So, how can project managers master the art of on-point communication skills among their teams and use it to pave the way for triumph? Today, we explore some of the most powerful project management communication strategies to help your project teams thrive and connect on new levels.

Fueling Success: The Vital Role of Effective Communication in Project Management

In the universe of project management, effective communication is the fuel that propels teams toward achievement. Picture a rocket hurtling through space, relying on precise calculations and coordinated efforts to reach its destination. Similarly, projects require a seamless flow of information, clear directives, and a shared understanding among team members and clients.

Without it, the project can veer off course, resulting in missed deadlines, costly errors, and strained relationships. Take, for instance, the construction of a towering skyscraper. Architects, engineers, and construction workers must communicate flawlessly to ensure each element aligns harmoniously, like a symphony of steel and concrete. When communication falters, corners may be cut, and the structural integrity compromised.

By recognizing the crucial role of communication in project management, you can avoid such pitfalls and foster a collaborative environment where ideas thrive, conflicts are resolved, and goals are achieved – seamlessly. After all, the success of a project lies not only in bricks and mortar but in the connections we forge through the power and art of communication. It’s one of the best growth hacking strategies for your business.

Mastering the Art of Connection: 5 Strategies for Effective Project Management Communication

Welcome, fellow project managers, to a journey where we delve into the depths of effective communication in project management. In a realm where bad communication can breed chaos and stifle progress, mastering the art of connection becomes paramount. It is how we unlock the secrets to building cohesive and high-performing project teams.

By embracing the power of effective communication, project management teams can navigate the challenges that arise, provide constructive feedback, and foster an environment where every team member feels genuinely heard and valued. Time to unveil the latest strategies that will enable you to establish a proper communication strategy, ensuring the success of your entire team.

So, let us embark on this transformative voyage and unlock the key to project management greatness. Ready? Dive right in!

1. Tailor Your Communication to Fit the Project

Just as a master tailor customizes a suit, project managers must tailor their communication strategies to suit the unique requirements of each project. Consider the following factors when determining the most effective team communication methods for different scenarios:

• Project Complexity: The complexity of a project will influence the depth, detail, and frequency of communication needed. For example, a high-stakes, intricate project may require more frequent and comprehensive updates than a simpler endeavor and vice versa.
• Team Size and Structure: A smaller team may find the informal type of communication, like face-to-face meetings or instant messaging, sufficient, while larger teams may benefit from formalized communication channels such as email or project management software.
• Stakeholder Preferences: Understanding the preferred form of communication of key stakeholders is crucial. Some may prefer face-to-face meetings, while others may favor written regular updates. Tailor your approach to accommodate their preferences regarding communication types involved to ensure their engagement, as well as efficiency of communication.

2. Embrace Diverse Communication Styles

Words are but pictures of our thoughts. Each person has a unique communication style and a preferred communication type, influenced by their personality, background, and unique experiences that have shaped them into who they are. Embracing this diversity within your project team can lead to more effective project communication.

Look into these most common communication styles:

• Direct and Assertive: Some team members prefer to be concise and to the point, valuing efficiency and results over small talk or going back and forth with pleasantries. Appreciate their directness and provide them with the necessary information concisely.
• Analytical and Logical: Others may rely on data and logical reasoning to communicate effectively. Provide them with accurate information, evidence, and analysis to engage and leverage their problem-solving abilities.
• Emotive and Expressive: Emotional individuals may communicate through stories, metaphors, and anecdotes. Connect with them on an emotional level and harness their passion to motivate the team.
• Collaborative and Inclusive: Team members who value collaboration may prefer group discussions and brainstorming sessions. Foster an environment where their input is encouraged and valued.

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3. Break the Silence: Establish Clear Communication Channels

Poor communication or a lack of communication can be the death knell for any project. Establishing clear communication channels will prevent misunderstandings, help you avoid potential roadblocks, and keep everyone informed.

Think about incorporating the following methods to avoid ineffective communication:

• In-person Meetings: Face-to-face interactions can build rapport, and foster collaboration, and allow for immediate feedback. Arrange regular team meetings or one-on-one discussions to ensure effective communication.
• Discussion Boards: Virtual platforms like discussion boards can provide a centralized space for team members to share updates, ask questions, and collaborate asynchronously.
• Real-Time Communication: Instant messaging and chat applications, such as Slack, enable quick exchanges and facilitate real-time communication, especially when team members are geographically dispersed.
• Phone Calls: Sometimes, a phone call can be more efficient and effective than a lengthy email chain. Pick up the phone when a conversation is required to avoid misinterpretation.
• Project Management Software: Dedicated project management software provides a range of communication tools, including task assignment, progress tracking, and document sharing. Leverage some of the various project management tools available to streamline communication and enhance collaboration.

4. Active Listening: The Key to Successful Communication

Unfortunately, most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. Nonetheless, an effective communication process is a two-way street. Project managers must actively engage in conversations and hone their active listening skills to foster successful, interactive communication.

Here’s how:

• Be Present: Give your undivided attention when someone is speaking. Put aside distractions, maintain eye contact, and show genuine interest in what they’re saying.
• Paraphrase and Clarify: Summarize and repeat back what you’ve understood to ensure accuracy. Seek clarification when needed to avoid misinterpretation.
• Ask Open-Ended Questions: Encourage dialogue and a deeper understanding by asking open-ended questions that promote discussion and reflection.
• Empathize: Put yourself in the speaker’s shoes and try to understand their perspective. Validate their emotions and show empathy to build trust and rapport.
• Manage Nonverbal Cues: Besides actively listening and engaging in verbal communication, pay attention to body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. These nonverbal cues can provide invaluable insights into the speaker’s feelings and intentions.
• Give Feedback: Provide constructive feedback when necessary, but do so in a respectful and supportive manner. Be open to receiving feedback as well, whether negative or positive, to foster a culture of transparent and open communication among your team or with your clients.

5. Develop a Robust Communication Plan

A goal without a plan is nothing but a wish. With that in mind, you should be aware that a well-crafted communication plan is the pillar of effective project management and finishing any project on time. Follow the following steps to develop a robust and effective communication plan:

• Identify Stakeholders: Determine who needs to be included in the communication plan, both within the project team and external stakeholders.
• Define Communication Objectives: Clearly articulate the goals and objectives of your communication efforts. Are you aiming to inform, align, or inspire? Communicate accordingly by leveraging the most effective methods for what you are looking to achieve.
• Choose Communication Methods: Select the most appropriate communication methods based on the project’s needs, team dynamics, and stakeholder preferences.
• Establish a Communication Schedule: Set a cadence for regular communication and meetings, whether it’s daily, weekly, or monthly. Consistency is key to keeping everyone informed.
• Document Communication Guidelines: Create a set of guidelines that outline expectations for communication within the project team. Include guidelines for response times, tone, and confidentiality.
• Evaluate and Adjust: Continuously monitor the efficiency of your communication efforts in your project management strategies, and be open to adjusting your plan as needed. Solicit feedback from team members and stakeholders to identify areas for improvement.

From Chaos to Seamless Collaboration: Building Bridges to Project Management Success

Productive interactions and dialogue are the backbone of successful project management. By tailoring communication methods to fit the project, embracing diverse communication styles, establishing clear communication channels, practicing active listening, and developing a robust communication plan fueled with practical tools, project managers can foster a culture of effective communication that propels their teams toward success.

Remember, communication is the bridge that connects minds, transcending words and fostering meaningful collaboration. However, it’s not just about words but about genuine understanding, connection, and collaboration. As Maya Angelou eloquently stated, “People will forget what you said and what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

In project management, it is not just the content of our communication that matters but the impact it has on those we engage with. So, strive for simplicity and clarity in your communication, create an atmosphere of empathy, trust, and shared understanding, and witness the transformation of your projects thrive. Our team certainly has.

Good luck!

The post Effective Communication in Project Management: 5 Strategies for Success appeared first on Play Media.

As a cost-effective way for businesses to get all eyeballs and ears on them and the ultimate platform for brand building, customer service, and conversion, social media marketing can bring remarkable success to any business – but only if done right.

From social media 101s to practical tips, tricks, and tools you can leverage on your way to digital heights, this practical, all-in-one guide is here to show you how to do social media marketing in a way that delivers tangible results for your business and helps you tame the wild social landscape beast.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

For the first time in human history, we have technology that allows us to maintain rich connections with many people in real-time – social media, aka social networks. Intrusive, traditional marketing went out the window a long time ago. The edge social media has over traditional media lies in its unprecedented capacity in three key marketing areas – connection, interaction, and customer data.

Social media is any digital channel, tool, or platform that allows people to create and share content, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube – some of the most popular social networks today. Social media marketing can help businesses reach a wide audience and advertise their brand, products, or services to an almost infinite pool of both present and potential clients and customers.

If leveraged smartly, it can result in enormous benefits, such as increased brand awareness, brand loyalty, rankings, and organic traffic, and allows for creating crowdsourced and user-generated content (UGC) and using customer feedback which ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.

Different Types of Social Media Marketing

As digital technologies and the prevailing use of mobile devices have become an integral part of our personal and professional lives, social media has become one of the main communication channels of choice – and the place to be if effective digital marketing is what you’re after. Although complex, social media marketing can be broken down into three main categories:

· Organic media: Free advertising and content that gains attention naturally

· Paid media: Sponsored content that costs money to post (paid social media posts, search engine ads, banner ads, native ads)

· Earned media: Promotional content that has been given freely by the audience in the form of shares, likes, and comments, like customer-created product reviews and recommendations.

How to Use Social Media Marketing to Propel Your Business

Done correctly, social media marketing can be a winning long-term solution for the success your brand has been struggling to attain. But is being on social media enough? Of course not! Winning the social media marketing game is easier said than done, and to see any results, you need to push all the right buttons the right way.

Great social media is like any other marketing strategy – carefully crafted, measured, managed, and founded on a strong and clear plan. It might seem overwhelming, but with the right guidance and insights, your business can flourish by reaping all the benefits of having a strong presence on consumer-favorite social media platforms.

1. Develop a Killer Social Media Marketing Strategy

Over one-third of the world’s population is on social media, so it’s quite obvious it’s where the majority of the global citizenry is. But while you might be tempted to post on as many social platforms as possible, more doesn’t necessarily mean better regarding your social media marketing strategy. Only well-researched and thought-over social media marketing strategies are rewarded by consumers.

