TotalWeb Partners Blog

February 6, 2023

Digital marketing: trends for 2023

What are the major digital marketing trends we are likely to see in 2023? No one can say for sure, but based on careful observation of the recent past and without launching into reckless predictions, industry professionals can offer insight into some of the possible developments.

In this post, we will try to identify the trends that might characterize the immediate future of digital marketing. In most cases, these are phenomena that have already existed for a few years but are now unfolding their full potential: more or less subterranean currents of marketing that seem destined to become even more diversified and inclusive.

Marketing that is not just tuned to customers’ imaginations but also capable of taking on their concrete needs.

According to Marketing Insider Group, the most influential digital marketing trends that will take hold in the coming months testify to a renewed focus on all things related to content visualization, and they will especially affect the customer experience and employee engagement.

We can also add, preliminarily, that in order to succeed in fueling the conversation with customers, acquired or potential, marketers will likely need to draw on topics that target audiences may feel are relevant, will need to avoid simplifications in targeting emerging markets (for example, Asian markets, which have grown tremendously over the past decade and are projected to continue to grow over the next decade), or in interacting with cultural groups (such as the highly courted and very often misunderstood Generation Z).

Before we delve into the digital marketing trends that will mark 2023, let’s make a couple of introductions so as to contextualize the role of automation and give an idea of the complexity of the issue we are going to address.

Automation as a commodity
Technology, which undoubtedly continues to come up with innovative solutions, will increasingly be conceived as an enabler and an instrument: the means through which brands can connect with people. After the two-year period of “forced digitization” that organizations experienced due to the healthcare emergency, in 2023 digital marketing will still be marketing that relies on automation. However, the “human” element will increasingly be more central within a communication ecosystem where technology returns to being a commodity in the service of people (from artificial intelligence applications to data management platforms, just to name the most obvious expressions today of this endless hymn to the magnificent fates of technological development).

January 18, 2023

by TWP Publisher

Why Your Business Needs SEO Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO Optimization

The need for SEO optimisation is increasing. As consumers use the internet for almost everything and the market becomes highly competitive, even the most traditional businesses understand that they need to accelerate the shift to digital. SEO optimisation is considered one of the most effective and cost-effective methods to understand and reach customers to stay relevant and gain revenue.

Many companies all across the world know (or think they know) that they need SEO to grow barn awareness and improve visibility. However, using SEO in your marketing strategy delivers a vast range of benefits. While some businesses still avoid investing in quality SEO optimisation, Let’s explore key reasons why you need to consider this step in your marketing:

Organic Search is the Top Source of Website Traffic
Organic search is an essential part of most businesses’ website performance. It is also a crucial element of the buyer funnel and getting users to the stage when they are ready to buy your products or services. Today Google owns the lion’s share of the search market in contrast to its closest competitors like Yahoo, Yandex, and many, many others.

Even though you may think that other platforms don’t contribute to a brand’s visibility, the truth is that Google owns a considerable portion of the overall user search market. Google is the leader in the industry, and it is a valuable point to consider.

January 16, 2023

by TWP Publisher

How to incorporate social media into SEO strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO strategies

To increase brand awareness and drive more quality traffic to their websites, marketers should invest in search engine optimization.

Marketing teams use SEO to increase a website’s visibility when people search for products or services. Most people use search engines to find what they need, and they are more likely to buy from or engage with a brand that shows up high on search engine ranking pages (SERPs). When done correctly, SEO can help marketing teams rank higher on SERPs and see increases in traffic and its quality.

Marketers have myriad ways to work on a website’s SEO, including access to various channels and tools. However, to improve the chances of showing up on SERPs, marketing teams need a good content strategy in place.

Blog content, links to internal and external sources, optimized meta descriptions and social media can help improve SEO. Social media is critical to a brand’s content strategy, as it serves as a channel to share content, connect with an audience, build awareness and drive traffic to a website.

Explore how an organization can incorporate social media into its overall SEO strategy.

