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.

Expanding your brand's digital footprint

 The larger your brand's digital footprint is, the easier it will be for your target audience to find you online, especially in today's a digitally connected world.

Let us see how B2B marketing companies can strategically expand their digital footprint -

Website

Your website is one of the most important digital marketing channels and the top source of information about your brand. Focus on having a professional, user-friendly website optimized for SEO and content.

Social presence

It is not enough to merely post content or offers on social media. Actively engage your customers and target audience in meaningful conversations by responding to their comments and participating in relevant group discussions.

Content

Value-driven content is one of the best ways to increase your brand visibility, and attract new customers to your business through inbound marketing.

5 Sure-fire Ways to Get More Inbound Leads for Your Agency

Getting qualified leads – the bread and butter of every business. However, after spending countless hours on different strategies, many companies find that the amount of leads collected and the subsequent conversions is lesser than expected or desired.

Unlike the outbound lead generation tactics that involve actively getting in touch with your target prospects, inbound tactics seek to attract leads through useful content and take some time to work. Let us see how you can fine tune your inbound strategy to generate more leads -

 

Polish your lead generation forms

Often, marketers channel all their efforts into the content and design of a website or landing page, but overlook the final step of the lead generation process – the lead form. Even if they are interested in your content, most prospects are reluctant to give up their contact information. A plain, dull form can quickly turn them away.

 

To prevent this, you need to make your lead forms as interactive as possible. You can even use online tools for this purpose. Also, offering a useful resource such as a whitepaper, ebook or a free trial in exchange for sign up will encourage more subscriptions on your audience's part.

Optimize your email list

Growing your email list will ensure that you are sending emails to those people who have volunteered to hear from you, and are more inclined to have a need of or be interested in your offering. You can use the above mentioned tip to get more subscriptions and opt-ins for your emails. 

Leverage the outreach of webinars

Webinars are a great way to expand your digital outreach and invite just the audience you have in mind. They give you an opportunity to add to your credibility and be known as an industry expert. Provided you add to their knowledge through a valuable topic, you will be able to tap into a large pool of leads through webinars.

Start your own business blog

Blogging is another great way to showcase your industry expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader. Take time to research the type of content consumed by your target audience, and to identify common business challenges faced by them. An SEO-optimized blog that provides valuable content and shows a way to overcome these challenges will help attract more leads.

Post engaging videos on YouTube

With video marketing on the rise, the largest video platform and the second-largest search engine after Google is a great way to increase your online awareness and generate leads. Here are some options of valuable content you could provide through videos -

• Product demos

•  Product tutorials

•   Interviews with industry experts

•   Customer testimonials and case studies

If you need help to boost your inbound marketing efforts, you can engage the services of 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.

Growing your brand with social media contests

Increasing brand awareness, getting customers to engage with your brand, increasing traffic to social media pages – there are many benefits to hosting a social media contest. It gives you a chance to grow a loyal following that can translate into increased leads and sales. 

Let us have a look at some tips and strategies to help you make the most of your contest -

•  Choose the purpose of the contest (increasing website traffic, increasing brand engagement, increasing followers and so on) so that you can better optimize your strategy

• Build your email list by requesting people to sign up for entering the contest. This will help you stay in touch with them even after the contest is over

• Choose the format of the contest such as video contest, photo contest or giveaways based on your end goal

•  Promote your contest far and wide on social media for maximum participation and online visibility. You can use online tools or a digital marketing company for effective promotion

Use a custom hashtag for your contest so that it can extend your online reach and generate more engagement

Building links through testimonials and reviews

Testimonials are no doubt a great way to increase your brand's trustworthiness and credibility, but they can be a great source of quality backlinks as well. 

Let us see how you can leverage them to improve your SEO efforts -

Leave useful reviews

Yes, you do not have to wait around for someone to write testimonials for you. Depending on your niche, make a list of the tools or software's that you regularly use. You can leave a meaningful review with a link to your website on the high-authority tools. If their website itself does not have any provision for leaving review, you can check high-authority third party websites to leave your testimonial.

Encourage your customers to leave reviews

Either on your own website or third-party review platforms, do not shy away from asking your recent customers to leave their feedback, and make sure that they include a link to your website.