To deliver on your strategic vision, you must be up-to-date with the latest trends and practices. When creating social media strategies, focus on where your target audience spends most of their time, what platforms are popular in your industry and where your competitors are gaining a significant following and clout. Consider aspects like business domain, future plans and goals, end customers, and audience nature.

2. Custom-Tailor Your Strategy Around Your Audience

Without the support of the right crowd, your social strategy will be in vain. Your target audience will help you figure out everything and guide your way from the social media platforms you need to be on to every piece of content you’ll ever create.

Once you narrow down the social media platforms you want to use, you’ll need to determine what type of content you want to share on those platforms. Different types of content appeal to and engage differently with different people, so experimenting to see what works best for each platform and audience, then tailoring your content accordingly is essential.

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3. Devise a Detailed Social Media Marketing Plan

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you even know when you get there? To excel in social media marketing, it’s important to create goals that will guide your efforts. Your social media marketing plan is the road map for carrying out your strategy – it helps you keep your eyes on the grand prize and create content that aligns with your marketing goals and business objectives.

Structure your efforts and clearly define your goals so you can easily measure your success down the road, ensuring you spend your time, money, and effort where it matters most. Having helpful frameworks in place, like setting SMART goals, OKRS and KPIs, will light up the road ahead.

4. Track Your Success

One of the best things about social media? It’s loaded with valuable data. Many factors affect social media marketing, and analytics can help you assess tracking metrics, optimize campaigns, and create new goals. Unlike traditional marketing forms, social media has in-built data analytic tools allowing you to review your performance, track the success of your efforts and identify even more ways to engage without much time or resources on it.

The ever-changing digital times call for adaptable methods. So, the final and most important step in any social media marketing strategy is measurement. Use each platform’s analytics to monitor your marketing campaigns, identify which posts generate the most engagement, and tweak them as necessary. Scale up what works and stay away from what doesn’t.

Best Social Media Marketing Tools to Leverage

Without an arsenal of powerful social media marketing tools that align with your business goals, your social strategy may fall flat before being given a chance. Thankfully, there’s a plethora of both free and paid tools available that can help you win the social media marketing race. Whatever you set out to market, social media tools make staying active and engaging on social media easier, offer key analytics, and pave the way for greater impact.

Each social media tool offers specific features that best serve different social platforms and purposes. If you have a clear social media marketing strategy and plan in place, you’ll know exactly what you need from each social media tool to execute them.

Consider adding the following to your social media marketing toolkit:

Social Media Analytic Tools

In a data-driven digital era, knowledge is success. If your data is off, so will your social strategy – you can’t get the full, clear picture of your social media marketing efforts without the relevant tools to analyze each piece of the puzzle. Luckily, a well-designed social media marketing (SMM) plan lets you tap into an invaluable resource – customer data.

SMM analytics tools like Google Analytics, Hootsuite Analytics, HubSpot, and Brandwatch can do the math for you – they have the capacity to extract customer and performance data and turn this informational gold-mine into actionable market analysis and easy-to-read reports that can help you gain insights into valuable metrics to tailor and crowdsource new strategies upon.

Social CRM Tools

Compared to traditional marketing, one of the advantages of social media marketing is that it has two kinds of interaction that enables targeted customer relationship management (CRM) tools: customer-to-customer and firm-to-customer. Unlike tracking customer value by simply capturing purchase activity, SMM can track customer value directly (through purchases) and indirectly (through product referrals).

A social CRM tool like Salesforce Social Studio, HubSpot CRM, and Sprout Social acts as a sophisticated address book – it lets you store a plethora of customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage social media campaigns across various social channels, all in one location.

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Consistency is key with social media content, yet it can be an uphill battle if you manage multiple social networks. Luckily, there are different types of social media management tools for everything from composing posts to queuing and organizing them, with one common goal: saving time.

Using a Social Media Calendar or any other type of scheduling/management tool can help you plan posts in advance while ensuring you stay organized and keep track of the various moving parts of social media.

Social Media Engagement & Automation Tools

Social media engagement and automation tools help you set your brand to excel in responsiveness and efficiency. Engagement tools like Talkwalker, Zoho Social, and Hootsuite help you unify all of the messages from every platform, notify you when there’s a sharp increase in mentions, assign messages to individuals on your team and show you the full social media history of someone reaching out to your handles.

Automated social media marketing is all about dealing with repetitive social media marketing tasks that can be automated to maximize your time and performance without compromising the user experience. Automation tools can automate content promotion, streamline customer service and increase your response rate.

Social Media Advice from the Pros: Practical Social Media Marketing Tips & Tricks

To help you cut through the digital noise, we’ve asked some of our savvy marketers to share some inside scoop with our readers. Here’s what they had to say about the latest secret ingredients of social media marketing you should be tapping into:

1. Keep the Wheels Turning

Few things move faster than the speed of social media, which is why a half-hearted commitment to social media marketing is the equivalent of failing. Social media marketing is not a one-and-done thing, and if you’re not at the right place at the right time – you’ll soon fade into the noise.

Post frequently and consistently, and actively engage and interact with your followers – and yes, that includes responding to negative feedback, too! After all, social media is a cross-functional platform that also acts as a customer service portal. Use it to your advantage.

Yes, social media might be an ever-changing landscape you constantly need to keep up with, but what will never change is the human desire to connect. So you can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.

2. Never Forget that Content Is King

Valuable content is at the core of social advertising and has the power to make or break your social media marketing efforts. One of the best ways to sabotage your social media content is to keep it salesy and fail to tie it to your goals or custom-tailor it to each social media platform and its audience.

Know why you’re creating content in the first place, and ensure each piece of content is equally engaging, compelling, and formatted to suit the channel outlines and its audience. Does your content lead readers on a journey, or does it merely stuff them as leads into a pipeline? Does it answer your customers’ problems and needs? Does it naturally fit in its surroundings so it does not disrupt users’ browsing experience?

Whatever the platform, nobody counts the number of ads you run – they just remember the impression you make. People don’t want to be sold to; they want to establish real connections and trust the brands they engage with. Emotional attachment and a humanized brand voice go a long way – it’s what builds long-lasting relationships and cultivates customer interaction and loyalty.

3. Use Smart Incentives

Boost your social media reach and following with contests and sweepstakes – most people will jump at the chance to get some free bees. Organizing giveaways for your products or services is an easy win-win – a great way to boost engagement rate and have a well-motivated audience encouraged to share your posts and, thus, get your brand, products, or services out there.

4. Take Advantage of Video Content

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know how powerful video-based content has become – especially in social media marketing. It’s become the most engaging type of content marketing with an unmatched ROI that offers the opportunity to tell a story, plus it provides amazing actionable insights. So, ensure you jump on this 21st-century marketing bandwagon and harness its power to the fullest.

Social Market Your Way to Digital Heights

Creating a highly-targeted and effective social media marketing strategy will improve your online performance. Utilizing tools to manage your social media presence and interact with your audience will increase your reach and lead generation and cultivate customer loyalty. And most importantly, tracking and analyzing your social media performance metrics will help you stay on the right track and path to success.

A marketing professional’s job is never done – marketing is about perpetual motion and continuous innovation. Use social media marketing as an idea generator, cutting-edge trend mapper, and strategic advertising compass for all your digital marketing ventures, and your brand will become a household digital name in no time.

The post Social Media Marketing Guide: Tools, Tips & Tricks for Results appeared first on Play Media.

However, having a goal without a strategy in place is just wishful thinking. Running a content marketing campaign without a clear plan is like driving a car with your eyes shut – reaching your destination or crashing becomes nothing but a matter of luck. But where do you start?

We’re about to shed some light on the who, what, why’s, and how’s of content marketing strategies to help you develop a winning content marketing plan that will propel you to new digital heights in 7 easy-to-follow steps.

After all, content marketing works best when you plan for its success.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the 21st-century go-to advertising technique and the bread and butter of digital marketing.

It’s defined as the process of planning, creating, distributing, and publishing relevant and valuable written and visual content online via different channels (like social media, websites, blog posts, podcasts, apps, white papers, etc.) to attract more leads, engage with your target audience and drive profitable customer action. When done right, content marketing can lead to increased brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty and boost conversions and sales.

By creating an immersive environment, content marketing bridges the gap between what brands produce and what consumers actually want. Instead of force-selling your products or services, you are providing relevant and useful content to your prospects that solve their issues. With content marketing, you become what people are interested in instead of interrupting what people are interested in. Plus, its low-cost yet effective nature means that any business can reap its benefits, large or small.

What Is a Content Marketing Plan / Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a framework that ensures you create the right types of content, distribute them on the right channels at the right time, and can measure their success. It is an actionable plan based on data and diligent research that outlines and maps out your business objectives and how your content marketing efforts will support and address them.

It clearly defines what key future efforts you need to focus on –who you will be talking to, what you will say and how, where the content will be promoted, and how you will know when you are successful. It also ensures that your content marketing goals are aligned with your business goals, and that each team member is one the same page at every step, from writing and posting content to sharing it and tracking your results.

Why Is Having an Effective Content Marketing Plan Important?

Despite its newfound popularity and the sharp increase in its unmatched effectiveness, the value of content marketing is still poorly understood. Although diving head in might be tempting, sustainable, long-term success with content marketing first requires a mastery of the fundamentals. To realize the full vast potential content marketing offers, having a plan is crucial, yet it’s a step many content marketers skip.

A content marketing plan is your road map to a successful content marketing campaign. A carefully built content marketing plan will point you in the right direction –- without one, you’ll be forever tapping in the dark, guessing. Everything you do as a content marketer should flow from a deliberately and intelligently constructed (and documented!) content marketing strategy, or you’re going to end up missing the mark more often than not.

7 Steps to Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy that Drives Results

Ultimately, it’s not the best content that wins – it’s the best-promoted content that wins. Content is king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants. Approaching your content plan strategically will ensure your message cuts through the digital clutter and reaches your target audience with the right information at the right time and place.

So, to get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you need a solid, bullet-proof content marketing strategy. Not sure where to start? Here’s how to develop a winning content marketing plan, step by step, by using this tried and true framework of best practices:

1.Spell Out Your End Goal

First, you need to know where you’re headed to get there. What’s your key purpose in the first place? The “why” behind your content marketing efforts? Of course, you’re in it for all the juicy benefits, but it’s time to get more personal and granular. What is your bottom line? What objectives are you trying to accomplish with your content marketing?

