Short form vs Long form Content : The Eternal Dilemma

This kind of difference in opinion is not surprising, as there are schools of thought supporting both forms. Both forms have their own benefits. Short blog posts have proven to be helpful in tackling the lowering attention spans of your readers. On the other hand, statistics show that long blog posts can improve your ranking, bring more traffic and increase user engagement.

So, when I am asked to recommend short or long-form content by clients, I answer that there is no one right choice for ideal content length. I advise them not to restrict their ideas to pre-conceived notions of which length works better.

There is one other downside of sticking to a fixed content length. If you create only long posts, you might have to include filler content to reach the designated number of words. Vice versa, you might miss out on a vital point in order to wrap up the post within a lower word count.

How well your content will perform does not depend upon its length. Instead of fixating on content length, focus on providing value to your readers through every single word. Once you do this, the length will cease to matter.

Useful tips to increase your conversion rate

 Having visitors click on your website and read about your solutions in one thing, but making them take an action such as sign-up or purchase is a different game altogether. A good conversion rate translates to a high sales volume and revenue. Let us have a look at the steps you can take to increase this coveted rate -

 

•  Add customer testimonials and successful case studies to make your visitors more willing to further, engage with you

•  Offer something of value such as a free ebook or a free trail in exchange for their contact information for sign up

•  Keep your form fields to the minimum to make the process easier for your prospects

• Focus on a minimalistic website design with lots of whitespaces, so that the visitor is not overwhelmed or distracted by too many design elements

• Make your value proposition clear through simple, engaging, and relevant content

•  Use customized and clear CTAs so that the visitor does not get confused regarding the next a step you expect him/her to take

Contact a digital marketing company for more information and help to increase your website's conversion rates.

Benefits of content marketing for startups

When you are a newly minted business, you do not have enough budget to invest in the expensive television, radio or print ad campaigns. However, the need for creating brand awareness and acquire new customers is no less. 

Let us see what benefits the budget-friendly content marketing can bring to such start-ups -

•  Producing and sharing content on social media helps you kick-start and increase your brand's online presence

•  Creating valuable and original content demonstrates your industry expertise and helps start establishing yourself as a thought leader

• It is very easy to start – you can either start a blog, podcast or a vlog depending on your niche and target audience behavior

• SEO-optimized content offers you a huge potential to improve your search engine ranking, online visibility and organic traffic

•  Offering helpful content that helps your target buyers arrive at an informed decision can greatly shorten your sales cycle

Contact a digital marketing company to get started with your content marketing campaign.

Ways to improve your digital customer service

 The current pandemic might have curbed physical meeting between you and your customers, but the need of providing a great customer service and experience has by no means declined. If anything, it is even more important when majority of your customers are concerned about business continuity and financial management. Thankfully, the digital world enables us to stay in touch with customers and be available whenever the need arises. 

Let us see how B2B marketing companies can improve their digital customer service and experience -

 

• Set aside fixed hours for customer service so that you can provide a dedicated service

• Use a separate social media account to handle your customer service requests, so that you do not miss out on any in your regular account

• Implement a chatbot on your website so that it can handle multiple customer queries simultaneously, without the need of human intervention

• Provide self-service options such as FAQs and online forum discussions so that your customers don't have to wait for help

Ensure that your website, web pages and apps are mobile-optimized to suit smartphone users

5 Marketing Channels that Can Drive the Best Results for Your Business

Digital marketing is one of the best ways of positioning your brand and your solution in front of a wider target audience. Yet, with so many marketing channels available, marketers are often divided between choosing the right ones that will fetch the ROI they desire.

Let us have a look at the most important marketing channel every business needs to adopt -

Email Marketing

There is a lot of talk about email marketing being outdated, but the truth is far from it. Emails are a great way to make new prospects aware of your solution, and keep existing customers in the loop regarding updates and offers on your products or service.

Short, personalized emails with the appropriate subject lines can yield you a high conversion rate.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads allow you to position your brand at the place where you want it to be, on the first page of the search engine. With the choice of right keywords, the increased visibility can bring you increased organic traffic and qualified leads.

