Best Tips To Help Your Website Increase Revenue

How Recommendations Can Increase Revenue by 20 Percent

Introduction:

Creating a good website which can help you earn more revenue is not a very intimidating task as one might feel. If you have done your research correctly and know the content you wish to spread across the World Wide Web you are pretty much set. However, there are a few things one can keep in mind before jumping into the website industry.

 

Have a plan regarding the content: 

How to Write a Business Plan You'll Actually Use (2021)

This is especially for the bloggers and content writers who want to showcase their writing skills over the web. Before purchasing your first domain name, ensure that you know that your content is going to be posted on the website. Have a timeline set for you. Do properly research regards to the current events to attract more users on your website or particular products.

 

Keep it simple and sweet: 

 

Every web designer want their website sparkling with colors, great animation and smooth transitions. Some go overboard trying to keep the aesthetics right and forget to consider the user experience. No one wants a lagging website which takes minutes to load. Try keeping it minimalistic, plain, and simple.

 

Informative and concise: 

What undermines that 'concise, informative' article - Opera News

Aspiring online writers often are caught between the struggle of how much is too much or too less. Keep in mind that users reading your website are trying to gain information from what you have posted. Do not over burden yourself trying to explain your entire thought process. However don’t keep it too vague.

 

Use images, navigations and hyperlinks: 

 

Using images throughout your content is a good way to voice out your opinion and also to catch the users’ attention. Good content clubbed with an eye catching image is an excellent combination to execute. Along with images, users would like if the website has the ease of navigating from one page to another. Implementing a free flowing interface with hyperlinks for various website makes the website more intuitive.

Earning revenue

There are many ways a website can make money. Some of the prominent ways are the following:

  • Ad Revenue: Host an ad of a different company on your website. In other language rent your web space to other companies to post their products advertisements.
  • Affiliated Marketing: Promote any e-commerce website on your web page. If a user clicks on the e-commerce website and makes a purchase, you will be getting a share of the profit.
  • Selling Products: Create a website to sell products you would produce.

Building a Successful Organic Traffic Pipeline in 5 Steps

Drawing internet traffic towards your website:

 As mentioned earlier it is not a difficult task to create a website with good content. However, earning revenue out of this website will be proportional to the number of users accessing it. The more number of customers visit your webpage, the more chances are that they click on one of the ads. More internet traffic means more revenue. Let’s look at the ways you can potentially increase the number of users accessing your website.

 

Video Marketing:

7 Secrets of Super-Successful Video Marketing -

As the title suggests, this method involves using video content to get more traffic to your website. There are two ways this can be achieved, one being uploading the video on YouTube and linking your website in the description of the video. Many YouTubers would have their website linked on the second line of the description. The second way would be embedding the video on your website allowing a user to view the video on your website. This has an un-intended advantage. Because the users are watching the content of your video on the website, you could boost your search ranking since users are spending more time on your web page. This makes your website more relevant on Google. On page and on site time is a huge factor when it comes to Google search ranking.

 

Giveaways:

Affiliate giveaways: 3 ideas for mobilizing your affiliates - AffiliateWP

While many would be a little skeptical about this method, handing over freebies and gifts to users has been proven to be a great strategy to get more interest to a website. Again this is subjective to the content you are publishing on your website. As you must have realized that nearly all the e-commerce websites would give their new users a discount voucher for becoming a part of their website.

 

Emailing Marketing:

Is Email Marketing Dead? Statistics Say: Not a Chance.

As the famous saying goes “The money is in the list”. In this method, a user can send out their desired content such as links or promotional campaigns for the website through a list of emails gathered over the course of time. The target user would require opening the email sent and would need to click on link mentioned on the email. As farfetched it sounds, Email marketing yields 4300% return on investments for businesses worldwide. This method is also essential in getting new users and creating deeper relations with your existing customers. Needless to say, you would need to have a well established website for people to acknowledge your emails or else would be considered as a spam.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - North Storm Academy

There is no doubt about the fact that this is one of the simplest but crucial factors in having traffic diverted to your website. The idea is that anytime a user Google searches a word which is relevant to the content you have on the website, Google should display your webpage for the user to access it. Let us just say you have a website which gives information about Vintage bikes, which means that the keyword here is “Vintage bikes”. The content on the webpage must be written in such a way that the keywords are used across. In this way, when a user searches the keyword Vintage bike, Google would scan your website and once it finds the word in your website multiple times, your website would be displayed in the search result by SEO Services. Having your website featuring in the top Google searches for the keyword can drastically increase the traffic on your website.