Start with what you know best – yourself and what you want. Creating a clear mission statement can help you guide all your decision-making, keep your eyes on the prize, and never lose sight of what’s important. If you’re shooting for the stars, you can break down large business goals into smaller segments by using SMART goals.

Try to keep your goals quantifiable so that you can easily evaluate your progress down the road – you can use OKRs and KPIs to track your objectives and measure the effectiveness of your content marketing plan later on.

2. Research Your Market and Competitors

If you develop a content marketing strategy without diligent research, your brand will barely float, and due to the speed industries move today, you’ll sink fast. You need to know exactly what you’re up against. So, start by researching your industry and niche current trends to get a sense of direction and figure out what makes today’s consumer’s heart beat faster.

Keyword research is what you should focus on next, as relevant keywords will be the ones guiding the potential customers your way on search engines and driving organic search traffic. When researching your competitors, focus on people and brands that are competing for your audience’s attention.

Reflect on what content types they are producing appear to do the trick, where they are distributing it, as well as what search terms they’re targeting to offer your shared audience something even better and steal a piece of the attention pie.

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PlayMedia is the digital marketing agency that will take you to the top, and help you grow your business through dedication, transparency, and a unique, highly individual approach.

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3. Sneak a Peek Into the Past with a Content Audit

Past is a great teacher if you choose to listen. So, the next step to creating an effective content marketing plan is auditing your existing content across all channels to learn a thing or two. Google Analytics, Moz, and SEMrush are great tools for evaluating content performance. These performance metrics will help you gain valuable insights into what type of content piques your target audience’s interest the most.

Which posts and pages have received the most attention and traffic? What about your click-through rates and bounce rates? Hone in on the content audit data to figure out what works and what doesn’t while keeping in mind that some of the past trends might not be relevant to the content marketing plan you are creating now. After all, a crucial part of a successful content strategy is also knowing what not to do.

Then, use that information to recycle, innovate, and hit all the sweet spots!

4. Define Your Ideal Crowd, then Learn All About It

A lot of content strategies fail because they haven’t done a good job of understanding the target audience. If you’re trying to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one – you need to focus and zone in your efforts where it matters most. So, who are you going to be creating and publishing content for? Conducting audience persona research to define your buyer persona – a fictional representation of your ideal customers will answer this question.

Developing a persona humanizes cold research facts and allows you to highly target and personalize your content marketing for your target audience, as you’ll be familiar with your consumers’ needs, experiences, behaviors, motivations, and goals. It allows for custom-tailored content creation and distribution through discovering the brand voice, channels, and messaging that appeals most to them.

Comb through your contacts database, comment sections, or simply interview your customers and prospects through Q&As and surveys to discover what they like or dislike about your brand, product, or service. Listen to your customers, too, not just your competitors – they’ll tell you everything you need to know if you lend them an ear.

5. Choose Your Formats and Channels Wisely

You’ve uncovered your and your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, your personas’ deepest desires and burning pain points, and your content marketing plan is beginning to take shape. But you can’t have your content simply floating around the web while you’re crossing your fingers it gets noticed by the right crowd, right? So, where will you find your target customers and best reach out to them?

To find the best distributing channels, start with figuring out where your target audience is most likely to be and spends most of their time. Find out their preferred platforms, from your website to social media channels. Using what you’ve gathered from analyzing what content was successful with your target audience in the past can also help you craft personalized, engaging, and compelling content.

Don’t stop there – you also need to figure out what type of content formats will resonate best with your target audience and correspond with the stages of their buyer’s journey. How do they prefer to consume media? What do they perceive as valuable content? Are they more likely to engage with email marketing, a blog post, a social media post, or maybe a guest post?

6. Create High-Quality Content, then Share It When & Where it Matters

Useful and relevant content that resonates with your audience is the atomic particle of your content marketing plan.

Marketing is no longer just about what you offer. Nobody reads advertising – people read stories, information, and solutions. Great content creation should not seek to disrupt conversations but fuel them. Keep each piece of content compelling, engaging, fresh, and informative. Arm it with SEO and target keywords and adjust it to each distribution channel accordingly.

Never simply churn out content for the sake of getting it out there – content marketing is not about publishing a thin piece of content and hoping people will stumble upon it. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about. You can create a content calendar (editorial calendar) to manage all your content activity and organize when and where you’ll publish upcoming content.

7. Track and Measure Your Progress

Personal judgment is not a great measure of the overall success of your content marketing plan. To get a real feel of how your content marketing strategy is doing, you need to measure its performance using objective metrics on a regular basis. Key performance indicators can tell you all you need to know about the progress you’re making.

Dive deep into essential content marketing metrics, such as engagement metrics like clicks and page views, conversion rates, ROI, as well as backlinks, search rankings, and social media shares. Use all the information you can get to rinse and repeat the process until you nail it down to a T.

Digital Marketing at Its Finest: Strategize Your Way to Content Marketing Success

Instead of one-way interruption, content marketing is about delivering valuable content that resonates with users on a deep, personal level, precisely when and where they need it. Having a robust and elaborate content marketing plan is how you make it happen.

Remember that content marketing strategies are not gospel or set in stone. A strong content marketing plan should focus your efforts to make the most out of them, not lock you into fixed strategies! Keep things flexible – tailor each content marketing strategy to your unique goals and target audience, and you’ll reach them before you know it.

Good luck!

The post Winning Content Marketing Plan: 7 Easy Steps to Follow appeared first on Play Media.

If you’re not reaching out to the right crowd the right way, connecting your ideal customers to your brand, products, or services will be like throwing darts at a moving target – in the dark. Businesses and marketers need to identify who their ideal customer is; otherwise, all their efforts will be unfocused, without purpose, and miss the mark.

Scroll down because we’re about to let you in on some insider tips and tricks and walk you through how to find your target audience step by step to get the most out of your marketing efforts.

First Things First: What Is A Target Audience?

In marketing, a target audience refers to your main customers and potential customer base – the individuals that are most relevant to your business and, therefore, the ones you should focus your attention on and try to reach and appeal to.

Your target audience is your ideal customer – the people most likely to be interested in your service or product and fit a specific demographic or a set of behaviors that make them a perfect fit for your offerings. It’s a cluster of people with similar traits — the key one being they have a need that your product or service solves and are, thus, most likely to convert from leads into real customers.

You can look at your target audience as your North Star – it should guide your entire business and marketing efforts, from your products/services and brand voice to your marketing, social media, and content strategies and campaigns.

Target Market vs Target Audience: What Is the Difference?

While the terms target market and target audience are often used interchangeably, they refer to different things and knowing both is key to creating digital marketing strategies that convert.

A target market is a wide range of customers with shared common characteristics that are likely to be interested in your products or services. For example, working moms between the ages of 25 and 35. While there might be some demographic similarities, the target market is a less-defined group of end-users than the target audience. A target audience is a subset of a target market – it’s more narrow, granular, and specific, such as working moms inside the same age range but with little free time and an interest in fashion.

Your target market is who your product or your service is generally intended for, while your target audience is an audience segment within your target market you are trying to reach and appeal to with your marketing efforts and activities like campaigns, advertisements, and promotions.

Getting your brand, product, or services in front of as many eyes as possible sounds tempting. However, “the more, the merrier” is not always true. The more specific you get about your target audience, the more tailored and focused your business and marketing strategies can be. Although a broader selection of ideal customers might help you reach a wide audience, casting too big of a net might means you may overlook the handful of potential customers with a higher chance of buying your product.

Why Is Finding Your Target Audience Important?

Many digital marketing campaigns flank because they fail to define and get to know their target audience. Identifying a target audience is the basis for your marketing campaigns, as it will define and shape all your decisions. The types of platforms, marketing channels, formats, and messaging you’ll want to use will all depend on the specific target audience you want to reach, attract and convert through your campaigns, which is essential for achieving ROI on your efforts.

Consumers are also more likely to trust brands that offer personalized interactions. Identifying your target audience gives you the power to truly understand the people you are trying to reach, communicate your marketing message better, and custom-tailor your approach to connecting with them. The target audience should guide all your marketing, branding, and on-site conversion efforts, such as ad copy, content, and calls to action.

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Hence, not knowing who the potential buyers of your product or service are is a sure way to miss out on sales – all your marketing efforts will be fruitless without a specific audience in mind. But what if you aren’t sure which audience you should target? Or, what if you’re targeting the wrong crowd? Keep reading because we’re about to show you how to pinpoint your target audience easily.

How to Identify Your Target Audience In 7 Steps

Before you start any marketing endeavor, you need to get your target audience down to a T. Who do you want to reach and appeal to? Who needs your products or services the most? These are all key questions that finding your target audience will answer. From there, you can learn more about what interests them, how to relate to them, and what drives them, so you can speak to them the right way and make them an offer they can’t resist.

You will probably need different target audience segments for different campaigns. Whatever the main goal, you can easily find your ideal target audience by using several tried-and-true methods and following these simple yet crucial steps:

1. Tap Into Your Current Audience

The best place to look for your target audience? Your own backyard. Rather than starting from scratch, you can use what you already have to define your target audience. Dig into your current audience customer base and examine it to see where there is room for some nip & tuck. Use analytics tools, your website, social media, and purchasing history data to segment your target market into smaller, more granular groups based on demographic, preferences, or behavioral traits that align with the goal of your campaign.

For example, you can tap into the pool of promising or inactive current customers, people who follow you on social media, are subscribed to your email list, or leads who have performed some qualifying action, such as visiting a landing page for a specific product.

2. Weed Out ‘Till You Find Out

Sometimes, knowing what you don’t want is the first step to figuring out what you actually do. So, you can start by determining who your target audience isn’t in a specific campaign or advertising strategy to eventually narrow it down to the right crowd, and avoid investing your time and money on market segments that won’t be receptive.

You can use the same recipe when you start getting to know your target audience on a deeper level – instead of focusing all your efforts on what your audience wants, think about what they definitely don’t want and what they would respond to negatively, too.

3. Research the Market and Analyze Your Competitors

Burning consumer trends and behavior are great references, so digging around Google might get you the industry intel you need to find your target audience. Detailed market research can help you uncover gaps in the market, industry, target customer pain points, buying motivations, etc., and discover exactly who you should pitch to, how, and where.