Find unlinked mentions

Check any of your previous testimonials for unlinked mentions. If you find any, you can contact the customer and ask them to include a link to your website or the relevant web page.

Contact a digital marketing company for further information and help on earning quality backlinks for your website.

5 of the Most Important Marketing Channels for Digital Marketing

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 channels for B2B marketing companies -

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.

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

Effective tips for broken link building

 Broken link building is a smart way to replace the dead links on a relevant website with your own. It is beneficial to both parties – you get a backlink and the host website gets rid of a dead link. Now, there is a general consensus that the broken link building method is time-consuming and not that effective. There is no guarantee that the website you have contacted will reply or change the link. However, with the right approach, this method can be very effective and well-worth the effort. 

Let us see some tips for you to effectively leverage broken link building -

• To get the right type of backlinks, use online tools to find the websites that are regularly visited by your audience, as well as check the high-authority websites in your niche

• Try to use online tools to find out the content of the old link, so that the content you offer as a replacement is as similar as possible to the old one

• Keep your email short and to the point, as webmasters get such emails and pitches all the time

• Make sure that you are contacting the right person, and not using a generic email address on the concerned website

Send a follow-up email once or twice, but do not be too pushy as you can get reported as spam

Why is inbound marketing so vital for businesses?

Focused on attracting consumers and building a communication channel with them with the help of useful and relevant content, inbound marketing helps you achieve the core objectives of a business – obtain new customers and retain them. 

Let us have a look at the most prominent ways in which the inbound approach benefits B2B marketing companies -

Helps shorten the sales cycle

Unlike cold calling where your prospects might not be looking for a solution or be unaware that they even need one, inbound marketing targets the prospects who are already actively looking for a solution. The right approach can lead to quicker deal closure and save time.

Increases brand awareness and visibility

Well-written, SEO-friendly content makes you more visible on the search engines and makes it easier for your target audience to find you.

Establishes you as a thought leader

Original and engaging content that reflects your expertise helps you portray yourself as a thought leader among your customers and peers.

Provides scope for improvement

Inbound marketing provides easily trackable metrics that let you test the efficacy of your campaigns, so that you can make adjustments whenever necessary.

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.

Unnatural link building practices to steer clear from

Everyone wants backlinks for boosting their SEO efforts and drawing traffic to the website. However, obtaining links from bad sources or through unnatural practices can adversely affect your ranking or even get you penalized by Google.

Let us have a look at some of these practices -

•  An unnatural amount of links obtained through link exchange practices

•  Buying or selling links

•  Using automated link building programs to build links to your site

•  Spammy guest posting practices

•   Leaving spammy comments on irrelevant blog posts or discussion forums

•   Low-quality directory submissions

•   Using private blog networks – sites that use different IP addresses and exchange links, but are owned by the same person

An excessive amount of keyword-rich footer links

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.

How to Build Your Personal Brand on Instagram

Instagram is rapidly becoming the golden goose for businesses looking to strengthen their social media presence. With numbers of active users in billions, it is one of the best platforms to build your personal brand, humanize your interactions with your followers and gain new ones.

Let us see some actionable tips that will help you define and set apart your personal brand on Instagram -

Set your goals and objectives

Like with any other strategy, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve from your Instagram account. Analyze your competitors for how they are interacting with their followers, the hashtags they are using and the kind of content they are posting. This will give you an idea of what is working well, what your audience is and isn't responding to, and what you can do to differentiate yourself from them.

Set a voice or theme for your brand personality

Having a unique voice or theme will help your brand become more memorable for your followers. Pick a theme or voice and keep everything from the brand colors and logos to fonts consistent, so that your followers can easily identify you and know that you are staying true to your personality.

Get your hashtags in order

Hashtags are the best and most effective ways for brands to get discovered on Instagram. Luckily for you, the platform allows up to 30 hashtags for a single post. Thus, you have plenty of options to reach new audience by using hashtags that are relevant to your niche.

Leverage the power of Stories

Millions of people watch Instagram Stories everyday. In fact, businesses claim the credit for one-third of the most viewed Stories. You can use this feature to post a behind-the-screen video of your company or host a live event to capture your followers' attention and generate more engagement.

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

How to ensure maximum webinar attendance

Hosting webinars has always been a popular B2B digital marketing strategy. They can greatly help you increase your digital outreach, generate new leads and engage with your target audience. However, all this is possible only when you have a healthy amount of attendees. 