Social Media

With majority of your consumers distributed across various social media platforms, it has become an indispensable channel for digital marketing. Social media offers you an opportunity to solidify your brand's online presence. Many users follow businesses and brands they can relate to; thus you can not only focus on putting your solution across the platforms, but also build long-lasting business relationships with your followers and peers.

Content Marketing

Publishing SEO-friendly and helpful content in varied forms, that focus on helping your target audience make an informed business decision can bring you new leads over a long period of time.

Content that encompasses relevancy, expertise and authoritativeness is one of the best digital marketing channels for your business.

Websites

Yes, your own website is an important marketing channel. It is your virtual calling card and the top source of information about your brand for the client. With the right content and user-friendly design, your website is a great tool to convey your brand's messaging to your site visitors and convert them into revenue generating leads.

Thus, there are a multitude of channels available for digital marketing, each with their own set of advantages. It is impossible to pick one marketing channel that will yield the highest ROI; you need a seamless cohesion of the right channels to fetch the results you desire.

 

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

How to get quality backlinks without creating new content

Content creation is a great way to earn quality backlinks, but it is also time-consuming. 

Let us have a look at some alternate, effective techniques of link building -

•  Broken link building – Find a website with broken links that direct to pages or blogs similar to your own, contact the said website and offer your pages as a way to fix the broken links

•  Online directories/Resource pages – Find relevant, authentic and high-traffic directories or resource pages to list your business in them

• Leverage existing partnerships – List your partners on your own site and ask them for a link back, or you can leave a testimonial for a company whose services you are using

• Unlinked mentions – Find if you have any unlinked online mentions and ask them to link back to you

• Contest – Hold an online contest to encourage more social shares and online mentions

Get in touch with a digital marketing company for further information on earning quality backlinks and optimizing your overall SEO strategy.

Top 5 Skills You Need to Become a Successful SEO Specialist

As Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more important than ever to increase your online visibility, draw organic traffic and strengthen your credibility, it is natural for the demand for SEO specialists to be on the rise. If you are thinking about embarking on an SEO career, you will want to obtain more information about certain skill set that organizations look out for.

Let us have a look at the topmost skills you require to become a successful SEO professional in the competitive digital marketing industry -

Critical and analytical thinking

An SEO professional needs to be clear that no same strategy will work for every website. He/she has to carefully audit every website they are working on, for any shortcomings and come up with suitable solutions to fix them.

Also, a website rank will not be consistent. It may be positively or negatively affected at any given time. An SEO specialist must be adept at unconvering the cause behind a sudden rank drop, so that the issue can be fixed as quickly as possible.

Research skills

As an SEO specialist, most of your time is going to be spent on research. From keyword research and competitor analysis, to keeping up with the latest techniques and Google algorithm updates, research will be an important part of your job responsibilities.

Basic programming skills

This may not be a hard-core requirement, but technical considerations such as page speed, server side redirects, rendering, etc., are an important part of every optimized SEO strategy. A basic knowledge of languages like HTML, CSS, or JavaScript will help you work better with these aspects and use them to improve your SEO efforts.

Communication and team work

You will need to regularly work together with other team members such as content writers and digital marketers to make sure that your SEO strategy is being executed perfectly.

Also, you will time-to-time find yourselves in a position to explain SEO concepts to a client in a manner that is easy to understand, making communication skills an absolute necessity.

Content skills

It is rare that an SEO professional will need to produce content, but there are times when it can become necessary. Also, content being an integral part of SEO, you need to have an understanding of the right kind of content and the quality required to make it user-friendly.

4 critical components of an optimized marketing email

As a way of engaging with customers to strengthen relationships, apprise them of new products and even generate new leads, emails are among the favorite tools of most B2B marketing companies. But, creating emails that your audience opens and follows through to clicking on your CTAs is not that easy.

Let us see the critical components which make up every successful email -

Subject Line

Without a relevant and attention-catching headline, your audience might forego even opening the email. Craft a subject line that addresses your audience's concern, but make sure that you do not inadvertently clickbait them.

Personalization

Once again, relevance is the key. Making your audience feel like you are serious about helping them solve their unique business problems will naturally encourage more engagement on their part.

Visuals

Along with a great body copy, including appealing visuals will not only help engage user attention, but also help them process information more easily.

Mobile-optimization

As the number of people accessing emails through mobile devices are rapidly increasing, you need to optimize emails for mobile or risk a higher bounce rate.