You can use various tools like Google Analytics, although even simple customer surveys or Q&A sessions with your customers or followers can go a long way and help you gather audience insights.

Sneaking a peek into what your competitors are doing and who they are marketing to never hurt anybody –sometimes the grass is greener on the other side. A thorough competitive analysis can give you a heads-up about which audiences might be worth targeting, identify the weaknesses and strengths of your rivals, and then offer your audience something even better. After all, you likely share a lot of objectives and maybe even target audiences.

4. Create Your Customer Persona

Finding your target audience without resorting to ineffective generalizations can be challenging and creating audience personas can help. Buyer personas are fictional customers representing your target audience. Some even assign alliterative names to their buyer/audience personas to make them more humanizing, real, and memorable.

Once you identify your audience personas – generalized representations of your ideal customers – you’ll know exactly who you are trying to reach and, thus, determine the best way to appeal to them. The result? Personalized and relatable marketing efforts that truly resonate with your ideal audience.

5. Think About What You Have to Offer

Your solution might be a someone’s dream come true – there are people out there turning stones to find what you’re about to give them. So, identifying the benefits of your product or service can point you towards the crowd who would get the most out of it – your target audience. Put yourself in your potential audience’s shoes.

What group of people would benefit the most from your offering? Whose problem, challenge, or need are you offering a solution to? This will help you narrow your criteria down to the folks that have the most to gain from your pitch and, thus, leads that are most likely to react positively to your marketing efforts and ultimately convert.

6. Don’t Overthink It

Resist the compelling urge to overcomplicate things – the simplest answer is often the right one. Who would be most motivated to respond to your ad, offering, or call to action? Who gets the most out of what you’re offering? Even thinking on the most basic level, in terms of the first person you know that comes to mind, can help – that person is the embodiment of your audience persona.

Then, all that’s left to do is figure out what market groups and types of target audiences that person belongs to according to demographic characteristics. Use their interests, marital status, income level, job title, purchase behavior, and other personal characteristics that define them as a consumer to guide you in the right direction.

7. Dive Deep

The best marketing strategy ever? Caring.

When you know your audience, your audience knows. The secret to effective marketing lies in deeply understanding and addressing your target audience‘s interests and concerns by creating specific, custom-tailored, personalized experiences that directly influence their purchase decision and your conversion rates. It’s about knowing who your main customers are and understanding them so well that the product or service sells itself.

This way, you’ll end up with customers that don’t need to be forced into action because your product or service is speaking to their purchase intention and filling their needs naturally. They eventually become loyal advocates – a free marketing team for your brand that even do some work for you through recommendations and word-of-mouth.

Tailor Your Marketing Plan to Your Target Audience for a Winning Strategy

If your audience isn’t listening, it’s not their fault – it’s yours. The 21st century’s greatest digital challenge is connecting with the target audience in a way that benefits both of you. Armed with the right target audience at your fingertips, you can confidently work on creating highly personalized and tailored marketing to reach your crowd the right way, at the right place, and at the right time. It’s the holy trinity of digital marketing.

Remember that identifying a target audience is not a one-time thing. Audiences shift, so your target audiences, campaigns, and strategies should too. Find your target audience for each objective, then give them something they might not even realize they are missing with tailored marketing campaigns that directly address their needs.

The post The Ideal Customer: How to Find Your Target Audience appeared first on Play Media.

Digital marketing is a fast-paced and ever-evolving industry where the bleeding edge is everything in the never-ending battle for customers’ attention. Yet, after all, the best marketing is one that doesn’t feel like marketing at all. And that is how native advertising, one of the most immersive advertising experiences, was born.

Our all-in-one native advertising guide will help you unpack the mysteries and intricacies surrounding this marketing strategy of the future. Read on to find out what native advertising is, why it matters, and how you can use the power of native ads to boost your digital marketing efforts and skyrocket your business success.

Take a deep breath because we’re diving right in!

The Definition of Native Advertising and How It Works

Native advertising is a form of paid advertising. It’s the process of designing ads that seamlessly match the structure and function of their surroundings – the media format they appear. In other words, native advertising is non-disruptive paid media relevant to the consumer experience and harmoniously integrated into the surrounding content. Scratching your head? Let’s break it down.

The key idea behind native advertising is creating ads so cohesive with the content of a web page or app, flawlessly camouflaged into the design, and consistent with a digital platform’s overall feel that the viewers feel it naturally belongs there and, thus, don’t perceive it as an ad.

Native ads blend into their surroundings by matching the look and feel of a site or an app to provide a better user experience for visitors, instead of jumping out at readers screaming: “Hey, this is an ad! Look at me!”

The Marketing Doppelgangers: What Are Native Ads?

The “sell-sell-sell” and “in-your-face” advertising methods simply do not work in today’s advanced digital era. In fact, they do more damage than good by putting off users and leaving them running for the “X” button. After all, nobody reads advertising – people read stories, information, and solutions. Thus, marketers should not seek to disrupt conversations but to integrate. And that’s where native ads come into play.

Native ads are ads that fit “natively”, naturally and seamlessly on the web page they appear on – hence their name. In contrast to banner or display ads that are often seen as intrusive, native ads are consumed as if they were any other piece of content, with barely a blip in the consumer experience.

By taking on the look of the media they appear on, they help spread commercial messages that don’t look like traditional advertisements that overtly push products or services without raising any promotional “red flags” or disrupting users’ interaction with the page, so they can be consumed as if they were a natural part of the user experience architecture of a given digital platform.

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Why Is Native Advertising Important?

Innovation is crucial to digital marketing. Consumers are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up and reconnect with the users in the modern advertising space, we’re in trouble.

Back in the day of online advertising’s first baby steps, the blinking web banners ruled the web as they caught users’ eyes with their flashy design. Over time, users got accustomed to these dull ads to the point they didn’t even notice them anymore. Then came the notorious, pestering popups that unapologetically interrupted the browsing experience. Eventually, the click-through rates (CTR) started to decline, so the marketing world needed to breathe new life into its advertising methods.

Unlike traditional display ads, modern-day native advertising offers the opportunity to truly connect, engage and build trust with users and impact purchase behavior subtly. It does that by naturally blending into the media format of users’ choosing and seamlessly integrating into the potential customers’ experience to avoid being intrusive and disruptive.

Why Are Native Ads Winning the Race? Key Benefits of Native Advertising

Native ads benefit everyone in the ecosystem: the users, the publishers, and the advertisers. The list of all the pros and distinct advantages of using native advertising could go on forever – there are numerous benefits to using this strategy for building brand awareness and driving engagement and revenue.

Here are some of the most prominent ones:

· Less Intrusive

The biggest advantage and true power of native ads lie in their ability to expose readers to promotional content without sticking out and users dismissing them like they would traditional ads. Native advertising works because it doesn’t feel like advertising at all – it may be promoting a product or a service but doesn’t oversell or annoy readers.

· Better Campaign Performance

The effectiveness of native advertising is another one of its digital superpowers. Native ads generally perform better in contrast to many other ad formats. In fact, 71% of consumers say they personally identify with brands that launch native ads, while only 50% feel the same way about traditional display ads. Sound like a win-win!

· Increased Clickthrough Rates and Conversions

Does native advertising actually work? Statistics would agree – native ads drive 8.8 times higher CTR and 18% higher purchase intent than traditional display ads. Talk about effectiveness! The contextual relevance of native ads allows them to produce high Click-Through Rates and, thus, significantly boost conversions and ROI.

· Engaging and Generating Trust Among Consumers

Native advertising helps brands build trust among their target audiences and connect with them by sharing valuable content without resorting to annoying pop-ups or intrusive and disruptive messages that feel “forced” and “fake”, completely ruining user experience and brand image.

Digital Chameleons: Different Types of Native Ads

Native ads are successful only when done right. To achieve their “invisible yet visible” quality, native ads must be unobtrusive, fit in with the rest of the user experience and provide value. However, success in native advertising is not all about execution – it also depends on picking the right channel and form of native ad that aligns with your digital marketing goals and brand.

Choose wisely.

Search Engine Native Advertising

One of the most common types of native advertising is one you probably come across daily – the ads on search engine result pages. The top of the first search results page is almost always adorned with paid ads, but if you weren’t familiar with Google’s paid ads, you probably wouldn’t even it’s there – the only difference between sponsored search results and other organic search results is a small “Ad” label that sits unobtrusively in the corner.

Native Advertising On Social Media

Native ads can also be run on social networks, where they take on the form of a regular post. Sponsored posts on social platforms perfectly fulfill their native advertisement duty of blending into the format of the medium they’re presented on.

You probably noticed how posts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest seamlessly blend into the rest of the feed – they look completely natural, apart from being labeled as “sponsored” within the well-hidden caption or location stamp, enabling them to look and feel authentic and organic while subtly promoting a business, product or service.

In-Feed Native Ads

Many websites, social media platforms, and news outlets incorporate some variation of a “feed” for the online content they provide. In-feed ads are placed natively in the news feed or social feed of a platform and appear in line with the rest of the scrolling selection of organic content.

Sponsored Listings and Recommendation Widgets

Native ads are often intelligently embedded in personalized suggestions and recommendations for content users might be interested in, in the form of scrollable content carousels. They also found their way into promotional listings, like Amazon’s.

Custom Native Ads

Digital advertising campaigns and native advertising options are constantly evolving, continuously opening the path for new creative ways to seamlessly blend in native ads to engage with target audiences and drive conversions. As native ads are masters of camouflage, custom sponsored content can be integrated into any digital platform or take on any form – they could be anything from Snapchat and Instagram filters to videos or tweets.

Real-Life Native Advertising Examples

Why don’t we sneak a peek at a few other interesting and popular examples of native ads and how they work their magic to help you get the pig picture?

On a blog-oriented website, the native ad would be a blog post, written and displayed in a way that looks like all the other blog posts on that site, apart from a little note somewhere that it’s sponsored by an external brand. Promoted social media posts are native ads, for example, as is sponsored recommended content at the ends of articles.

Paid video content on Youtube is a great example of how native mobile advertising works. This promotional media is designed to match the visual design and function of natural content appearing in your Youtube feed of recommended videos.

The Burning Question: Is Native Advertising Ethical?

