May 20, 2016 | SMS Marketing, Social Media Management and Optimization (SMM, SMO), Social WiFi Marketing, Uncategorized
Every local business should have a mailing list to use for email marketing. However, convincing people to sign up for your list may be a challenge. Most people get dozens of marketing emails each day, and some are reluctant to add yet another email to the mix. The question, then, is how you can convince potential customers who visit your site to sign up for your mailing list. One common answer is creating something called a lead magnet – a freebie that entices people to type their email address into your opt-in box.
What Is a Lead Magnet?
In case you are unfamiliar with the term, let’s start with a quick explanation of what a lead magnet is. A lead magnet is a free item that you offer to new leads if they sign up for your mailing list. It’s called a magnet because companies often advertise the lead magnet as a way of getting people to visit their site. In other words, it attracts customers the way a magnet attracts metal. Once they are on the site, they learn that all they have to do to get the lead magnet is sign up for your mailing list.
A lead magnet can be almost anything you want it to be, but the best options for local businesses are digital items that can be immediately downloaded after the customer opts in. You want the process to be as easy as possible.
Why You Need a Lead Magnet
Maybe you don’t have a mailing list and you’re wondering why you need one. Local business owners sometimes neglect email marketing as a resource because they think it’s a waste of money. However, the fact is that email marketing is still one of the most effective – and most affordable – forms of internet marketing. Here are some reasons that using a lead magnet to build your list makes sense:
- Email marketing offers a low-cost, easy way to stay in touch with your customers on an ongoing way.
- Email marketing is incredibly versatile. Here are just a few ideas of ways you might use email marketing:
- To announce new products – for example, you might make a short unboxing or how-to video for a new product in your store.
- To share valuable information with your customers – one of the best uses of email marketing is providing value to your customers, which creates a sense of obligation.
- To offer enticements to get customers to visit your store – examples include promotions, coupons, and special events.
- To encourage customers to spread the word about your business – if you make a point of offering worthwhile information, some of your customers will share your email with their friends and family, thus increasing your reach.
- Using a lead magnet helps you encourage a particular cognitive bias – sort of a mental glitch – known as reciprocity. Most human beings feel a need to return the favor when they get something free. Offering a lead magnet makes your customers feel a sense of obligation to you because they know you’ve given them something valuable without charging them a dime. Once they have accepted a freebie from you, they are more likely to become paying customers than they would be otherwise.
As you can see, there are some significant benefits to using a lead magnet to help grow your email list.
How to Create an Irresistible Lead Magnet
Deciding you want a lead magnet for your website is the first step. The second is deciding what form the lead magnet will take, and then creating it. Let’s start by talking about some good options for lead magnets.
- Remember that digital products that are available for immediate download are the best choice. Don’t make your customers wait to get their freebie – give it to them right away.
- One common option for a lead magnet is a short eBook. Sometimes people think that books have to be long, but the truth is that the average length of non-fiction books on the Kindle bestseller list is only 10,000 words. A free book can be even shorter – sometimes 2,500 or 3,500 words is plenty.
- Another popular choice for a lead magnet is a tip sheet or hack sheet. It seems like you can’t go anywhere on the internet these days without coming across a list of hacks for everything from household chores to organizing your desk at work. People seem to love them, and creating a good hack sheet doesn’t take long.
- If you offer a business-related service, one very good lead magnet option is a free template for a particular kind of document.
- A video or series of videos is another option, although creating videos is certainly more costly than making written content. The downside of a video is that it takes time for your customer to consume.
The most affordable and easily accessible options are short written documents that customers can download immediately.
Now let’s talk about how to create your lead magnet. If you have a business that lends itself to tips and hacks – for example, the owner of a kitchen supply store might do well to offer a list of cooking hacks (or kitchen storage hacks) to potential customers – then that’s a good way to go because it doesn’t take long to create.