Benefits of marketing through messaging apps

With the rapid rise in popularity among chat and messaging apps like WhatsApp, especially among the younger generation, marketers are seen increasingly using them to reach their customers. The apps are used for a number of purposes including customer service, updating the users about a new product, lead generation and so on.

Let us see some of the most prominent benefits of messaging apps for the B2B marketing companies -

• Offer more personalized content for generating more interaction and engagement

•  Solve customer queries in real time and provide smarter responses with the help of chat-bots

• Cut through the social media noise and reach customers directly, regardless of their location

• Provide product demos through a live video call

• Update a customer about a new product that is similar to their previous preferences

What is Duplicate Content and How to Check for it During Website Audit?

SEO experts have always stressed on the importance of original content. Duplicate content should be actively shunned as this might not only severely affect your ranking, but also lead Google to penalize your website and have it removed from the search results.

What is duplicate content and what are its common causes?

Before we set out to find out the ways to detect duplicate content, it is necessary to understand what exactly the term means. Duplicate content is the content which is either identical to or closely similar in terms of wording and/or structure to an already existing piece of content on the World Wide Web.

Now, you might argue that you always take care not to copy content as it is from another source. However, duplicate content is not always the result of deliberate intent. Let us have a quick look at some of the common causes of this issue -

• Faceted navigation (especially in cases of ecommerce websites)

•  Session IDs  can create a new URL for a particular session, leading to duplicate content

• Site accessible at two or more variations of http, http, www or non-www

•  Print-friendly or mobile-friendly versions of the URL results in same content on different URLs

• Paginated comments

•  Duplication through scrapers and content syndication

How to check for duplicate content?

There are many free and paid tools available on the Internet that detect any duplicate or plagiarized content. This will make sure that the content you have created is completely unique and does not resemble any content from another website, either deliberately or unintentionally.

These tools will also let you know that if anyone has scraped the content from your website, so that you can take the required action against the scrapers.

You can contact a digital marketing company for a complete audit of your website for content quality, duplicacy issues and more.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

How to Generate High-Quality Leads For Your Brand

Lead generation is one of the top priorities of B2B marketers. New leads bring the possibility of revenue growth. Naturally, it is very easy to become hopeful when any person demonstrates the slightest interest in your product and consider them as a lead, while overlooking their quality. However, for truly successful revenue growth, you need to fill your pipeline with the leads who have a genuine interest and need for the product or service you are providing. Let us see how you can ensure this -

Have your marketing and sales team confer together

Often, marketing and sales team have radically different ideas for the qualification criteria of your leads. As a lead, majority of the sales qualified leads sent over by the marketing team are rejected by sales, leading to a poor conversion rate. Therefore, it is crucial that both these teams reach a common ground in their definition of a "qualified lead".

Establish a lead scoring process

Classify your leads on the amount of interest or enthusiasm they have displayed towards your brand. This will give you an idea of who is more likely to purchase from you.

Another way to evaluate lead quality is to use the BANT criteria -

• Budget – Does the prospect have enough budget to invest in your solution?

• Authority – Does the prospect have the authority to make a purchase decision?

• Need – Does the prospect have a pressing need for your solution?

• Timeline – Does the prospect plan to make the purchase within a reasonable timeframe?

The answers to these questions will help you weed out the leads who are unlikely or unable to purchase from you.

Have an efficient lead nurturing strategy in place

Even if a lead is promising, lack of nurturing can make them fall out of your pipeline. They are likely to have a lot of questions and considerations to go through, before they are ready to make a purchase decision. Make sure that you follow-up on these leads regularly, either through phone, emails and even social media. Let them know that you are always available and ready to resolve their queries and help them make the right decision to overcome their business challenge. This will help you drive them to the bottom of the sales funnel in a shorter amount of time.

Quality leads are essential to save a huge amount of your time, efforts, and shorten the sales-cycle to enable revenues. If you need help with lead generation, a digital marketing company can help you acquire quality leads from the desired pool of your target audience.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

How to use social proof for B2B conversions

A new restaurant has opened in your neighborhood, but so far you have been reluctant to try it out. But, when your friend comes to you with a rave review of the place, you are finally convinced and even eager to give it a go.

