not need from advertisers a list of keywords. Google Ads or Microsoft Ads do that for you.

Google could use its index of your site or a page feed to target landing pages.

The page feed takes the form of a CSV spreadsheet with a column for the page URL and a column for custom labels. Advertisers can use these labels to build ad groups within a DSA campaign.

Large business. One could argue that a well-organized, keyword-focused search campaign sending visitors to a popular, conversion-optimized landing page will outperform a DSA.

November 28, 2021

by TWP Publisher

What are the Main Web Design Trends of 2021?

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Design Trends

The web design industry is evolving rapidly, and if you don’t follow the trends, you’ll get left behind. Try telling today’s generation about flash menus and border ornaments and they’ll stare at you as if you’re some sort of cave person. If you’re thinking of designing a website in 2021, you need to conform to what’s hot and make sure you avoid what’s not. Of course, you can try to get ahead of the curve, but it would be wise to stick closely to mainstream ideas.

Thinking of Creating a Website?

Maybe you’ve just started a business and you want to develop an online presence. Or perhaps you’ve got an established company and you want to modernize or move your pages. Either way, you’ll need to be aware of the design trends in the industry this year.

Anyone can create a free website easily using online tools, with templates that allow you to put everything in the right place and make a professional site that you’re proud of. Experimenting with free designs first could be great for startups, before moving on to paid services to access more advanced features.

Before you begin, it’s wise to do a bit of market research and see what the leaders are doing in your industry. Mirroring the best in the business is a common strategy, and this is how popular trends in web design come about. So, what are the main techniques that seem to be abundant this year?

Horizontal Scrolling

Yes, you read that right. Horizontal scrolling is back in vogue. This was once considered a no-no in web design circles, but the concept is back in style now and proving to be popular. This form of navigating pages wasn’t user-friendly in the past, but it fits perfectly with smartphones and tablets where side swiping is a natural move. It’s also compatible with devices like Apple’s Magic Mouse, which allows users to intuitively move across the page.

Home Societe is one site that has broken the mold in recent times, and its hip layout is one that other designers will want to follow. Instead of navigating down the page, viewers are guided to the right each time. It’s a stunning way to display all the stylish content on the page.

No Set Structure

Square is a perfect example of how web designers are beginning to think outside of the box. This is an incredibly cool page that has introduced a world of new possibilities when it comes to structuring. Instead of clicking on boring tabs, players can navigate around using the cursor and then click on the various links they stumble across on the way. It has gamification feel to it, and it is seriously enjoyable.

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