Does SEO require so much patience?

 The way Google algorithms work, unless you consistently post user-focused content, work on earning quality backlinks, and practice ethical SEO techniques, you will not be indexed by the search engine. Once you start doing so, Google will start rewarding you with a gradual climb in ranking until you appear among the top results. And with nearly every online business practicing SEO, it will indeed take a few months before you see the desired outcome. Even then, you will have to continue practicing SEO to maintain your position.

If you do see a website ranking in a suspiciously short amount of time, they have most likely followed some black hat SEO shortcuts. They may enjoy the dominant position for a while, but it will not take long for Google to notice something amiss and penalize the website. After all, if Rome had indeed been built in a day, all the wonderful architectures we admire today would have long been crumbled to dust, wouldn’t they?

It might take a few, or maybe even several months to reach the position you desire, but with persistent efforts you will certainly achieve it!

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.

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

Useful content marketing tips for startups

 The biggest challenge in front of most start-ups is to differentiate them from not only their peers, but also from the big industry players. Fortunately for the budget-constrained start-ups, digital and content marketing has levelled the play field for both big and small enterprises. 

Let us see how you can make the most out of content marketing when you are just starting out -

 

• Conduct a thorough research to find out what kind of content and content formats are working well with your target audience

• Incorporate your brand name, logos, website links and other brand elements in your content wherever feasible, to increase brand awareness

•  Spend some time creating a content calendar to avoid haphazard posting of content

•   Start a business blog to showcase your industry expertise

•  Start engaging with your audience and industry peers on the social media platforms relevant to your niche

• Experiment with different types of content and formats to find out which one works the best for you

• Start working on your SEO early on to increase your online visibility and traffic

Contact a digital marketing company for further help with you content development and marketing strategy.

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.

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.

Applying the SMART methodology to your content marketing goals

The SMART methodology is widely used while setting personal, professional or academic goals. 

Let us how it can be applied to your content marketing goals, and ensure greater success from every piece of content you create -

                           

Specific -

Set a highly specific goal for your content strategy (Example – I will publish five long-form articles every month)

Measurable -

Setting measurable goals will help you assess your progress (Example – I want to increase my social media followers by 25% from last month)

Attainable -

It is good to be ambitious, but you have to make sure your goal can actually be accomplished (Example - Wanting to increase your organic LinkedIn followers by 100 to 200 in a month is attainable, but going for 1000 new followers is not)

Relatable -

The goals should be relevant your overall marketing or business strategy (If your goal is to increase revenue, consider whether investing time and efforts into social media advertising will help you accomplish it)

Time-bound -

Of course, any goal has to be bound by a time frame to make sure you achieve it and do not fall off the wagon (Example – I will publish 3 social media posts by the end of this week)

If you need help with creating content, a digital marketing company can strategize and create value-added content that aligns to your marketing goals.

Are you caught in the trap of thin content?

Content is arguably the most important part of an organization's SEO strategy. However, if you find that you are still not seeing any improvement in ramking or traffic no matter how much content you create, you are possibly creating 'thin content'.

                                                      

As per Google, thin content is the content that provides "little or no value". Naturally, as Google has made clear its emphasis on user-relevant and quality content since the days of Panda update, thin content will not go far. Some examples of thin content are -

• Low-quality content on affiliate pages

• Content created through tools like article spinners or directly translated from another language

•  Content copied directly from another website

•  Page with negligible or no content at all

•  Pages stuffed with keywords

Today, it is vital to produce original content that matches the search intent of the user, to fare well on the search engines. A digital marketing company can help you create such quality content that provides the value of your solution to your target audience.

Effective B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies

More than collecting interest leads, it is important for B2B marketing companies to nurture them and keep them moving through the funnel till they convert into customers.

                                

Break your leads into different categories

Categorizing your leads as warm, hot or cold will give you an idea of the stage they are currently at, and the amount of nurturing they will require to move further.

Use email marketing

Segment your leads into hyper-focuses categories and send personalized messages.

Leverage marketing automation software for quick response

Lacking a fast response, you stand at a risk of leads going cold.

Use targeted content

Send your leads useful content that is tailored to their interests and business challenges, to engage and delight them.

Are you selecting the right digital marketing channels for your business?