If the majority of your customers are looking for information, then writing a short eBook might be the answer. Don’t get intimidated by the thought of writing a book. If you feel you can’t do it yourself, you can always hire a freelance writer to do it for you. Just brainstorm some potential topics for a book, keeping in mind that you want things that are going to be compelling and interesting to your potential customers. For example, a sports equipment store might offer a short eBook about how to prepare for ski season or a buying guide for parents whose kids are signing up for the local soccer league.
The key with any lead magnet is to think about what your customers want, and then to find a way to give it to them. When you start, it might be helpful to think about your target customers and who they are. After that, you can reach out with some social media advertising to let people know about your awesome new lead magnet and why they need to get it.
Lead magnets are an effective and inexpensive way to help you build a mailing list – which you can then use to attract new customers and grow your business. As long as you focus on providing value with your lead magnet, and target your ads wisely, you should have no difficulty attracting people to your opt-in page.
At JVI Mobile, we are passionate about creating and growing awesome social relationships. Tell us how we can help! We’ve got a crack team literally at your fingertips!
If you haven’t already, check out our Digital Marketing Assistant. It’s a relatively new service we are offering where you can get expert help and ready access to the JVI team will all your digital marketing concerns and questions!
May 10, 2016 | General
Does your business appear on Google’s first page when potential customers search for your chosen keywords? If you’re not at the top – or near the top – it can be frustrating. There is plenty of evidence to show that very few users venture beyond the first page of results when they do a Google search. In fact, they’re more likely to refine their search than to move on to the next page.
Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do to help your website rank on the first page in 2016. Here are the top five.
#1: Google’s first page is more about authority than keywords
It’s still important to use keywords in your web content, but the days when high keyword density was the key to ranking on Google are long gone. In fact, your keyword placement is not nearly as important as the overall authority of your site. Google’s algorithms are very sophisticated, and they no longer rely on keywords in a title or H1 tag to determine if a page is worth visiting. Rather, they focus on contextual meaning and look for expected words to rank pages.
For example, it used to be that if you wanted to rank for a keyword such as “Best Legal Services” you’d have to use that keyword three or four times in strategic places to have a chance of ranking. Now, if you talk about competent legal representation, Google can tell that your page is relevant to the keyword even if you don’t use it more than a couple of times in your article.
#2: Pay attention to bounce rates and the time spent on your page
Another surprising SEO development for 2016 has to do with an evaluation of whether your page is providing visitors with what they need. In addition to crawling your page for keywords and context, Google also pays attention to what people do after they leave your page as a way of determining if your page is an authoritative one or a waste of time.
For example, if a visitor searches one of your keywords and clicks on your page, Google looks at how long they stay. A visit of several minutes might indicate that a user is engaged with the content on your page and has found what they want. However, if they spend several minutes on your site, return to their list of search results via the dreaded back button, and click on another site instead, it’s a good sign that your site did not offer what they needed.
If you have a high bounce rate, a good way to improve your search ranking in 2016 is to make sure that your site provides the answers to the questions implied by your chosen keywords.
#3: Optimize your website for mobile users
In 2015, mobile searches on Google outpaced computer searches – and that trend is likely to continue. Google has placed a great deal of importance on mobile search as evidenced by their Mobilegeddon mobile-friendly update in early 2015. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, now is the time to get on board.
Fortunately, most businesses can switch to mobile-friendly or (ideally) mobile-adaptive sites with little trouble. Sometimes it’s as simple as switching the template you use for your site. For example, if you have a WordPress site, they have a huge library of templates available, many of which are mobile-adaptive. You may have to do some fine-tuning of your site to make a new template work, but it’s worth the work to get it done.
The beauty of mobile-adaptive sites is that they work by configuring to the specific mobile device being used. Mobile customers tend to be an impatient bunch, and they are unlikely to wait for a slow-loading page or scroll horizontally to read your content. If you take the time to optimize your site for mobile users, it can do more than anything else to improve your search ranking in 2016.