 

Social Media:

A Chronological History of Social Media

Lastly, one of the best ways to draw traffic to your website is by promoting it on all social media platforms and start social media marketing. Create a Facebook page for your website and link your updates to the page. Invite more people to join the page. Link your website with your twitter feed. Since we have almost the entire target audience on social media, promoting your website on these platforms will help you educate more users about your website which will further increase a chance in increasing your traffic.

Now, in this tutorial, you’ve learned how to Making your Website to display nearby users. Though, if you want to add further features, the implementation process can get tricky, and it’s better to consult with an best website development company before you implement in your ideas.

How to Create an SEO Friendly Homepage?

8 Key Features Your Homepage Should Include | GRIP Blog

Homepages are unique to any website. They serve as both an online reception area and as a navigational hub for visitors wanting to find information about your company, its products and services. The key to getting more traffic, however, is improving how your homepage ranks in search engine results and here, we’ll explain how you can do this.

Distilling your USP

When ranking your homepage, search engines will use its content to understand what the page is about. Unlike other pages that can talk specifics about your products and services, the homepage’s job is to distil what is unique about your business and put it in a nutshell. This means making your unique selling point (USP) the central theme of your homepage. Although you should include information about your products and services, with links to them, promoting your USP is the homepage’s most vital task.

Getting the USP right takes some work, It has to define not just what makes your business unique’ but why it is the best choice for your customers. Don’t just tell them you are an independent financial advisor or a local estate agent, tell them the benefits of being independent or local.

Essentially, a good USP is like a mini blog post. It should succinctly show that you understand the customers’ problems and explain how your company is best placed to solve them.

Getting your keywords right

How to Choose the RIGHT Keywords to Optimize For

With the homepage being the navigation hub of a website, many believe it needs to contain the keywords for all their products and services. Some will even list everything they sell or offer in an attempt to do that. Overdoing this, however, can be misguided and backfire.

Every page on a website should have a focus keyword and no two pages should use the same one. If you have a landing page for selling shoes, for example, you don’t really want your homepage competing with this page. Though there is value in mentioning shoes on your homepage if they are one of your main products, multiple keywords relating to shoes should, ideally, be reserved for the shoe page.

Indeed, if a homepage is little more than a list of products and services, it doesn’t necessarily come across as useful to your customers. Search engines today are sophisticated enough to understand this. Instead, they are looking for user-friendly information about your USP and what visitors can find on the rest of the site, including your main products and services. Any keywords used should be within the headings and text and primarily for the benefit of the visitor, not the search engines.

A company visitors can trust

5 Ways to Increase Visitors Trust in Your Website | Web Galeria

If search engines direct users to the websites of untrustworthy businesses, people will stop using them. To avoid this, search engines go beyond filtering out the dodgy websites of scammers and cybercriminals. Today, their algorithms analyse a wide range of trust factors to determine whether your site and your business should be listed in results.

On a technical level, they will look to see if your site has an SSL certificate, reliable hosting, quick loading and response times and a lack of broken links and 404 error pages. They will even analyse the links you point customers to, in order to make sure you don’t send them on to other untrustworthy sites.

They will also look at other information, such as user reviews and star ratings. Indeed, one of the reasons they have listing services like Google My Business is so they can verify the legitimacy of a business and gauge what the public think of it.

A homepage can also play a vital role in promoting the company’s and the website’s trustworthiness. Displaying company and VAT registration details, accreditations, qualifications, memberships of recognised organisations, customer testimonials and reviews, etc., help both the search engine and customer gain trust in you. The perfect place for these is on your homepage as this is the first page that visitors and search engines visit.

A homepage designed for the visitor

What Makes a Good Website Homepage Design?

As mentioned earlier, the homepage is the navigational hub of the website and search engines will analyse how well it serves this purpose. Does it have clear information, helpfully organised with headings, images, easily readable text and links? Is it easy to navigate from the homepage using menus, search bars, category lists, etc.? Is it user-friendly on mobile devices and provide assistance for people with accessibility needs?

All these factors need to be considered when optimising your homepage.