How does social media affect SEO?
Social media does not directly contribute to how SERPs rank content. However, link sharing across social media platforms increases brand exposure and influences SEO.

Social media can indirectly increase search visibility and organic search rankings through social metrics and signals. Metrics like shares, likes and comments help build trust, customer loyalty and brand awareness. Additionally, these metrics indirectly elevate online visibility and traffic, which search engines look for to evaluate a brand’s online reputation and influence SERP rankings.

Effective search requires a marriage between content and context. Search engines see sites as reputable if they have an SEO strategy and traffic driven to them regularly from various sources, including social media platforms.

January 11, 2023

by TWP Publisher

Why Everyone In Your Business Wins With SEO

Search engine optimisation concept. Hand putting wood block cube shape with word SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO Optimization

We know that there are many reasons to focus on SEO from a commercial standpoint.

Working on your company’s SEO can help raise the quality of your website, your brand reputation, and your conversions.

But what about the impact on your team?

Having a good SEO strategy in place can actually benefit your company in other ways.

Colleagues’ jobs can be made easier.

They may be equipped with new skills.

It may even help prove the worth of their work.

How SEO Can Positively Impact Other Marketing Channels
There are many important ways in which SEO can impact other marketing channels.

But let’s take a look at how it can help those teams meet their personal and team goals.

Collaboration
A good SEO strategy will never be in isolation from other marketing channels.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, for instance, goes hand-in-hand with SEO. Both channels’ leads need to talk to each other, or there’s going to be a financial impact.

The benefits go beyond money saving, though. SEO is a far-reaching specialism.

We need input on many other teams’ work: brand marketing, CRM, and paid media, to name a few. Through this, SEO can help to unify projects.

January 9, 2023

by TWP Publisher

10 e-commerce marketing strategies for your business

B2B Marketing, E-Marketing, Ecommerce, Marketing e-commerce marketing

Without a clear e-commerce marketing strategy, organizations could face significant challenges as consumer behaviors change.

E-commerce sales boomed in 2020 and beyond due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, online shopping has continued to grow, as have competitors and changing demands from customers. If organizations invest time and resources into e-commerce marketing strategies, they can help establish, increase and retain their customer bases.

E-commerce marketing strategies involve promotional tactics to drive traffic to an online store. A well-thought-out marketing plan, coupled with an engaging website, can convert visitors into paying customers, help businesses retain them and increase their overall customer lifetime value (CLV). If marketing teams stay up to date on the latest trends, they can help the organization reach and retain new customers.

These 10 e-commerce marketing strategies can help set an organization apart from its competition, strengthen the brand, attract new customers and increase sales over time.

Search engine optimization
Launching a website is a win for any e-commerce company, but websites aren’t enough for consumers to easily find the brand. To improve visibility, marketing teams must optimize websites for search engines. Positive search engine optimization (SEO) requires marketing teams to continually update websites with rich and relevant content that provides useful information for customers.

An SEO strategy can help organizations ensure their content shows up on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries and deliver positive CX when customers find the information they need. Marketing teams should use SEO keywords and phrases organically within content to alert search engines to the site’s relevance for those queries.

December 21, 2022

by TWP Publisher

How Small Businesses Can Make the Most of Email Marketing

E-Marketing Email Marketing

For many small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the pandemic was the nudge they needed to embrace digital technologies, like email marketing software. Plus, new challenges like inflation and labor shortages have left small businesses lacking the time and resources to maintain a robust marketing program. A recent Act! Survey found that 69% of SMB owners handle all of their company’s marketing responsibilities. Email marketing technology has quickly become a necessity for SMBs looking to keep pace with the competition.

With ROI top of mind for many of these SMB owners, it is critical to make the most of their email marketing. To do so, businesses must start by setting clear goals, then using the tools necessary to measure the success of those goals and simplify email marketing processes.

Related: Your Email Marketing Is Destined to Fail Without These 3 Essentials

SMART goals
We’ve all seen the acronym — successful email marketing starts with setting SMART goals that properly define and measure the goals of an email campaign. If you’re unsure of what your email campaigns are delivering, first ask yourself two questions:

Do you have SMART goals?
Are you effectively measuring your progress?