This third-party endorsement by a peer of influencer is nothing but social proof, and is a favorite tool of B2B marketing companies to boost their sales. Let us see different ways in which you can leverage social proof for your own business -

• Include customer testimonials and reviews on your website and third-party review sites

• Listing the names of big-shot clients on your website

• Using industry influencers to spread the word about your brand

• Listing your awards, recognition's and certifications on your website

• Publishing case studies that highlight your most successful endeavors

• Show off statistics such as a high user or subscriber count

Tips to optimize Facebook ad targeting

The success of your social media advertising campaign largely depends upon the audience you are targeting. Reaching the right people will enable you to increase conversions and save budget in the long run. Let us see some useful targeting tips to help you do so -

• Use Facebook Custom Audiences to deliver ads to your existing customers, for a greater engagement or click-through rate

• Use Facebook Audience Insights to narrow down your target demographic

• Re-purpose your best performing content into a Facebook ad through info-graphic or a short video

• Use Facebook Lookalike Audience to target the people who are similar to your existing customers

• Serve ads targeted to your fan base, provided you have a loyal one

Contact a digital marketing company for more insights and help for running optimized Facebook advertising campaigns.

Single Opt-in vs Double Opt-in: Which is the best for your email list?

When you are making efforts to grow your email list, you will have to make a choice between using either single or double opt-in for getting subscriber permission to send emails. If you cannot decide, let us have a look at what exactly both the terms mean and weigh their merits against each other.

With the single opt-in, a person will only have to subscribe once through your sign-up form to start receiving your emails. On the other hand, double opt-in requires the person to re-confirm his subscription through a confirmation email.

The advantage of single opt-ins is the reduced number of steps on the part of the user, contributing to a simplified user experience. It will also enable you to build your list in a shorter amount of time.

However, the additional step of double opt-in reinforces that the user is serious about receiving your emails, and you can be sure that the email id is valid for maximum inbox deliver-ability. Thus double opt-ins can enable you to build a cleaner mailing list and act as the founding stone of a greater conversion rate.

Both of these options have their own merits. Your choice will depend on your overall campaign goals and priorities. You can contact a digital marketing company if you need help in strategizing and executing effective email marketing campaigns.

What is SEM and What Does an SEM Specialist Do?

If you are fascinated by the workings of the search engine that decide which pages show up first in the search results and which pages get pushed down, the job of a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) specialist is the right one for you.

                           

In fact, as more and more businesses are moving online and competing for the larger share of user attention and website traffic, they are on the hunt for SEM specialists that can be a value addition to their digital marketing team.

Before diving into an overview of the roles and responsibilities for this job title, let us first understand the meaning and purpose of SEM.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

SEM is nothing but the practice of increasing the visbility of your website or brands on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on. SEM encompasses different methods including organic ones such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and paid ones such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. 

Who is an SEM specialist?

An SEM specialist is a person who puts their knowledge of how search engines pull up results to work on behalf of their organization. Their aim is to ensure that when the organization's target audience searches for specific keywords or queries, their website or relevant web page/blog will rank as high as possible. The higher the page ranks, the more probable it is for the user to click on it, get engaged and progress towards conversion.

The overall daily responsibilities of an SEM specialist include -

• Research and keep up-to-date on the latest trends and search engine algorithm updates to make sure your strategy is on the right track

•Target and test new keywords that are relevant to your niche and target audience

• Work on the website's overall SEO strategy including keywords, analyzing content, technical SEO and making changes whenever required

• Set up and manage PPC campaigns

•  Analyze website performance through online analysis tools for different statistics such as website traffic, traffic source, etc., and modifying strategy based on the metrics

Education and skills required to become an SEM specialist

While the requirements will depend upon the organization you are applying to, here is an overview of the common skills and educational requirements for the job -

• A bachelor's degree

• One or more years of relevant experience

•  Good communication skills

• Basic understanding of SEO and PPC

•  Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

•  Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Tips to choose the right digital marketing company for your business

The Internet might be full to the brim with lists of the best digital marketing companies, but that does not make the selection process any easier. 