Certain people warned about the danger of potentially “angering” users by resorting to trickery and deception by masking native ads into regular content people came for and called for greater transparency regarding native advertising.

Despite the stigma and controversy around native advertising, regulators and publishers consider native ads ethical, as long as they’re labeled clearly. The reasoning behind this is that if readers know they are looking at promotional, commercial messages (like when the ad is clearly labeled), then native advertising isn’t deceptive and, thus, ethical.

So, there are laws and legal guidelines that regulate the native advertising landscape. For example, although savvily blended, mandatory texts such as ‘promoted by’ or ‘sponsored’ within a post or a thumbnail are there to indicate that it is paid, commercial content.

The Potential Downfall Native Ads are Facing

Although we’re currently in the golden age of native advertising, it might not be as effective in the long run.

Just like the “banner blindness” eventually evolved, people might become numb to native ads at some point, as well. There are also indications that some people don’t trust brands that promote branded or sponsored content, in general. Perhaps the greatest potential threat lurking around the corner is ad blockers, slowly evolving to recognize sponsored online content.

It remains to be seen how this will shape the future of native campaigns. In the meantime, feel free to leverage all it has to offer, as this powerful native content marketing strategy drives sky-high ROIs and strong click-through rates for businesses worldwide, making it oh-so worth your time.

Native Advertising: The Future Of Original Content Marketing

Native ads have left traditional forms of advertising biting the dust and risen to the very top as the most popular and successful form of advertising in today’s digitally-centered world. Their superpower is their unique ability to camouflage their way into customers’ minds and hearts without interfering with their digital experiences, as well as evolve alongside the digital sphere and media as they change.

When executed correctly, native advertising campaigns are some of the most powerful tools modern-day marketers can leverage. Try to steer away from deceptive, over-the-top, or dull native ads, as they can damage your advertising efforts. Use our tips and insights to navigate the digital native advertising landscape and natively advertise, or, shall we say – camouflage – your way to digital marketing success!

The post What Is Native Advertising In Digital Marketing? appeared first on Play Media.

Don’t sweat it – we’ve analyzed these two marketing giants in detail and explained the benefits, as well as the “when” and “why’s” of using both, so you can ensure your time, effort, and advertising budget is the best spent.

Sit tight because we’re putting the Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads debate to rest for good to help you figure out which advertising platform will offer your brand the best chance at digital success.

The Importance of Online Advertising

While word of mouth and newspapers may be great ways to reach customers offline, most of today’s online customers use a search engine to find a business, product, or service. Nearly half of the world’s population, of all age groups, use the Internet as the primary source of information. Online advertising has overtaken print a long time ago and is no longer optionable – it’s a must for any brand trying to make it in the digital era.

Online advertising is a cost-effective way to put ads where a business’s target market/target audience spends its time. In other words, it’s a powerful tool to get your product or service in front of potential customers worldwide. This modern-age advertising tool enhances your client base, lead generation, and marketing reach, ultimately increasing your profits.

Benefits of Online Advertising

The benefits of online advertising are too great to be ignored in the 21st century and can be felt by businesses of all sizes. Any success-oriented business owner should harness the power of online marketing. Why?

Let’s take a look at six major benefits of online advertising and how it can boost your digital marketing strategy:

· Reaching a broad, global audience
· Targeting a specific audience with targeted campaigns
· Increased customer engagement
· Flexible, budget-friendly, and cost-effective
· Measurable performance (access to data and ROI, so you can measure and track results)
· Timely delivery

Key Differences Between Facebook Ads and Google Ads

Facebook Ads and Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) are the leading pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising platforms, each with its own set of strengths and pain points, as well as unique audiences and use cases. But which one is best for your business?

Not sure if you should run ads on the world’s largest search engine or social network? To help you leverage each platform to its fullest and play your cards right, you should have a deeper insight into their distinctive benefits, characteristics, as well as key differences.

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Paid Search vs Paid Social

Google Ads runs search and display ads by utilizing keywords, while Facebook Ads are used for sponsored social campaigns on Facebook based on users’ habits, lifestyles, locations, and other factors. They both run pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements, but they do so on different channels and by targeting customers at different stages of the buying process.

Google Ads works on active search intent through Google Search and user search queries, making paid search a responsive (or reactive) form of advertising – it gets customers to come to you. It’s ideal for nabbing customers who already know what they want and are ready to buy.

On the other hand, paid social is based on passive user intent and your proactiveness – you’re reaching out to prospective customers (which can sometimes be seen as intrusive). However, it works best for building relationships, engaging, and generating interest among your target audience.

You can use paid social and paid search ads to reach users in different stages of the funnel (their buyer journey). If you want fast results to increase your online visibility and reach new customers – invest in search ads. Do you want long-term customer loyalty and to connect with your audience through more engaging ads? Social is the place to be.

Ad Formats

One of the biggest differences between these two advertising giants is the visuals. Although it offers different types of ads, such as Shopping Ads, Google Ads limit you to text-based ads to catch potential customers’ eyes on Search Engines. Facebook ads, on the other hand, allow you to get more creative and add visual impact to your advertising messaging through image-based ads or video ads, thus, grabbing the attention of users more easily.

Targeting Options

Both Facebook and Google Ads offer options for targeting specific audiences by age, gender, location, and other factors. However, Facebook’s advanced audience targeting options, including the new “Lookalike Audience” feature, exceed the ones of Google Ads.

They allow you to narrowly target the ideal customer based on endless demographics, a large list of interests and behaviors, and even life events, thanks to their massive data bank that can match your ideal user down to a T. This means you can tailor your ads to very specific and nuanced niches and users.

Costs-per-click and ROI

The ultimate ad campaign goal is to maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS), which leads us to another important difference between Facebook ads and Google ads to keep in mind. Although they vary by industry, the average cost per click of Google Ads is higher ($2.69), while Facebook Ads are slightly cheaper ($1.72).

Another benchmark to consider is CPA (Cost Per Action), which is, again, pricier for Google Ads. However, the clickthrough rate is higher for Google Ads with a 2% average, in contrast to the 1.11% for Facebook Ads.

Despite the higher average cost per conversion, Google Ads is worth the investment if your goal is reaching users at the time of their purchase decision, while Facebook Ads are better for cost-effective long-term investment in building engagement with your audience.

Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads: Which Platform Is Better for Your Business?

It’s finally time to answer the burning question: Is Facebook Ads or Google Ads better for your brand? The ideal answer is both, maybe in different amounts depending on your business type, what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and what your overall marketing goals are.

The widespread belief that you must choose the “better one” is confusing and misleading, especially to those new to online advertising. Although these platforms were long seen as “rivals” and frequently compared to one another, Facebook Ads and Google Ads are complementary, providing different advantages to advertisers.

So, it’s not necessarily about which is better, but about utilizing both platforms and playing to their strengths to maximize your marketing efforts. The key is to adopt different strategies that align with the functionality of each platform.

Advantages of Using Google Ads

Many benefits come with using the world’s largest search engine for advertising. Here are some of the most prominent pros for using Google Ads to amp up your online marketing game:

· A vast audience pool / wider reach of prospective customers
· Easy-to-use interface and advanced tool features
· Positions earned based on relevancy

Advantages of Using Facebook Ads

The biggest benefits of advertising on the Facebook social media platform come down to:

· Unmatched ability to target specific audiences thanks to diverse active user data
· Compelling, persuasive, and highly visual ads with more creative freedom
· Affordable with a high conversion rate and ROI

Benefits of Using Both

Using both Facebook ads and Google ads for a combined marketing strategy enables you to advertise to the core target audience in all the relevant places at the most convenient times, thus maximizing your advertising efforts.

By leveraging the best of both worlds, you’ll end up with combined web analytics and data, the widest possible reach, double results, and, ultimately, reap the maximum reward.

How to Choose the Right Ad Platform for Your Brand’s Goals

In an ideal scenario, a brand should be able to utilize both of these powerful advertising platforms since their simultaneous use perfectly complements one another, allowing the brand to reach, engage and convert its audience. But if you just rolled your eyes at this and came here to truly find out which one you should be using — we hear you.

Unfortunately, nobody has an endless marketing budget. Since time and money are often limited, businesses are sometimes forced to choose between running an advertising campaign on Google or Facebook. That means you must choose wisely where to focus your time and money to create a winning marketing campaign.

Don’t have the marketing budget or resources to leverage both Google Ads and Facebook ads? Here are a few things you should take into account to get the most bang for your buck:

Purpose of Your Campaign

What is the goal of your marketing campaign? What are you setting out to achieve? Answering these questions is key to steering you in the right direction.

Your Budget

Look into where your money will get you the furthest in relation to your business goals.

Customers’ Buying Stages

Certain platforms align better with certain buyer intent, consumer behaviors, and stages in the customer journey. Thoroughly research your targeted audience to see where your target users are in terms of their buying journey.

For example, Google Ads is best for getting brands, products, or services in front of people actively searching for them through targeted search terms (e.g., electricians). In contrast, Facebook Ads is best for advertising products or services a particular target audience isn’t necessarily actively searching for but is likely to be interested in (e.g., a new clothing line).

Choose wisely.

The Final Verdict? Teamwork Wins the Advertising Race

Facebook Ads and Google Ads work hand-in-hand to raise brand awareness and drive engagement, qualified traffic, and conversion your way. The most profitable online marketing campaigns are the ones dancing with the two networks in tandem. Using a blended, omnichannel approach is the ultimate holistic digital advertising strategy that can have a major impact on your business’s ROI and drive it to success.

If you have no other choice but to opt for one, it all boils down to your business objectives. If your main KPI is reaching new customers in the buying process and generating sales or leads, Google Ads may be a better fit for you. If increasing brand awareness and gathering a strong, loyal audience is your main goal of advertising, Facebook will get you there at a lower cost.

The post Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads: Unveiling Differences, Deciding the Best appeared first on Play Media.

But with local SEO for doctors, you can get more traffic and profit from people near you. Local SEO refers to optimizing your website and improving your search rankings based on information about your services and location. That said, local SEO boosts the traffic flowing through your site, reducing the time prospective clients take to find a medical professional, streamlining appointment scheduling, and increasing patient retention.