Often, SMBs create email marketing campaigns with (at best) poorly defined goals, like “increase the awareness of a new product.” While you may be able to track things like impressions, does that really determine the awareness you have created around the product?

Email marketing campaigns must be directed toward a specific, measurable outcome, like generating new leads, improving conversion rates and growing a subscriber list. Failure to properly define and track email campaign goals can lead to missed opportunities and uninformed decision-making down the line.

The metrics your team tracks should be determined by the goal of your email campaign. For example, if your goal is to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website, you should track the overall time on site (TOS) while monitoring bounce rates to determine if page enhancements are enticing users to stay longer. If the goal is to generate leads, teams should be tracking lead source viability over time, leads by campaign type and the average number of touchpoints to conversion. To generate successful email marketing campaigns, marketers must first define clear goals and the metrics to track them.

December 19, 2022

by TWP Publisher

What B2B marketers must know in the face of a potential recession

b2b-business-to-business-word-vector-18889889

B2B Marketing B2B marketing

Talking about a recession isn’t always enjoyable. But it’s a situation that inevitably requires a shift in strategy and mindset to continue finding success in the face of economic headwinds.

Defined technically as a period of a significant decline in economic activity, a recession (and the looming potential for one) directly affects marketing.

In particular, B2B marketers face a unique challenge in identifying a downturn – with sales cycles expanding beyond 6, 12 or more months into the future and lacking evident shifts. Whereas, B2C and D2C marketers can feel it more quickly when complete verticals go south.

In this article, we’ll unpack how a looming recession impacts B2B marketers and the key factors to consider to successfully navigate this landscape.

What did B2B marketers do last time?
You must know the past to understand your present and future. There have been plenty of recessions – some fairly recently.

In 2007–2009, we experienced the Great Recession in which the mortgage crisis led to the collapse of the housing market bubble. While it may have ended for the U.S. in 2009, the ripple effects were felt in some European countries for years.

Countries defaulted on their national debt and had to be bailed out by the European Union, resulting in those countries enacting austerity measures to repay their debts, according to History.

Hindsight is 20/20. And when it comes to learning from past mistakes, there’s a clear connection to be made between:

Those who increase (or at least maintain) advertising budgets.
And those who cut or stop marketing efforts altogether.
When faced with a potential downturn, brands that committed to advertising and marketing efforts rebounded faster and recovered quicker than those that opted to pull back.

During the 1990-1991 recession, McDonald’s decreased its advertising and promotion budget, while Pizza Hut and Taco Bell did the complete opposite, according to Pathfind.

This allowed Pizza Hut and Taco Bell to increase sales by 61% and 40%, respectively, while McDonald’s saw 28% fewer sales.

What do B2B buyers want now?
COVID-19 is one key element that differentiates this potential recession from the others.

We just experienced a global pandemic that permanently altered the entire spectrum of consumer and business decisions.

As a result, we will need to navigate key shifts in the B2B buyer behavior and landscape.

December 14, 2022

by TWP Publisher

Four Things B2B Marketing Can Learn From B2C

B2B Marketing B2B marketing

“At the end of the day, it’s all about value delivered to the customer.” That’s how my marketing club meeting ended last month. Today, marketing goes far beyond “the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers.” That’s how it was described by the American Marketing Association in 1935.

Now, the AMA defines it as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Through the years, marketing has been divided into B2B and B2C. And there’s a reason for it. We act differently when choosing a software vendor (partner, in fact) for the next five years to support digital transformation projects than we do when choosing sneakers to support our exercise.

Anyhow, there is much more we, as B2B marketers, can learn from B2C to create special bonds with our customers and help them make their business more sustainable and efficient.

Typically B2B services are hard to communicate. There are so many services we provide and industries we serve. This leads to generalization or hard-to-understand concepts and deeply professional words. It creates barriers for customers. The harder it is to understand what we are talking about, the fewer chances we have to make a deal. So, let’s make our language simple. A good litmus test could be an elevator speech to a friend of yours who is not a part of the industry you work in.