Conclusion  

To improve your homepage SEO, you need to provide what search engines want – and that is a focus on the user, not the search engines themselves. This means your homepage should display your USP, describe the main areas of the site and help people get there easily, and provide evidence of your trustworthiness. While you should place keywords where they are useful and needed, they should not be the focus of your homepage content.

Road to your company’s success: Develop Website

Anyone who has ever been involved in running a business knows that an effective product or service does not guarantee success. When your potential customers are unaware of your company’s existence, or they don’t understand how you can benefit their lives, they won’t buy your product.

That’s why strong website development is so important.  When designed by talented website developers who approach each project individually, websites can be an extremely powerful method of lead generation. The following are just a few of the ways your web presence can help you achieve success:

GETTING CUSTOMER ATTENTION

In most cases, potential customers do not stumble across websites unprompted. It’s much more likely that they’ll find your website as a result of an internet search.

By incorporating keywords into your website’s content, you’ll boost your chances of appearing in a relevant Google search, helping you achieve that critical first step: getting potential customers to know you exist.

To increase your visibility on the web, you should not only feature the keywords prominently on the homepage, but also host a blog that shares relevant information with users. Doing so gives you even more opportunities to reach the kind of people most likely to be interested in your service or product.

DEMONSTRATING YOUR PRODUCT

An intuitive website could be designed to show off to customers what exactly your product or service can do for them. For example, if you’re selling a new tool or promoting an app, a quick video embedded on the homepage to demonstrate it is an excellent visual element to include.

That said, you don’t need to rely on video. Many great websites make effective use of clean and simple graphic design to explain how a service benefits customers in easy-to-digest visual language (e.g. infographics). Whatever route you choose, if your website is organized around explaining what your product does in a concise and engaging manner, you’ll have made your way through another major hurdle on the path to success.

MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES

Although a great website can often convince someone to buy your product right away, it’s true that even your target user will not necessarily click through and convert to a paying customer. Luckily, you can build your website to clearly direct viewers towards additional marketing campaigns, such as an email newsletter. As such, marketing experts often suggest that companies include numerous lead generation forms throughout their sites.

Do you offer free estimates for your service? Include a form for that. Are you currently offering a free promotion? Make sure potential customers can easily spot the form to sign up for it on the relevant portion of your site.

ESTABLISHING CREDIBILITY

While you may be fully aware of the fact that your past clients have been thrilled with your service, it is safe to assume new customers are unaware of this fact. Fortunately, a great website easily solves this problem for you: All you need is a page which features testimonials.

Your homepage should be the main feature that grabs the attention of a customer and explains to them how you can address a need in their own life. Testimonials from previous clients help to establish your credibility because consumers are more likely to trust their peers than just the brand speaking for itself. This can be a critical ingredient in your recipe to success, getting previously skeptical people to make a purchase.

CREATING A BRAND

There is a universally accepted fact in the business world: Proper branding is key to success. Your company should have a fully-realized identity that customers recognize in the form of visual imagery, language use, and overall attitude.

The right website may be the most powerful tool you have for establishing your brand early, because it allows you to include all of the elements of effective branding. The images you display on the screen, the tone of your content, and the user experience itself will all come together to reflect the values of your company.

Your website is a representation of your unique brand, and as such it is essential to hire experts who work hard to understand what makes your business stand out. They’ll translate what they learn into a website that will set you on the course to success.

Most Valuable Person? Nope, find out the reality!

MVP in the field of Software Development stands for Minimum Viable Product. It is a concept developed by Eric Ries as a part of the Lean Start Up method. According to his definition:

 “The Minimum Viable Product is that version of the new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about the customer with the least efforts.”

It is based on the idea of Incremental Software Development that renders a product more efficient which is complete on its own with each iteration. A Minimum Viable Product is developed as a core unit of an experimentation strategy. It consists of a basic set of solutions for testing the viability of a business idea and how the customers react to it.

The main purpose of building an MVP :

How to build an MVP: Steps, Examples, and Benefits

  • Deliver a working product that provides immediate value with minimum resources be it money, time or infrastructure.
  • Create a baseline for future development and clarify the next steps to be taken in the project.
  • Earliest possible product release.
  • Minimum implementation costs.
  • Test the viability of the product before investing large capital and manpower into it.
  • Identify potential features and failures.
  • Identify and understand its user base and its preferences.