Often, we have observed that many of our new clients have a notion that digital marketing does not work for them. After an analysis of their previous campaigns, we find that they simply had chosen the digital channels that were not at all suitable for their business.

On questioning why they selected the particular channels, the answers are usually that they were used by the client's competitors, or their previous marketing agency had suggested them as low-cost channels for getting quick results. Neither of these are good reasons to select a digital marketing channel. Even if you are working in similar domains, what worked out for your competitor may not work out for you. And yes, budget is an important consideration, but it is far more important to check whether the channel can further your digital campaign goals. If you want to establish yourself as a thought leader, posting on social media platforms will not help you. You will need to consistently publish high quality content in the form of blogs, whitepapers or case studies, and in a way that provides real value to your target audience.

Even more important is taking the time to find out which online channels which are frequented by your audience, and the type of content that is readily consumed by them. It will give you a clearer picture of the channels you need to adopt, and the kind of content you need to furnish them with.

The success of your entire marketing campaign hinges on your choice of the digital channels. So when you set out to select them, make sure that you have a clear picture of your marketing goals, your budget and the needs of your target audience in your mind.

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.

4 Major Predictions for the Digital Marketing Business Post Covid-19

There can be no two opinions about the fact that the current pandemic will leave a lasting impact on the way we conduct business. While countless businesses felt the effects of the situation, majority of them adapted quickly and moved operations and customer communications online to improve business continuity. This shift has propelled the already progressing digital transformation, and has led the way for new trends and practices in the world of digital marketing.

Personalized experience and user data will be even more crucial

As businesses struggle to deal with financial crisis, it is imperative that you offer them a solution that they absolutely need to overcome their challenges, as well as save them money. For this, consumer data will prove to be even more critical. It is absolutely essential that your content reaches the right audience at the right time.

SEO-optimized content will include considerations of safety

As more and more people will turn to search engines for the product or services they need, there will be also an increase in search terms that include safety considerations such as social distancing, health and remote contact. Keywords that include these aspects will increase in search volume and become more competitive.

The frequency of sending emails will be re-evaluated

Earlier, you were most probably sending out an email to your mailing list based on a schedule. However, during and post pandemic, you need to remember that your prospects and customers are probably receiving tons of emails from different brands. Thus, you need to make sure that not only your emails, but also every communication you send is absolutely critical and relevant to them.

There will be an increase in demand for digital marketing professionals

Naturally, as an increasing number of businesses and enterprises adapt to digital marketing, there will be a huge demand for skilled digital marketers to plan and execute optimized campaigns.

A digital marketing company can also help you position your value among your target audience, and conceptualize strategic campaigns to maintain a steady stream of leads and enquiries in a post-Covid world.

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.

Avoiding information overload in content marketing

Digital marketing or content marketing entails reaching out to your target audience on multiple digital channels and educating them through content. However, the constant barrage of information from all channels such as emails, social media posts, blogs and newsletters can confuse and overwhelm the person at the receiving end, thus leading to information overload. 

This renders the person unable to take an informed decision, leading them to abandon your brand altogether.

Here are some tips to help you avoid information overload -

•                     Keep the content absolutely relevant to your audience's business requirements

•                     Break it down into easily consumable pieces and use visual content for easy comprehension

•                     Create non-screen content such as podcasts, so that users can consume information while mullti-tasking

A digital marketing company can help you strategize and create content in a way that engages and educates your target audience, without overwhelming them with information.

What are the traits that make the best B2B Marketers today

In today’s competitive market, simply having outstanding content is just half the job done. As a new-age marketer in the Digital B2B marketing industry, there’s a lot that goes into the making of a thought leader. Let us explore some of the traits that go beyond the known facts of good content and social media marketing genius.

Subject matter expertise-

Becoming a subject matter expert is the first step to becoming a thought leader. Writing a compelling piece of content is not always a piece of cake.  Writing about complex products, services even and technology can take some level of expertise that comes through years of study, perseverance and also through contributing your own thoughts to add value to business and the market. As a successful B2B marketer, you would want to prep-up on the knowledge front that will surely create a loyal audience for you.