While local SEO for doctors can be challenging, it does a great job at improving your visibility on search engines. So, if you’re ready to learn some of the best local SEO strategies for doctors that you can implement to rank higher in the local search results, keep on reading.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO (search engine optimization) helps your site rank higher in the search results for location-specific queries. For example, a San Francisco-based clinic will rank for searches like “doctors in San Francisco”. Patients also search with key phrases like “doctors near me”. Then, search engines use the searcher’s geolocation or IP address to connect them with relevant nearby businesses.

Local SEO for doctors is an effective tool that can help your medical practice obtain excellent online visibility. And if done correctly, it can help you rank among the top-3 “pack”. This can help you beat the search results even if your site doesn’t appear on the first SERP.

The Benefits of Using Local Healthcare SEO

As you know by now, local SEO is vital for medical professionals. It’s not enough to have a website, business cards, and social media presence. Now, you need to be visible and easily found by prospective patients searching for your services in their location. That said, here are the benefits of investing in local SEO for doctors:

• It helps you rank higher in SERPs, meaning more people can find you online.
• Local SEO-generated traffic converts at a higher rate, helping you get more patients through your door.
• It can help you boost profits.
• Local SEO is a great way to build trust with prospective clients.
• It helps improve authority in your location or niche.
• You can get more positive referrals from your patients.
• You can stand out from competitors.
• You have control over your online reputation.

Top 13 Local SEO Strategies For Doctors

Now that you know a thing or two about local SEO for doctors and its benefits, it’s time to check out the best SEO practices for medical professionals that can help you improve your online visibility.

Update Your Medical Website Design

Before anything else, correct and update your healthcare website design and the information contained therein. Ensure you have a dedicated contact page containing your NAP (name, address, phone) contact details. These should also be uniformly used across all other listings and review websites.

Uniformity is a keyword here. Place the contact information in the universal footer of the website and put it on the contact page of your site, as this is one of the first places Google will look for these details.

Claim and Verify Your Online Listings

Instead of Yellow Pages, nowadays, people turn to directories like Google Business Profile and Yelp. These options typically appear on the first page of a query for doctor information. That’s why these business listings must remain up-to-date regarding your practice. Otherwise, you could miss out on many high-quality leads.

Ensure you have claimed and verified your listings on Google Business Profile and Yelp if they already exist. If not, create them. Moving forward, you need to update and maintain them to make sure clients have the correct information.

Keyword Research Is Essential

Keyword research is vital for local SEO because it shows you which keywords to use so that the search engines can connect relevant searches to your listing. That said, local keywords differ from regular keywords because they are marked by location-specific phrases like “dermatologist near me” or “dentist Chicago”.

To do local keyword research, get into your patient’s head. Ask yourself what they think when looking for a healthcare provider and what words they may use when searching. Then, create a list of possible key phrases they might use when searching, and once you have it, find keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs, and search the phrases from the list.

Then, shortlist the keywords relevant to your phrases and find the perfect balance between competition and search volume. Note that the search volume for local keywords and key phrases is typically low, so don’t hesitate to shortlist relatively smaller search volume keywords.

Use Google Posts

Google Posts is Google’s feature for businesses that allows businesses to create short posts on their business pages. They are shown in the search results when users search for their company name and will appear above organic listings. Moreover, they have an image that links back to the original website content, so why not take advantage of them?

Health and Safety Practices

Nowadays, people want to know the health and safety practices of a place before they visit it. That’s why Google has added health and safety attributes in GBP listings. Besides these vital attributes, there are other information chunks you can use to give your potential clients the information they want. This will give them peace of mind and the information they need without them having to look for it.

Create Local Landing Pages

Many doctors interested in local SEO for medical professionals are targeting multiple locations, like the city where the practice is located and a couple of nearby areas. But that’s a mistake because it confuses both Google and your website visitors. However, ensuring each location has its landing page will keep things organized and effective.

That said, fill your landing pages with valuable original content that tackles issues potential patients from that area might have, such as driving directions. You can also embed a map within your content to make it more useful.

Local Link Building

Backlinks are your website’s URLs placed within the content of other websites, and link building is the process of acquiring these links. Google prefers sites with a high amount of backlinks because these websites are considered trustworthy and authoritative.

For regular SEO, you would seek out and get links from relevant high-authority sites. However, for local SEO, you need to get backlinks from local entities. This way, Google will trust your presence in that locality and rank you for queries from there.

Local link building is the process of obtaining links from local websites, and you can get these links in numerous ways.

For example, you can create valuable content for doctors and get it posted on your community blog with a backlink to your site. Or, if your practice makes sufficient revenue, you can sponsor a local school team and get a link from this or similar institutions.

Moreover, you can create PR content for local newspapers, write articles, offer advice, and link back to your site. These websites usually have high domain authority, and links from them are valuable. These are just a few examples of local link-building strategies, but if you get creative, you’ll find many other ways to obtain them.

Create Relevant High-Quality Content

Creating high-quality content relevant to your audience is an excellent way to attract traffic from local clients. Consider creating content like newsletters that contain information about news stories covering your industry or local events. This will help build authority around your brand while helping local searchers find what they are looking for.

Take Advantage of GBP Calls and Messages

Businesses listed on GBP can get direct calls from searchers, so ensure you have someone to receive and respond to them if you have added your phone to GBP. If you don’t respond to these calls and messages, you may get negative reviews due to poor customer experience, which can damage your reputation.

Mobile Friendliness Is Vital

58% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices, making mobile accessibility critical for any local SEO strategy. Make sure your web design is streamlined, fast, and can adapt to different screens. Also, ensure any buttons and on-site functions are compatible with touch-screen technology. By doing this, you will show Google you’re offering an excellent user experience and satisfy its mobile-first indexing policy.

Get Positive Online Reviews

Positive reviews can do wonders for your local SEO for doctors as they give potential patients more information about your business. Additionally, they let them develop an opinion about your services before deciding to visit your practice. But how to get positive reviews? It’s simple – all you need to do is ask for them during client interactions. Just remember to thank them after they leave feedback.

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PlayMedia is the digital marketing agency that will take you to the top, and help you grow your business through dedication, transparency, and a unique, highly individual approach.

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The Power of Social Media

Social media marketing is another effective local SEO practice, as social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are great for connecting with potential patients. Use them to share articles about health topics or post pictures of your office or employees. You can also learn about your patients by checking their profiles and use this information for marketing purposes.

Add Video Content

Video content is an excellent way to attract potential customers, so why not include videos on your website? You can also use them to answer any questions your potential patients might have and offer information about treatment options or procedures. On top of that, videos can increase the time spent on your website, helping with conversion rates.

Take Advantage of the Best Local SEO Practices for Doctors

Now that you understand the importance of local SEO for medical professionals, it’s time to take advantage of the strategies we described above. Implementing these practices will boost your online visibility, improving everything else that comes with it, such as higher revenue. So, go ahead and play with local SEO techniques – you won’t regret it.

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With more than 350 million items only in the U.S. market, it’s needless to say that the competition is fierce. So how do you stand out? Through proper product listing optimization. This process of optimizing Amazon listings is called Amazon SEO. Basically, this tactic can increase your product rankings.

In this article, you will learn all you need to know about Amazon SEO and how to apply it in practice. So let’s get to it.

What Is Amazon SEO and Why Is It Important?

As you may already know, SEO stands for search engine optimization. This process enables search engine bots (also known as spiders or crawlers) to find and index web pages. If web pages are optimized in a specific way, it will be easier for the users to find them. It’s not an easy job to influence the search algorithm and improve search rankings for your products.

To achieve this, it is necessary to use specific SEO tools.

In simple terms, SEO specialists are experts who follow the latest guidelines and implement the best practices that help web pages rank higher. Even though there are some common SEO principles, each search engine is specific in its own way.

Amazon SEO is the process of listing optimization on Amazon. This tactic will increase the chances of your products ranking higher on Amazon search results. The more clicks your items have, the more likely you will sell them.

Implementing some basic steps can boost your sales dramatically and increase the brand’s exposure to new shoppers. That’s why we strongly encourage every Amazon seller to use Amazon SEO as an important tactic in their marketing strategy.

After all, nobody will buy your products if customers can’t find them.

How Does Amazon SEO Work?

Before you can implement this SEO tactic, you need to get familiar with the basic elements and tools on Amazon. We will explain the most important ranking factors you should know about. However, if you want to be informed about all the official guidelines, requirements, and recommendations in detail, visit Amazon Seller Central.

Amazon Search Box

The first thing customers encounter at the beginning of their journey is the Amazon search box located at the top of the homepage. Shoppers can find any product by simply typing in the keywords. In return, Amazon will fetch relevant results for that word or phrase. This is where all of the organic searches take place.

Search Results Page

Showing up at the top of Amazon’s search results page is no easy feat. However, you can make your product listing easy to find, both for bots and buyers. Optimize these five key factors if you want to dominate the search results.

• Titles
• Descriptions
• Images
• Features
• Pricing

Optimizing Amazon listings will help you boost your ranking in Amazon search results and bring you more customers. However, shoppers can also filter the search results in different ways.

Search Filters

While choosing between various products and brands, buyers can use various filters to easily navigate through the website. Some of the most used are department filters, new arrivals, customer reviews, prices, or devices. Other popular filters that are unique to Amazon are Best Sellers (the most popular product) and Movers and Shakers (the most sales in the last 24 hours).

Amazon Departments

Potential buyers can use the Amazon search bar to quickly find products with a drop-down menu of departments. This feature is optional, but it will help you categorize your search. You can also filter your search results by price, review scores, etc.

List of Amazon departments:

• Home Décor Accents
• Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry
• Women’s ClothingMen’s Clothing
• Seasonal Décor
• Kitchen & Dining
• Snack Foods
• Bathroom Fixtures
• Home & Kitchen
• Industrial & Scientific
• Tools & Home Improvement
• Health, Household & Baby Care
• Beauty & Personal Care
• Appliances
• Toys & Games
• Office Products
• Sports & Outdoors
• BabyGarden & Outdoor
• Electronics
• Grocery & Gourmet Food
• Handmade
• Musical Instruments
• Arts, Crafts & Sewing
• Automotive Parts & Accessories

Amazon Sales Rank

Like any other e-commerce platform, Amazon has its own rating system. Having positive reviews from previous customers is a massive signal to future customers. Negative reviews will also occur, and you need to handle them professionally. Every business should maintain its reputation and build trust with buyers.

All sellers receive a rating based on their performance. The higher your product reviews are, the more selling potential your business will have.