After receiving feedback, more features can be added. Every new release of the MVP should ensure a better solution for the customers and should be completed rather than a ‘work in progress’ solution.  This can be understood better through an illustration by John Mayo in his article ‘Two Ways to Build a Pyramid’.

In a traditional approach, building the pyramid can be started from the base, and a new level can be added on top with each increment. Although this is an incremental process, until the last iteration it is only a ‘work in progress’, as in the image below.

The other approach is to start with a small pyramid. With each iteration, components can be added to increase its size or extend its functionality. Thus, after each increment, you will have a complete pyramid which can be further extended. 

The rule here is to add new features gradually with each release of the MVP being a better and faster solution for the agenda under consideration.

Types of MVP

There are two categories of MVPs. Low Fidelity MVPs help you to get an insight into your customer’s problems and the kind of solution that will be most effective for the customer. High Fidelity MVPs are used to find out how much the customers will be willing to pay for the solution. Furthermore, it helps you to optimize your marketing strategy and communication channels along with the best potential growth strategies.

In today’s market where a wide range of services and products are in demand, minimum viable products differ accordingly. The different types of MVPs which can be categorized under Low-Fidelity and High-Fidelity MVPs are as follows:

Low Fidelity MVPs High Fidelity MVPs
An Honest Customer Interview Digital Prototypes like wireframes and mock-ups
Blogs and their Comments 3D Models for manufacturing products.
Subject Matter Forums The Wizard of Oz
Website or an Application Landing Page The Concierge MVP
Split Testing to measure user reaction to changes The Piecemeal MVP
Videos Crowdfunding helps generate funding for the product creations as well as testing its future demand in the market.
UX Prototypes. Single Featured MVP in order to focus on the most essential solutions that will be provided by the product.
Ad Campaigns for market surveys Email MVP
User SignUp for an Upcoming Product
Audience building via tests, interviews and questionnaires.
Micro-Surveys

Out of the above MVPs, most of which are self-explanatory, let us elaborate on the following few.

  • Concierge MVP: Here building a product is not necessary. Here you provide the services manually and analyze your customer interaction. This helps to understand if the customers will use your product or they need an entirely different product.
  • Wizard of Oz MVP: Here a fully functional product prototype is presented before the user while you are at work behind the scenes providing all that is necessary. Through this type of MVC, you are able to interact directly with your customers and review their preferences.
  • Piecemeal MVP: Here existing tools and solutions are used to create your product. This involves a minimum or no investment. A piecemeal MVP consists of existing components from multiple third-party sources that are put together to create the product or service.
  • Email MVP: Here you begin by sending emails with the business proposition to your existing customers. If the feedback is positive, the business idea is worth pursuing, however, if the feedback is bleak, either the proposal is missing something or it does not solve any problem.

Pitfalls

 

The main pitfall of an MVP is its lack of understanding. More often teams tend to believe it is the smallest amount of functionality that needs to be presented to the consumers in order to understand its viability. It might also be confused with minimum market earning. MVP is more focused on learning from customer feedback. It is very important to identify the set of features that needs to be included for an MVP. Including too many features will overload the MVP, incur cost and time and may fail to succeed. However, filtering features may cut out its key functions. The basic set of solution repeatedly mentioned here, refers to developing a deployable product with the key features which allows customers to access the solution and complete their entire journey towards their goal. Hence, it is essential that before releasing an MVP teams correlate the terms ‘minimum’ and ‘viable’ correctly. Finally, always keep in mind the metrics – Daily active users, maintenance rate and the average time spent with the product in order to quantify the success of your MVP.

Conclusion 

Developing an MVP is a strategy to avoid developing products that are liable to be rejected by consumers. It is basically built to test a specific set of assumptions and prove that the product will provide an effective solution. MVPs are effective only when you take into account market feedback. This will help you to understand which features are to be developed and which to be discarded. While developing an MVP always keep in mind the most accurate but least features of the product but not the complete product.

Reasons Home Improvement Service Firms Need a Website

Web Design for Home Service Companies | Contractor Websites

The home improvement service sector provides essential services to homeowners and landlords, covering everything from building and gardening to bathroom and kitchen installations. It’s a sector that includes interior design, decorating, window replacement, flooring installation and more. The demand for home improvement service also means that there is considerable competition, not just from other local companies but from national DIY chains that are adding design and installation to their retail services. This, together with the change in how consumers now shop for home improvements means its more important than ever for local suppliers to have a website. Here, we’ll explain why.