A Frictionless Experience
A frictionless and transparent checkout process is the key to success for any consumer business today. Customers want to have full control of the process and be sure of any additional charges that may occur.

December 12, 2022

by TWP Publisher

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch for 2023

Uncategorized B2B marketing

The B2B market is facing younger buying committees, shifts in buyer expectations about the purchase process, overcomplicated tech stacks, and uncertain economic conditions. These factors are changing how marketers can reach, engage, and retain business customers.

Buyers Reject Traditional B2B Experiences
Younger, digital-first buyers want experiences that mirror their B2C journeys. Millennials and Gen Zers are now dominant in B2B buying committees. These age cohorts prioritize vendors that are easy to engage with and expect to manage their journey on their own terms. As a result, marketers will need to provide interactions that meet these buyers’ high expectations.

The buying committee is bigger and more diverse. Buying experiences now have more involvement from multiple stakeholders of varying generations but still must resonate with each person.

November 16, 2022

by TWP Publisher

B2B Email Marketing 101

B2B Marketing, E-Marketing, News B2B Email Marketing, Email Marketing

If you’re in the B2B space, you must already understand how important email marketing is, but why isn’t it working out for most marketers?
As email marketers and copywriters, you want to craft emails that people love to read. You can’t create emails for the heck of it, and in case you do, your audience will only learn to treat it as white noise and tune it out.

It’s time to harness the power of email, and this blog post will help you achieve that! We’ll show you how to write compelling emails that inspire your audience to take action. Let’s dive in!

Email Marketing: The Dos and Don’ts

“Most B2B brands have an email marketing strategy, but often get stuck when it comes to writing email copies that stop the readers in their tracks and grab their attention.”

Direct email is a marketer’s biggest blessing. The one-to-one communication it offers gives you a chance to make an impact and form robust relationships with your readers. Emails provide the best ROI for marketers and flexibility and control for the readers. Only the consumers decide when to open and read an email. The first to-do on the list is consent. As a business, ensure you have an opt-in list of subscribers and follow all the data regulation laws such as CCPA, GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM. If your readers wish to unsubscribe, make sure the opt-out process is smooth and easy.

Most consumers check their emails multiple times a day. You can create email marketing campaigns to educate, entertain, and inform your audience. But most importantly, to build rapport and make them trust your brand even before your ads or salespeople reach out to them. Personalization is the key. Your customers don’t want to feel they’re just another name on your list. They want to feel it’s personal. They want to feel like you’re directly talking to them.

Email marketing’s goal is to help your customers get to know your brand better and take the intended action. Before you start writing your email, you may want to ask yourself why you want to create this email in the first place. It helps you set an intention for your email marketing practice and design an inviting subject line. If you do not write a good subject line, most people would not even bother to open the email, and all the efforts you put in to create the email body go in vain. Make sure the subject line is clear and specific.
Email marketing has the potential to grow your business rapidly, no matter in which industry or niche you operate. Segment your email lists as per the audience categories and preferences. You shouldn’t be sending the same email to everyone. Marketing only works when you send the right message to the right audience at the right time. Communicate with your audience consistently- time is of the essence here! We recommend once a week for most B2B brands.
Make your emails readable- write short sentences and give enough whitespace; so it doesn’t look tedious to read to your customers. One-sentence email paragraphs make your emails scannable and prompt you to be clear and concise. Simplicity is the key!
In the B2B world, avoid sending emails early in the morning. When selecting days in the week, go for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday since Mondays are busy with meetings and calls, and on Fridays, people often wrap up work early. Try to think about your reader’s schedule and time your emails accordingly.

In the end!
Emails shouldn’t be about you. They have to be about your customers because your readers aren’t interested in how great you think your business is- they want to know what you can do for them. Be bold and straightforward with your emails but don’t come off as too salesy or aggressive. Subtle marketing is the way to go!

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