Be an awesome storyteller-

In the realm of B2B Digital Marketing realm, being an awesome story-teller is a skill not many possess. Great story-telling equals to creating great content and can surely get more audience for your business and can keep them engaged for long. Cutting through the content noise in the market and standing out in the crowd is an art and you can accomplish it through intelligent, insightful storytelling

Being Tech-savvy-

In a high-tech and hyper connected world in B2B Digital Marketing industry, staying updated when it comes to technology has almost become a must. Going beyond apps and getting to know about technology tools that can help leverage your business, can surely pave way toward becoming the best B2B marketer today.

Defining the right goals and objectives and configuring your expertise around it; while learning each day can help you become a thought leader that everyone wants to listen to.

Things to remember when you do inbound marketing for a B2B company

Traditional outbound marketing was becoming too noisy for customers to believe the authenticity that it claimed. Inbound marketing strategies mostly work for all companies and more so for B2B companies. Following certain rules for creating and implementing inbound marketing strategies can change the face of your business.

So, what should you plan when it comes to inbound marketing for B2B companies? Here are a few steps-

With clear and thoughtful messaging, inbound marketing can help B2B companies gain visibility and make their presence felt. Identifying the right audience can help give the right direction to all the efforts. Inbound marketing helps enhance your social media presence too. Bringing quality leads can be a challenge; however, unique inbound marketing helps ease the challenges to bring in a lot of quality leads from time to time.

Being more focused and adopting more direct ways, helps B2B companies make sure that their products and services reach the right audiences and are made easily available to customers. Content is a factor that these companies heavily rely on and make it strategic and also unique for fetching better results. Creating informative, shareable content is a good inbound marketing strategy that works for almost all industries today.  In addition to meaningful content, the use of SEO, meaningful call-to-action, emailers that are crafted with the right messaging for the right audience can create outstanding results.

Inbound marketing calls for designing and planning campaigns that are customized for a specific audience and the content and the context both play an important role while implementing inbound marketing. Apart from creating the right content, the distribution of messages across various social media channels also matters and affects the results.

The objective of any marketing strategy is always to attract new prospects and convert them into customers; however in inbound marketing, a part of the objective is also to elevate the overall customer experience. Hence, creating a buyer persona is critical in any B2B industry.

So here’s the crux of what you should do to plan a good inbound marketing strategy-

•  Create informative and engaging content
•   Understand and create buyer personas
•   Focus on elevating customer experience
•   Buyer’s journey is important in planning the strategy
•   Evaluate the results and re-strategize

Creating an outstanding and competent inbound marketing strategy requires skills, so make sure that you hire resources that have the experience, knowledge and the clarity that is required to keep up with the competition.

Unique ways to add more value to content in a B2B landscape

When you have taken up the role to write content on a regular basis, whether it is for an organization or for yourself, think of how you can get innovative and how far you can really go when it comes to dishing out not just words but some creative, out-of-the-box ideas.  Usually, when you are busy churning out content on a daily basis; it’s sometimes good to take a pause and step back a little and ask yourself a few questions. The answers might startle you and you might want to think of new ways to look at content for better results.

Curating Content-

In a B2B Digital Marketing industry or any other industry, for that matter; curating content may not be an inspiring task for any writer who wants to invest all his energy into writing original content. But curating can require skills and it in no way means that you re re-using content. If curating someone else’s content can add more value to it then why not try it to see how it works for you. With plenty of resources available, it takes some level of skill to reinvent ways of finding new content, analyzing it to see if it suits your business domain and to reposition it for making it sharable enough.

Critical thinking-

Critically looking at content resources may not be such a negative trait. In fact, to be able to question anything that does not convince you or having the curiosity to dig-deeper for finding more insights through any content piece is a good sign of being a competitive content writer. Not accepting content at its face value, or trying to find the underlying message that you may want to build upon, can help create some unique content pieces for the right audiences.

Understanding the audience-

Like it or not, no matter how creative you want to be, you may not have the free will to write about any theme, without understanding your audience and taking their preferences into account. In the B2B Digital Marketing realm; understanding your audience and their needs should be at the core of all your strategies; let alone content. In fact, your audiences and their needs may give you a direction to create content effectively; as without a goal your content may not become that valuable or shareable.