Let us have a look at some pointers which can indicate that a certain digital marketing company is the right choice for your business and marketing goals -

• They have a strong online presence, which means that they can achieve as such for your brand as well

•  They specialize in executing digital marketing campaigns for your niche (as far as possible)

• They can demonstrate proven experience and expertise through case studies, testimonials and references

•  They have a tailored marketing strategy for every client, and not a one size fits all solution for everyone

•  They do not make any claims or promises that sound too good to be true

They take the time and effort to understand your business, the value proposition of your solution and your ideal target audience before pitching any digital marketing plans

What Makes a High Quality Backlink in SEO?

We always hear marketing and SEO experts iterating that we need to focus on quality, rather than just quality of backlinks. However, what exactly constitutes of a high-quality link? Let us find out.

                                           

Here are some of the characteristics that indicate the quality of a backlink -

Domain authority

Imagine that you are confronted with two opinions, one from a well-known industry expert and another from a largely unknown person. Now, whose opinion will you tend to trust more? Obviously, that of the industry expert's.

Similarly, you want to be sure that the website you are getting a backlink from has high-authority and is trusted on the web. When you have backlinks from such websites, their visitors will naturally transfer this credibility and trustworthiness to your page.

Relevance

Of course, relevance is the basic requirement for any backlink. The website, page or blog on which your link is posted on must talk about the same topic it does or at least be relevant to your own niche.

Ability to direct traffic

Any link that does not direct traffic is not serving its purpose. To be able to do so, it must be placed in a prominent position so that it will be easily visible to the site/page visitors. Not only this, the anchor text used for the link must be good enough to generate curiosity and make compel the visitors to click on it.

Comes from a unique source

A backlink that comes from a source that does not have too many links to other websites will add more weight to yours. A large number of backlinks from the same source will divide up the trustworthiness and authority of your own link.

One-way link

As far as possible, it is better that there is no or minimum link exchange between your website and the one you are linking from. This practice has been widely exploited in the past, and can be considered by the search engines as an unnatural practice. Thus, the best option is to acquire the link through content quality and relevancy, rather than an empty exchange.

If you need help evaluating the quality of your backlinks or acquiring new ones, you can contact a digital marketing company.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Different ways you can use consumer data

So, you have started collecting and analyzing your customer data. Now, the real question is how can you use it effectively to grow your business. 

Let us see some of the most effective ways in which B2Bmarketing companies use their consumer data -

Identify consumer pain points

This helps companies adjust their marketing strategy to address the main problems and make sure that the customers get exactly what they want.

Improve customer experience

Analyzing their behavior, feedback's and reviews helps companies better understand their needs and meet them accordingly.

Increase sales

A study of customer behavior and preferences will enables smarter business decisions that increase conversions and revenues.

Debunking the prevalent B2B social media myths

Myth 1 – My target audience/customers do not use social media

Billions of people worldwide use social media actively. There is a very high chance that your customers are looking for more information on your brand on at least one social media platform.

                                                  

Myth 2 – Social media only gives vanity metrics

Yes, publishing a random bunch of posts will only get you likes and comments. However, campaigns tailored to business goals like increasing website traffic and generating leads will allow you to track the correct metrics and engagement rate to test your strategy efficacy.

Myth 3 – Social media will not help you make a sale

Of course, posts that directly push for a sale will not help you much. However, posting useful content such as white papers and ebooks, or engaging in meaningful conversations with your prospects will help them move further along the sales funnel.

Myth 4 – Pinterest isn't useful for B2B marketing companies

Pinterest is a great platform to share visually engaging content such as infographics and short product videos. This will help you increase brand awareness and drive more traffic to your website.

What is keyword cannibalization and why should you avoid it?

Keyword cannibalization is a phenomenon where multiple pages of your website are targeting the same keyword. On the surface, this does not seem like a bad thing. After all, you are providing more opportunities for Google to detect the keyword and increase your ranking.

                                          

However, this can do more harm than good. With keyword cannibalization, you are essentially pitting your own pages against each other. It can cause the search engine algorithms to get confused regarding which is the best result for a particular keyword, and consequently, the better page might be pushed down in the results.

For example, your goal might be conversion, but the page better suited for achieving this goal might get buried under an educational page. Thus, it is of utmost importance to audit your website, and identify and fix any cannibalization issues. If you need help doing so, you can get in touch with a digitalmarketing company.