#4: Stay away from content that’s too short
It wasn’t that long ago that blog posts of 250 to 500 words were considered the norm. Short and snappy was the rule of the day, and the assumption that people wanted short content led to a glut of short articles that were light on value and meaning.
That has all changed. Truthfully, the trend toward lengthy web content has been happening for a while, but this year it has really become the rule rather than the exception. Research shows that web users are far more likely to engage with content that’s in the 1,000-1,500 word range than with short articles. Why? Because they want valuable information, and – with rare exception – it’s hard to convey that in just a few hundred words. Of course, you can offer a top 10 list that’s only 500 words long, but you’re not going to be able to explain why items are on the list as well as you would if you wrote a longer article or blog post.
The reason that Google is placing so much emphasis on length is that they want to make sure they are sending people to pages designed for humans, not search algorithms. If you’re worried about publishing long content, remember that you can make it more readable by breaking it up with subheadings and images.
#5: Make sure the user experience is front and center
In a way, this last point is a summary of everything that has come before it. Each one of the above points come back to one thing: user experience. Old-school SEO focused on tricking Google’s algorithms – to the point where many websites were far friendlier to computers than they were to human beings. More and more, Google is concerned about ensuring that their search results are leading users to sites that answer their questions. They want users to feel good about the search experience, something that’s unlikely to happen if they end up on a site that’s not mobile-friendly, or is packed with keywords but contains no real value.
There are many things you can do to test the user experience on your site, including split-testing individual components on your page. However, the best thing you can do is to do what you can to answer key questions that are implied by your chosen keywords and make sure that your site is easily viewable by any user, on any device.
Ranking on Google’s first page is always a challenge. Regardless of your niche, you will be facing some fierce competition. It might sound odd to say this, but the best way to rank is to forget about trying to rank. Don’t worry about algorithms and SEO tricks. Instead, focus on making your site a place where potential customers can find exactly what they need. If you do that, the search rank will follow.
At JVI Mobile, we are passionate about creating and growing awesome social relationships. Tell us how we can help! We’ve got a crack team literally at your fingertips!
If you haven’t already, check out our Digital Marketing Assistant. It’s a relatively new service we are offering where you can get expert help and ready access to the JVI team will all your digital marketing concerns and questions!
May 5, 2016 | Facebook, Social Media Management and Optimization (SMM, SMO)
Facebook advertising gets a bad rap at times, though perhaps only part of that reputation is deserved. You don’t even need all the figures to realize that an investment in Facebook advertising is a must-do to grow in today’s world.
Facebook Advertising
Kyle Taylor, the owner of The Penny Hoarder, recently shared the secret to his success in this channel in a recent post for Entrepreneur.com. You can get the full article here, but we’ve summarized his insights below. We couldn’t agree more!
- Facebook advertising can be challenging with changing interfaces and options. It takes some time to learn and master.
- Focus on sending traffic to your site, not on growing your Facebook page.
- Boosted posts, though at a higher cost, can dramatically drive more visitors to your site. You’ll still get likes along the way. Not only do boosted posts go live faster, but they also feel less “salesy”.
- You don’t have to spend a lot to see a good return. Between effective segmentation and watching the analytics, you can get clicks for pennies.
Social Media Retargeting
If you’re already spending on Facebook, you’ve got to consider social media retargeting as well. Social media retargeting is where the vacation you were just looking at online suddenly appears in your Facebook feed.
As Mary Long recently shared over at AdWeek:
“26 percent of customers will return to a site through retargeting. This is up from 8 percent of customers who return to a site without retargeting.”
And in regards specifically to Facebook retargeting that:
“When adding Facebook to an existing display retargeting campaign, advertisers saw a 92 percent increase in impression reach, 9 percent drop in cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and 27 percent decrease in cost per click (CPC).”
With results like that, how can you not get in the retargeting pool!
Here at JVI mobile, we specialize in unique programs in both Facebook advertising and retargeting geared to YOUR unique needs. Just ask us how we can help!