Digital Advertising for Small Business

I recently met with a client to talk about pursuing digital advertising campaigns for his small business in St. Louis, only to find that there was some confusion when it came to the differences between digital marketing and digital advertising. Many times, people think the two are the same, when digital advertising is actually a tactic of digital marketing strategy. I went on to explain how advertising fits into the realm of marketing and urged him to read our 10 disciplines of digital marketing for further clarification.

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Do You Analytics?

You should really be tracking the amount of traffic your website receives. At the end of the day, website rankings don’t mean anything if you’re not getting people to see the products and services you offer on your site. You could have first place rankings with SEO, but are people buying from you? It’s important to know how many people are coming to your site; it influences your bottom line.

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Supplement: 2013: The Year of the Online Writer

Introduction

The year of 2012 was important to any SMB in the digital marketing game, especially for those who are investing in content creation and online writing. We’ve seen the search giant, Google, focus more and more on quality content and make even talented writers more important with their Panda and Penguin updates. These changes force digital marketing companies and SMBs to be more aware of how Google determines online authority; Copyblogger’s “2013: The Year of the Online Writer” only solidifies that statement.

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Strangers with Candy Always Have Higher Conversions

Introduction

Despite what we’ve learned as children, strangers with candy aren’t always bad people. This holds true for those in any type of SMB development atmosphere, especially if your goal is to cultivate and nurture leads. We’re talking about the principle of providing an incentive for those who are interested in your product; this could be something that prompts your customer to fill out a form, take a free trial, or buy a product. Don’t know what type of candy to use? We’re happy to show you three ways (or types of candy) to get more leads through your website’s forms. 

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Website Optimization Essential: Web Form Design (Pt. 2)

Required Form Fields

Before we dive into the details of required form fields, we would like to invite you to read our Web Form Design Part 1 if you missed it. It’ll teach you a thing or two about labels and how they influence completion time. Now, required form fields are most useful when there are lots of fields but very few are required. They enable users to quickly scan the form to see what fields need to be filled in. The opposite of this is referred to as optional fields, or fields that aren’t required. It’s useful to note optional fields when there are very few optional fields in the form. Remember, there really isn’t a need to note required or optional fields if all of your fields are required. Here’s are some examples of what the two look like:

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Website Optimization Essential: Web Form Design (Pt. 1)

Introduction

People come to your website for all sorts of reasons. They want to shop for your products, gain access to industry newsletters, and engage with your brand through the content you promote. Web forms, simply known as “forms,” play a huge role in SEO and search marketing. They also determine whether or not your customer will convert on what you’re trying to offer, even if it’s as simple as contacting you for more information. There are a few principles in form design that will have you getting the leads you desire, and they include minimizing pain, illuminating a path to completion, considering the context, and ensuring consistent communication.

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Supplement: 5 Lessons Learned in Site Retargeting

In the past, we’ve talked a lot about digital advertising’s close cousin - remarketing. Some in the digital marketing realm may refer to this as website retargeting, but they’re both essentially the same thing. This type of digital advertising has the ability to appear in front of customers when they visit other sites on the Internet. They are triggered by a variety of different actions that a customer may make with your website. For instance, you may see remarketing ads if you’ve viewed a specific product on a website, or if you’ve place an item in your “shopping cart” but abandoned the transaction. All this being said, we stumbled across the Software Advice blog where we found an interesting article by Derek Singleton a couple days ago, and we thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to teach you some more! Before we start - If you’re still confused as to what a “remarketing advertisement” actually is, we urge you to take a look at some online examples of remarketing.

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