Online convenience

Complete Guide to Starting an Online Convenience Store Selling Groceries

The reality of the modern market is that everyone looking for a home improvement service wants a convenient way to find it. This means they will begin by looking online. Some may find you in local printed directories or the classifieds, however, even if they do, they’ll want more information than the ad can deliver. The most convenient way to find out more is to visit your website and they will expect you to have one.

Having a website, first and foremost, means your business will appear in search results so more new customers can find you. From here, they can visit your site where they can easily access all the information they need to decide whether you are the right company for their project. Without a website, you make finding this information inconvenient, increasing the likelihood that customers will simply find a competitor that does provide that information.

An online showroom

The Virtual Showroom: The New Normal of Customer Engagement

Customers with home improvement projects want to be able to visualise the finished product and see the standard of installation work that your company can deliver. What’s more, they want to see this from the comfort of their own homes and before getting in touch.

A website enables you to provide a portfolio of your previous work and if you sell products like kitchens and bathrooms, a gallery of the items you offer. This will give them a clear idea of the standard of your services and the quality and design of your products. Such portfolios play a vital role in establishing leads with potential customers or in convincing them to visit your physical showroom.

Offer other online services

online: 6 online services that are worth paying for - The Economic Times

The modern website can do so much more than provide information about your products and services. There is now a multitude of website tools and add-ons that can be installed to provide exceptional customer experiences, such as price calculators, design and measurement tools and virtual tours of previous work. Indeed, virtual and augmented reality tools are increasingly used to help customers create the designs they want to achieve.

Customers also want the ability to book services online, such as reserving a slot for you to visit their homes or schedule the delivery of products. They also want the convenience of being able to pay online and have access to user accounts where they can see the progress of their order.

All these things can be achieved with a modern website. What’s more, they are available 24 hours a day, even when your physical business is closed, so that regardless of when a customer is looking, everything they need is always there.

These additional online services can make your business far more competitive in today’s market where 82% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

Build your company’s reputation

How a Business Can Create and Maintain a Good Reputation

Online reputations play a critical role in purchasing decisions. Customers no longer take a company’s marketing at face value and will look to verify what they say by checking out reviews and asking for recommendations on social media.

The star ratings, reviews and recommendations you receive are solely down to what your previous customers think. However, many companies getting excellent feedback fail to take full advantage of it. Although they can be found on Google, Facebook and sites like Trustpilot, these independent reviews that have so much influence on customers can also be linked to and displayed directly on your website.

If you have great reviews, let your visitors know by displaying them prominently on your site and providing a link to the independent site where they can read them for themselves. Here’s what we display on our website.

Such a move can immediately put cautious customers at ease and ensure them that your company and the work it does is highly regarded by its previous and existing customers.

Dispelling myths about websites

Dispelling 5 Common Myths About MS - Multiple Sclerosis News Today

Some of the reasons business owners don’t have a website include the expense of building and running a site and the belief that they need highly technical skills to run one. This, however, is definitely not the case.

A business domain name (e.g. yourbusiness.co.uk) can be registered for around £10 – £20 a year, web hosting can cost from just a few pounds a month and the software used by the vast majority of the world’s websites is free. Such software, like WordPress, has been created to be used by those with only basic computer skills. Indeed, building a professional website is no more difficult than creating a PowerPoint presentation.

What’s more, at eukhost, you’ll be able to install WordPress with a single click and our 24/7 technical support team, knowledgebase and customer forum provide all the help you need to overcome any challenges. Our cPanel control panel also means you’ll be easily able to carry out any website management tasks and even automate many of them.

Conclusion

In the digital economy of the 2020s, having a website is essential for home improvement service businesses that want to stay relevant to today’s consumers and remain competitive. Hopefully, the points raised here will have convinced you of the benefits of creating a site and shown you that doing so is not an overly difficult or expensive process.