Let us have a look at some useful tips to increase your webinar attendance -

•  Start promoting your webinar early and leave some time to adjust your strategy based on the response

•  Send three reminder emails for maximum attendance

•   Select a topic that will add to the knowledge of your target audience or will show them a way to overcome a common business challenge

• Pick a date and time that will not interfere too much with your audience's schedule, especially if you are targeting a global audience

• Use social media platforms to promote your webinar widely

• Offer an attractive incentive for those who will attend the webinar

If possible, rope in industry thought leaders as speakers

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

Important email marketing metrics you should be keeping track of

Periodically analyzing metrics gives you an idea of how well your email marketing campaign and the steps you need to take to improve your results. However, with so many metrics available, it can be confusing to decide which metrics will prove to be useful.

Let us have a look at the most important metrics B2B marketing companies should pay attention to -

• Open rate – Tells you whether or not your subject lines are working out

• Click-through rate – Tells you how much your target audience is engaging with your emails

•  Conversion rate – Tells you whether or not your target audience is taking the action you want them to

• Bounce rate – Tells you whether or not your emails are getting successfully delivered to a recipient's inbox

• Unsubscribe rate – Tells you whether your target audience is finding your emails relevant and useful

Based on your email marketing goals, you can also keep a track of other metrics such your subscriber list growth, overall ROI and number of leads generated.

Link exchange for SEO – Is is good or bad?

Link exchange programs have long been marketers as a give and take strategy. One website offers another to add their links, if the other site will also add the former's own links to their website.

This strategy has been exploited a lot in order to gain quick backlinks, get traffic and improve search engine rankings in a short amount of time. However, these days link exchange programs are frowned upon, and can hurt rather than help your SEO if they are not used carefully.

If you have earned a backlink naturally because your content is relevant and of high-quality, and the other website has chosen to link back to you for a similar reason, the exchange will prove beneficial to both. However, doing so purely as a shortcut can also end you up with a penalty as this goes against Google's webmaster guidelines.

This will have a massive impact on your site's rank, authority and traffic.

The best course of action is to focus on naturally earn backlinks, rather than actively seeking a link exchange. If you need help with your website's SEO strategy, you can contact a digital marketing company.

5 Useful Tips to Ensure Your Next Virtual Event is a Success

Virtual events have always been popular, but during the pandemic times, this popularity and importance has grown exponentially. With an embargo on physical conferences and trade-shows, virtual events have stepped up as an integral part of any B2B digital marketing strategy. They let business owners and marketers engage their target audience in a meaningful way.

However, planning a virtual event is no easier than planning a physical one, and involves a lot of careful considerations. Let us have a look at a few tips that will help you ensure your next virtual event brings you the success you desire -

Choose the type of event carefully

You want to make sure that you want to host an event that people would enjoy attending as well as get some value from them. A few examples of such virtual events can be -

• Webinar on an useful, industry-related topic

•  Product demo/tutorial

•  Training and courses

•   Live Q&A session

•   Interview with industry influencers or experts

Start your promotion early

Don't leave off the promotion of your virtual event, either through social media platforms or emails, until the last week or so. Leave yourself plenty of time to send out your invites and test the response of the recipients. This will allow you to modify your message if necessary, and allow you to send a reminder as well to ensure maximum attendance.

While sending out your message, make sure that you highlight what your audience stands to gain by attending your virtual event.

Choose date and time wisely

Think about your target audience's daily schedule while you choose the date. Do not pick any day that will come in the way of a busy schedule, especially if you are targeting the 9 to 5 workers.

The great thing about virtual events is that it lets you include a global audience. However, make sure that you do not pick a time that will be considered too late or too early for the target audience in a particular time zone.

Be prepared for technical faults

Network failure, audio failure – there are many technical details that can go wrong and interrupt your virtual event. While your audience can sympathize, they will not wait around long while you scramble to take care of the problem. Make sure that you have a plan in place to take care of any interruptions as quickly as possible and resume the event smoothly.

Make the event interactive

Of course, as with any in-person event, your virtual event also needs to be interactive to prevent it from becoming monotonous and also increase audience engagement. Reserve some time for a Q&A session and allow the attendees to connect with you through the live chat option to encourage more participation.

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.