Sponsored Products

If the industry is highly competitive, you can give your SEO efforts a slight boost. In addition to Amazon SEO, a business can use Amazon PPC to promote its products for a certain amount of time. PPC stands for pay-per-click, which is an auction-style system where advertisers bid on their target keywords.

When Amazon shoppers search for a product, the seller with the higher bid will get listed. Combining Amazon SEO with Amazon PPC will give the best result and lead to higher conversion rates.

Amazon ads are used to promote individual product listings. They are available to sellers with a Professional seller account that are enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. These ads appear on shopping result pages and on product detail pages. If you don’t have the skills to manage Amazon PPC, you should definitely consider hiring an Amazon PPC manager, it will most likely be a cost-effective investment.

How To Optimize Amazon Listings?

Amazon listing optimization will help your business grow. Engaging with millions of customers doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why Amazon SEO is so important.
In order to achieve this, you need to take specific steps.

Here are the crucial steps you need to take in order to stand out from the competition and increase the click-through rates for your products.

1. Keyword Research

Like with any other SEO strategy, keyword research is the first step in optimizing web pages. This research will leave you with a list of keywords that you will need to track over time. There are many keyword research tools out there that can help you.

However, if you use them too much, you will harm your strategy. This is also known as keyword stuffing. Nevertheless, keywords are an important ranking factor in SEO, so choose them wisely.

You should always think about what makes your target audience unique. Think about their age, gender, background, education, devices, etc. What words or phrases might they use when searching for your product? Help them find you by putting yourself in their shoes.

Research all of the different keywords someone might use to find your products. Start by typing various words and phrases in the Amazon search bar. Take a look at the drop-down suggestions, and compile a list of relevant keywords. This process can be time-consuming. However, it will help you cover all possible keywords your customers use to find your listings.

If you are unsure where to start, search for your competitors and see what keywords they use. Then, include all the variations for both short and long phrases. Think about the long tail keywords in particular. These search queries are specific which means the customer is closer to buying.

2. Product Title

When a buyer searches for an item, Amazon will first compare your product title. In order to be relevant and trustworthy with customers, your title should clearly describe what the product is about.

The rule of thumb is to use about 60 characters, but be especially careful not to use 80 or more. Longer titles are harder to read. Additionally, don’t use all capital letters or subjective commentary like “the best” or “amazing product”. Customers want to be informed.

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3. Product Description

Always help your customers find and evaluate your products. Product descriptions can be used to highlight specific features and information. Don’t forget to include the brand’s name, size, color, material, packaging, etc.

This might result in higher conversion rates and increased sales. Since it’s not easy to ride the tide of ranking algorithms, use every option at your disposal. Sometimes you’ll just have to do some split testing with different versions of content in order to understand which description performs better.

4. Product Features

Key features on Amazon are a list of bullet points that help customers with their buying decision. Always include up to five bullet points per product. Since they always appear on product detail pages, remember to be clear and concise. Basically, your goal here is to reinforce key information from the title and description.

5. Product Images

If you’re thinking about buying any product online, you would want to see a few images first. What if the images are of bad quality and you can’t see them clearly? You would probably look for another option. That’s why having quality product images is crucial on all ecommerce websites.

Images should show the product in use and from different angles. By highlighting product features, you can spike your customers’ imagination and convince them to buy.

6. Product Search Terms

We don’t all use the same keywords when we search for stuff online. Different buyers can use different words for the same product. Luckily, Amazon had this in mind. Add so-called backend keywords – these additional terms further increase the discoverability of product listings. So, feel free to include synonyms and alternative names for a product. Think outside of the box.

7. Product Price

Product price can dramatically influence sales growth. Shoppers will research your products and your competitors before making a decision. A really helpful tool on Amazon is Automate Pricing, which allows you to automatically adjust the prices of your product listings. You should clearly include your shipping policy, delivery time, or any additional charges (if needed).

Amazon Tips for Sellers

By the time it took you to read this blog post, Amazon has made millions of dollars. According to some estimates, they make 443,000 $ per minute. So why wouldn’t you have a spot on this huge ecommerce platform?

You will notice a difference even if you just implement basic Amazon SEO practices. Whether your business is small or large, you should always focus on providing a positive customer experience. Happy customers are more likely to return and are eager to recommend your products to others. If shoppers are satisfied, the search algorithm will pick it up.

Try answering all the questions buyers might have when they start to get informed. You can be persuasive but not pushy. Nobody likes a sleazy salesman. When writing your descriptions, be honest about the condition and quality. Once you’ve finished with all the best practices, you have a solid Amazon marketing strategy.

This guide has all the necessary steps you could take to connect with more customers and grow your business to new heights. Never underestimate the power of Amazon product listing optimization.

By implementing all of the tips and practices, you will notice an increase in click-throught rates and in sales. In case you need further professional advice about Amazon SEO services, contact Play Media for a free consultation.

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After a long battle, businesses can finally expect to get back on track, but the road to recovery isn’t exactly a walk in a park, and picking up all the pieces of the mess the pandemic left behind might seem daunting. However, the right digital marketing strategies can get you off to a strong start and speed up the recovery of your business. After all, a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow, right?

As consumer expectations change and the digital landscape becomes even more challenging, you’ll need to look at the situation with a fresh pair of eyes to get your business back on its feet. We did our diligent research and came back with some of the best digital marketing strategies to drive business recovery in 2022 and beyond.

Time to get the show back on the road!

The Lifeboat: How Can Digital Marketing Help Your Business Recover?

The shift in consumer behavior caused by the outbreak plays a key role in the recovery of most businesses impacted by the chaos of the epidemic. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing numerous physical business establishments to close, some even permanently, digitalization became a life raft for businesses worldwide.

Consumers were also home-bound due to social distancing and lockdowns, so the number of people immersed in online shopping increased. Since almost everything has moved online, utilizing digital marketing strategies is a sensible choice to help your company or business stay afloat and ensure its survival in the digital jungle.

This trend is expected to continue, meaning both the path to business recovery and future success will be powered by digital ways. There’s no doubt about it – whether you are a brick-and-mortar physical store establishment, an online-only business, or a savvy hybrid of the two, the digital era is here to stay making it the ideal moment to regroup, reorganize and adjust your online marketing and branding strategies to keep up and thrive.

When life gives you lemons, simply make lemonade!

Top 6 Digital Marketing Strategies for Business Recovery

Is the captain supposed to go down with his ship? Not in our book. As we face the new normal and adjust to the adverse effects brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses struggling with diminishing revenues need new ways to keep going. The good news? You can rise from the ashes, revive customer interest and nurture your way back to the top beacuse digital marketing comes to the rescue!

Disasters happen, but recoveries have to be orchestrated. Your business will not recover by chance but by implementing changes, identifying the opportunities at hand, and then capitalizing on them. Keep in mind that any recovery, including that of a business, is a journey – not a destination. There is no quick fix for getting your business back on its feet after the adverse economic effects of the pandemic. However, there are ways to make the best out of a bad situation.

With a little regrouping, planning, and a fresh perspective, you can leverage the best digital marketing strategies to help your business not only get off the ground post-crisis but reach new heights.

1. Audit, Audit, Then Audit Some More

The first question you need to address is: Where does your business currently stand? To know where you’re going, you must first understand where you’re at. Running web, SEO, and social audits to address the current situation is the first step to your business recovery. The reports you get will help you understand where you’re doing well and identify areas for improvement.
There are many handy audit tools you can leverage to map out and analyze your current digital offering, assess your on-page SEO, usability, traffic, social media performance, and more, and provide you with actionable insights and recommendations you can develop further in line with your new goals and objectives to create winning digital strategies.

2. Rediscover Your Target Audience

The recent shift in customer behavior looks different from one industry, niche, and business to the next, but one thing is crystal clear – it has evolved. What once used to work seamlessly may not yield meaningful results now. If you want to stay in the game and ahead of the curve, you must re-discover your customer base and address your prospects’ current needs.

· Recreate your buyer persona

There’s a great chance the presumptions you had previously formed about your customers are no longer true. Customers who didn’t need your services in the past might look for you now and vice versa. Therefore, now’s the ideal time to examine the pandemic’s impact on your industry and market – whether favorable or not – as well as any new opportunities and worries that might be on the horizon.

Are you serving the right audience? Who is seeking your offerings at this time? Which customers have you lost, and whose attention have you gained? How can you broaden your reach and cater to your new leads? This is something to ponder.

· Reassess your current offerings

Do your products, services, or solutions help address the new customer concerns? How relevant are your offerings in the post-pandemic market? Are they viable? What is your new target audience looking for?

Scrutinize and analyze what you bring to the table and make the necessary changes according to your discovery if needed. Inspect the demand for your products or services online and concentrate on products or services that will perform and appeal to your new buyer persona to revive and pivot your business digitally.

· Retain Your Existing Customers

Even though your buyer persona may have changed, retaining the existing customers that remained loyal to you through the thick and thin of it all should still be a priority. After all, you don’t need any more losses, and attracting new customers is far more challenging (and expensive!) than retaining the existing ones.

Determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to virtual buying on your customers and act accordingly. Reward loyal customers and encourage old-school positive word-of-mouth promotion by offering incentives like loyalty programs and referral bonuses.

· Reach out to key customers

You can engage with repeat customers through Email marketing, target previous website visitors with remarketing campaigns and reach new customers with targeted Paid Search and Social Media ads. It only makes sense to expand or keep running your advertising efforts, given the increased time people now spend online. Pat them on the back for staying by your side!

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PlayMedia is the digital marketing agency that will take you to the top, and help you grow your business through dedication, transparency, and a unique, highly individual approach.

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3. Go Big with Your Online & Social Media Presence

The big winner of the lockdowns and consumer shift to digital is social media, with an increase of 36% in time spent on social media platforms. This means you have a vast audience at your disposal, just waiting for something to pique their interest. However, you need to choose your channels wisely. By tracking each stage of the customer journey across various platforms, you’ll gain insight into what works and where your brand needs to be.

If you don’t have social media channels set up yet, it’s time to make that all-but-necessary digital transition to revive and future-proof your business. Your brand must have a strong presence on digital platforms with relevant and shareable content that displays your brand’s values (integrity, empathy, trustworthiness) and also delivers value to your followers. Practice organic posting and make the most of social media marketing through targeted paid campaigns.