The role of a content writer can be creative and challenging enough, with the perks of being able to switch roles between a researcher, a curator and even a problem-solver. If you write content as though you are solving a problem and making someone’s life easy; there won’t be a dearth of ideas for creating valuable content.

E-mailers- a powerful tool to keep your readers engaged!

E-mailers are at the heart of every digital marketing service. Creating outstanding e-mailers with excellent content and messaging can do wonders to help you attract prospects, engage them and fetch huge ROI.

It isn’t difficult to find the companies who offer email marketing services; however it is a challenge to find the ones, who create out-of-the-box e-mailers that can change the face of your business with their unique content and messaging.

Here are a few things that good e-mailers can do for your business-

Building brand credibility-

Email marketing is like a direct reflection of your brand values. A good e-mailer with excellent messaging can help build your brand credibility and thus enhance your reach.

Enhancing website traffic-

A good, attractive e-mailer that is built with a purpose can be a direct gateway to your website. An e-mailer can be your first impression for prospects to dig deeper and log into your website to know more.

Establishing long term relationships-

An excellently crafted e-mailer is not just a page of information. It can be a powerful tool for you to not just attract a one-time prospect; it is a tool that can help you build relationships and keep enhancing them every time you send them some interesting data that is relevant and engaging.

Making Recommendations-

Establishing long-term relationships is all about intent and about nurturing those relationships. A good response and long list of followers is a good measure of success when it comes to e-mail marketing. You may simply care to know the customers’ preferences, likes and dislike, build offers around it and make recommendations too. After all, people won’t follow you for nothing!

Creating personalized messaging-

Similar to making recommendations, e-mailer marketing services that create e-mailers with focused, personalized messaging, almost always never go unnoticed. It is the effort that attracts customers and helps build trust.

Offering free resources-

E-mailers that offer free resources or links can attract customers who become your instant followers. Content that can be shared and used is valuable content!

Thus, e-mailers have a huge potential to attract prospects and convert them into customers. However, the key is to know the purpose, the audience and build content around these parameters for better results.

For effective B2B Inbound marketing – Attract, Engage and Delight!

B2B marketing landscape has drastically changed over the past few years. With digitization and technology at the forefront of revolutionizing the entire customer experience; marketers are re-thinking their approach toward attracting prospects, engaging them and eventually establishing a long-lasting relationship with the ‘happy customer’.

If you look at the buying journey of your customer, it should look like an incredibly engaging transition from an intrigued prospect to a happy customer; one that is built around trust, momentum and sustainability. A smart B2B inbound marketing strategy can do just that! It is more like a journey, built around innovative approaches and practices to create invaluable customer experience with a long-lasting, positive effect on businesses.

Inbound marketing is all about raising brand awareness, adding value to businesses, unlike the hard-sell approach. It therefore promises a more sustainable marketing business model that can win you loyal customers.

So what does inbound marketing look like?

Attract (Pull in prospects through without the hard-sell approach)

Engage (Empathetic conversations)

Delight (Creating lasting customer relationships through a consultative approach)

The Inbound methodology that works-

Curate what and whom you want to attract-
You want to attract only those prospects that are most likely to get converted into potential leads and eventually happy customers. You can do this by identifying buyer-personas and creating relevant content, publishing it around the right channels at the right time and analyzing the results and re-strategizing your content. You can attract them through blogs, videos, emails, ads and social media.

Engage to create lasting relationships-
More human interaction with an empathetic touch can create more possibilities of engaging your prospects. You can do this through engaging and relevant conversations created through chats, e-mails, ads, etc. Engage them through a creative confluence of technology and content strategy by using conversational bots, emailer marketing, lead management and many more tools.

Delight with trust and credibility-
For more delightful customer experience, make sure you deliver the right information to the right customer, at the right time. It’s all about surprising them with engaging content through innovative tools such as videos, infographics and more. Smart content, emailers, and marketing automation tools can help you delight your customers throughout the buyer journey.

The whole definition of customer experience in the past decade has changed drastically. Inbound marketing therefore fits in right, with a more strategic and persona-based approach. Giving away the right information through innovative content is one of the most important ingredients of a successful inbound marketing strategy.

For effective B2B inbound marketing, pinning the wheel of inbound marketing tools around rich and shareable content is the key to attracting the right prospects, engaging them effectively and delighting them in the longer run.