How Google’s New Ranking Factors Will Affect Your Website Page Experience

6 Tips to Improve Your PPC Landing Page Experience (& Quality Score)

Changes in the way consumers behave mean customer experience (CX) is now the major battleground over which businesses compete. While this will affect your company directly, in the sense that you’ll need to improve CX to stay competitive, from May 2021, you’ll also need to improve the CX of your website to rank well with Google. Under pressure to improve their own CX, Google has now decided to add ‘page experience’ as one of its ranking criteria. Here, we’ll look at what this will mean for your website and individual web pages.

1. Largest Contentful Paint

What Is Largest Contentful Paint? | Page Experience SEO

How will Google measure loading times going forward? One of the main ways will be the ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ metric. Basically, rather than looking at the loading time of a whole page, it will look specifically at the loading time of the largest element of that page, usually the largest block of text or image. With Google expecting these to load in less than 2.5 seconds, it means you will need to optimise images and break large sections of text into smaller chunks.

2. First Input Delay

Experimenting with First Input Delay in the Chrome UX Report | Web

While Largest Contentful Paint looks at loading times, First Input Delay focuses on response times, in other words, the time it takes your website to respond to any user interaction, such as carrying out a search, clicking a link or inputting information. The response time is a measure of how long it takes the user’s browser to start processing your website’s response to those interactions. With Google expecting this to be less than 100 milliseconds, not only is the speed of your hosting important, so too is the location of your server. To overcome latency, having servers located nearer the user will speed things up. For customers further away, websites might need to make increasing use of content delivery networks (CDNs).

3. Cumulative Layout Shift

Optimize Cumulative Layout Shift

As websites load the elements of a page in stages, it can cause the layout to shift slightly. A common problem is when a user sees a menu, goes to click on it and by the time they have done so, the menu has been pushed down by an advert or privacy banner and they click on this by accident.

Cumulative Layout Shift is a metric that measures the visual stability of a page, looking at how it changes layout during loading and how this impacts the experience of a user. In future, website owners will need to minimise this as much as possible, especially in the ‘above the fold’ layout.

4. The mobile experience

The Importance of Mobile Experience | Resource Techniques

The mobile experience is the area where Google has to put most of its effort. Today, we carry out the majority of our internet searches and spend most of our online time on smartphones. The key difference between desktop and mobile for Google is that with a desktop, we predominantly use Google to find things; on mobiles, much more time is spent on apps. Google needs to claw back some of its lost ground by making its mobile search just as smooth and seamless as using an app.

While Google has got things working effectively at its end, the Achille’s heel in its mobile customer experience is the websites it displays in its search results. What’s the point of having the world’s most advanced search engine if half of the websites that users visit don’t work well on mobile devices? The solution is simple, it will stop ranking websites that are not mobile-friendly, at least on searches carried out on mobile devices – which is most of them!

The solution is a mobile-first website design. Instead of creating a website for computers and then using a responsive theme to convert it for mobile devices, work the other way around. Create the site specifically for mobiles first (the biggest audience). This will improve the way a site looks and responds on mobile devices and prevent common issues that can occur with responsive themes such as text being too small and links or buttons being so close together that users frequently tap the wrong one.

Loading speed also has to be improved on mobiles. While laptops generally connect only to broadband, smartphones are taken everywhere, often where connections, both network and wi-fi, vary in strength and stability. Regardless of connection strength, a good website should still load quickly.

5. SSL, safe browsing and intrusive interstitials

Navigating Google's new page experience algorithm | Cobiro

Other key ranking factors to be aware of are the installation of SSL certificates to provide secure HTTPS connections and encrypt the sending and receiving of payment data; ensuring your website is free from malware and links to malicious websites; and the removal of ‘intrusive interstitials’, the jargon term for popups and other intrusions that affect the users’ browsing experience.

Conclusion

From May 2021, Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift will become ‘core web vitals’ in Google’s algorithm. At the same time, there will be increased importance on mobile-friendliness and security and far less tolerance of intrusive features, like popups.

The Most Recent Website Development and Digital Marketing Trends

ETSOFT INDIA- Web Designing | Web Development | Mobile App Development | Digital Marketing Company : Etsoft.in

As the share of online shopping continues to grow, the amount companies spend on website development and digital marketing is increasing by around 30% year on year. Underlying this investment is the need to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market. Companies are using their marketing budgets in a range of ways, from mobile websites to augmented shopping experiences. Here, we’ll look at some of the hottest trends currently having an impact.