Going digital and having a robust online presence is no longer optional. However, maintaining a strong brand presence across every digital channel or social network is unnecessary and time-consuming, so focus on quality above quantity. Exposing your brand to the right digital channels and to the right customers will maximize your marketing efforts. Oh, and don’t forget about Google My Business, Directory Listings, and Local Citations.

Spread the Word With Valuable Content

Your online presence won’t bear any fruits unless you have a story that will be of interest and appeal to your prospects. Knowing the extent the post-pandemic mindset and online shopping have on your potential customers can help you create valuable content and a suitable content strategy for the buyer’s journey.

Customers have varying interests, so nurturing empathetic communication tailored to your target audience is necessary. Create and share fresh and user-generated content that speaks to your buyer personas’ current needs and concerns. Be proactive – post regular updates, social media posts, and blogs, and pack them all with high-quality SEO.

Review Your Strategy & Re-invent Your Brand

Don’t just recover – use this opportunity to rebuild your business strategy from scratch and re-invent your entire brand to best adapt to the current environment.

Use this opportunity to freshen up and adjust to the new digital world order. Upscale your current website, or create a new one if you need to, and top it off with fresh, engaging, and optimized content that will speak to your audience and rank. Tailor your brand’s voice and offerings in line with the new digital order and consumer behavior to create the ultimate customer experience. Set clear goals and tweak them along the way.

Track, Monitor, Analyze & Adjust

Don’t get excited too soon – using digital marketing strategies for business recovery is not a one-time thing. Even after your plan is rolled out, you mustn’t forget to make sure it works in the long run by measuring your success! To stay one step ahead of the ever-changing trends, focus your attention on continuously analyzing data and monitoring, evaluating, and realigning your digital marketing campaigns.

Choose your marketing KPIs early on and keep an eye on them constantly. Use Google Analytics to track your website, SEO rankings, and paid ads data. Measure your ROI (Return on investment). Social media channels also have analytical tools you can use to assess performance. After all, numbers really do speak volumes.

By fusing measurable insights with consistency, trends, customer behavior, and brand authenticity, you’ll not only recover your business but create a future-proof marketing plan and a digital presence that yields the desired results – engages your target audience, converts, boosts online sales, and eventually raises your business to new heights. Even after you revive your business, never stop improving!

Bounce Back and Thrive In the New Normal Through Digital Marketing

Business recovery is all about evolving with the current and ever-changing digital marketing and consumer needs and hitting the moving target right in the bullseye with viable digital marketing techniques.

The right digital marketing strategies can help you speed up the revival of your business and make a glorious comeback. Be as patient, diligent, and enthusiastic about business recovery as you were about your business success, and we are confident you will power through and come out even stronger in the long run.

If you need a helping hand getting your business back on its feet, our savvy digital marketers are here to lift you off the ground and propel you to new heights whenever you’re ready. Sometimes, having a reliable partner in your corner and a little good faith is all it takes to fuel your business to stay ahead in the race and make it in the digital universe.

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What Is (B2B) Lead Generation and Why Is It Important?

The primary method of generating leads used to be outbound marketing – reaching audiences through traditional marketing channels like print ads, TV commercials, and cold calls. Today, lead generation has shifted to inbound marketing, aiming to deliver value to the target audience and create a positive brand reputation, which will, in turn, entice them to purchase a product or service voluntarily. Enter lead generation!

Lead generation is a modern and targeted method of marketing – the process of identifying, gathering, and cultivating potential customers who might be a good fit for your business and nurtured to become paid customers. Attracting them, getting them to take action, and moving them through the sales process is what it’s all about. The “B2B” prefix refers to businesses selling their products or services primarily to other businesses, rather than consumers.

Generating B2B leads is the priority of every B2B business as it’s what ignites the sales engine. Obtaining new customers is one of the main goals of any company, as this directly leads to business growth and, eventually, success. With that in mind, leveraging the B2B lead generation funnel – piquing the interest of potential customers and guiding them towards finalizing a transaction – is the roadmap to your success.

Learning the Ropes: What Is the B2B Lead Generation Funnel?

The definition of the B2B lead generation funnel is pretty much self-explanatory – you can imagine it as literally a funnel that illustrates the customer’s journey, from start to finish. All the prospects or “leads” go to the top of the funnel. Then, you guide them through the various stages of the funnel until they ultimately reach the end of the funnel, when they are ready to buy your product or service.

Creating a B2B lead generation funnel can help businesses drive leads into their sales pipeline and influence their prospects’ buying process. It can serve as a road map to filter out leads and take them further through the lead nurturing funnel, developing relationships with potential buyers, and eventually closing the deal.

What Are B2B Leads?

B2B leads are businesses or companies that are potential customers that might be interested in the product or service you offer. They put the sales process into motion and are crucial to maintaining a stable pipeline. A lead is considered “generated” when a company states an interest in your services or products. Then, it’s up to you to convert them into customers.

How Does It All Work? Different Stages Of a B2B Lead Generation Funnel

A B2B lead generation funnel outlines each step of a customer’s journey – from the first contact through to completing a purchase. In order to successfully guide leads through it, you need to be familiar with the different stages of the B2B lead generation funnel to be strategic and build an effective one.

You may have heard of the buzzwords such as TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU. Don’t worry – this alphabet soup is just an abbreviation of the stages of a B2B lead generation funnel, which can be narrowed down into three levels: top, middle, and bottom. Keep in mind that the B2B lead generation funnel is a system – each stage co-exists with and is connected to other stages, so you must never lose track of the big picture and perceive it as a whole.

Top Of The Funnel (TOFU)

During the first stage of the B2B lead generation funnel, also known as the “awareness stage” or the TOFU stage, your goal is to create awareness about your brand and drive quality traffic. First impressions can make or break your efforts. And, since this is your first interaction with potential customers, your main priority is to establish a sense of trust and authority with relevant and valuable content.

But, more about that later, as bringing those qualified leads in the first place is easier said than done. The B2B lead generation process starts by finding out where your target market “lives” on the web. You need to identify the most relevant platforms where your leads spend their time, then capture them with good advertising campaigns and quality content to create a trustworthy and authoritative presence there.

Most B2B companies use PPC advertising, SEO techniques, and other lead generation tools to acquire leads by launching B2B lead generation campaigns on various digital channels. From social media posts and email campaigns to google search ads, blog posts, and referrals, different platforms can be used depending on your niche, product, or service.

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Middle Of The Funnel (MOFU)

At this point, you’ve attracted your prospects who are now starting to explore their options. Acquired leads are interested in what you have to offer, but the chances of them becoming a customer are close to zero unless you nurture them. Lead nurturing is a crucial part of the B2B lead generation funnel – you need to build strong customer relationships to make them travel through the sales funnel and eventually convert them into paying customers.

Thus, the middle of the funnel (MOFU) is for building desire and interest among leads in your value offering and making them become more engaged with the brand. Offering a suitable solution for their problems or something of great value is how you turn intrigued visitors into leads. This is the time to go all-in, make your prospect feel welcomed, and show them what you’ve got!

The way you position yourself at the beginning of a relationship with a prospect can make or break your marketing efforts. Approach each customer with empathy and the idea of helping them solve a problem or achieve a goal. Instead of focusing solely on selling your products or services, focus on human interaction to build trust and loyalty. Surely, there will be a need to discuss the offer and pricing, but focusing on the relationships will bring long-term prosperity.

Bottom Of The Funnel (BOFU)

Lastly, but far from least important, the bottom of the funnel is the action stage – where leads take action and show readiness to make a purchase. In the BOFU stage, prospects are considering making a purchase, so your focus should be to make it happen. Assure them why buying from you would be the right choice.

However, don’t get excited too soon, because even after a purchase, you must maintain a good relationship with your customers. B2B products have a longer sales cycle. So, if you want them to become long-term clients, instead of business “one-night-stands” – keep them happy, valued, and loyal. High-quality customer service, being open to feedback, and offering loyalty benefits can help you build strong and long-lasting relationships.

Benefits of Using a B2B Lead Generation Funnel

There are numerous benefits to using a B2B lead generation funnel. Here are some of the most prominent ones that will make you want to run off to start creating your own lead generation funnel strategy. But, I advise you to bear with me for a bit longer to make the most out of it.

Leads, leads, and more leads!

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of using a B2B lead generation funnel is that it helps you build awareness for your brand, generate trust, and thus, more leads and reach ideal customers. And that’s not all – a strong B2B lead generation funnel can also help you improve the quality of your leads by qualifying them before they ever reach your sales team.
After all, you don’t want to sell to just anyone, right? You want prospects who are more likely to buy your product or service. By using SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click) in your B2B lead generation funnel, you can target businesses based on their specific interests and needs.

It’s cost-effective…

Even digital advertising can quickly turn into an expensive endeavor. Another perk of using a B2B lead generation funnel is that it can help you save money, as it’s one of the most cost-efficient marketing tactics out there, in terms of return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS). If set up correctly, a B2B lead generation funnel lets you craft a specific offer tailored for targeting specific leads and therefore, a better conversion rate. It’s a win-win!

… and Sales-Boosting

With outbound marketing, you’re constantly looking for leads to pursue. With B2B lead generation funnel, you’re getting prospective customers to come to you. It’s any marketing team’s dream come true!

Using a B2B lead generation funnel can help you make your sales process more efficient because marketing automation helps you move qualified leads through your sales process more quickly and efficiently, which, obviously, results in more sales and profits for your business.

Ready to Generate Some Leads and Send them Down the B2B Funnel?

Sales are what keep any business floating, but there can’t be many sales to make if you aren’t generating enough qualified leads. It’s all about caring enough to create value for potential customers. If you get that part right, selling is a piece of cake. That’s where the B2B lead generation funnel comes in.

Reaching and attaining new customers has never been a walk in the park, but since the world has turned virtual, innovative marketing techniques and digital channels make it a lot easier. Making the most out of them, however, still depends on you and your sales team. If you want your business to grow and prosper, knowing how to peak and nurture customer interest is a must.

With a powerful B2B lead generation strategy in place that will seamlessly drive prospects from the top to the bottom of the funnel – the sky is the limit. Creating a powerful B2B lead generation funnel is all about using the right tools and strategies. If you need a savvy partner in your corner for this lucrative endeavor, we’re always just a click away!

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