1. Data-informed strategies

Data informed research | Amanda Englert

Today, pretty much every major business decision makes use of data and this includes digital marketing plans. It is now commonplace for businesses to integrate market, competitor and customer data and use it to inform their marketing strategies, right down to how they design and manage their website. They use a wide range of data sources to achieve this, including data on online engagement, order fulfilment, purchase history and retail trends.

Integrating this data helps produce more innovative and highly targeted digital marketing strategies that are better able to achieve the specific goals of the organisation and which work best within its operational and financial constraints.

2. Mobile-first websites

Mobile First Web Design | Mobile First Websites

Mobile-first websites are those where the main focus is on the mobile user rather than the computer user. Although this is something which has been pushed by Google and could be of benefit in SERPS ranking, the main reason for building websites for mobile devices is that people are shifting more towards them. In the UK, we already spend twice as much time, per day, using a smartphone to search the web than we do a laptop. This has, unsurprisingly, led to significant growth in the amount we spend when using our phones.

As this trend is set to continue, companies are investing more and more into providing better mobile-friendly sites. It is no longer good enough to simply use a responsive theme if all it does is rejig the layout of a computer-based website for display on a mobile phone. Instead, developers are being asked to produce flatter websites where all elements are more mobile-friendly and which are optimised for quick loading, regardless of the type of internet connection being used. These sites are often single page (using scrolling instead of page to page navigation), have minimalistic, grid or card style designs and feature fewer images.

3. The customer-experience

What is Customer Experience: Strategy, Examples, Tips | Hotjar

Business has become increasingly focused on pleasing the customer over the last few years and this means looking after them at all stages of their dealings with you. To do this, you’ll need to provide personalised experiences that are engaging, simple and rewarding. And more than ever, you’ll need to do this in a way which they find ethical.

This means providing them with tailored content and products, giving them all the information they want in the most accessible of ways (think online chat, FAQs, knowledge bases, how-to videos, etc.) making purchasing and the delivery of goods as simple and convenient as possible (e.g. next day delivery, in-store collection, local pick up points) and rewarding them with customised offers, loyalty bonuses and the like.

4. Omnichannel marketing content

Omnichannel meaning: Definitions and examples of good and bad strategy

Content marketing has become an indispensable element of today’s successful digital marketing strategy. However, in the same way that customer choice has pushed for omnichannel shopping, content marketing strategies must also make use of the wide range of channels that audiences frequent. This means more than simply putting the same information on Facebook and Instagram, it requires a strategy that coordinates content in a way that is consistent, integrated and, above all, seamless across the devices and channels your customers like to use.

5. Building trust

10 steps to building trust that lasts - Nan S. Russell - Municipal World

Modern, highly literate consumers are far less taken in by advertising than they used to be. Every schoolchild is taught the techniques of writing persuasively and so understands the nuances of an advert. Today, therefore, ads are no longer taken at face value and customers are looking for additional social proof before they purchase. This comes in the form of recommendations or social likes by people they know, online customer reviews, independent professional reviews, influencer recommendations and products or services which are featured on reputable sites.

Rather than focus your marketing budget totally on promoting your own company directly to your audience, today, it is important to get others to promote you too. This means building partnerships with other customers, influencers and media organisations and enabling customer reviews about your products or about your business itself.

6. The rise of augmented reality

The Rise of Augmented Reality. The development of augmented reality… | by Vera Ortega and Leopold Gaebler | Medium

Augmented reality has been around for a few years and is beginning to take off in a big way. Essentially, it is a way to use digital technology to provide additional value to customers. For example, there are now apps or website platforms that let customers try products on before they make online purchases. One well-known UK optician has recently put augmented reality to good use by enabling customers to see what their spectacles will look like on their face. Before this, customers had to visit the shop before making a purchase decision, now they can do it online. Estate agents also use augmented reality to give home hunters a virtual tour of a house. No longer relying simply on photos, searchers are given a much-improved understanding of the home’s interior. In this way, those that do go for an on-site visit are already more inclined to put in an offer.

Conclusion

There are many factors influencing how businesses are updating their websites and digital marketing strategies, from advances in technology to shifting patterns in customers’ expectations and browsing behaviours. Hopefully, this post will have shown you what these influences are and the reasons why the trends mentioned here are having such an impact.

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