What is Content Marketing?

You've heard the term thrown around a lot, but what is content marketing? Just like any other marketing, it works by building brand awareness for the company and then increasing sales by drawing visitors back to the site. But these visitors are driven to the site through educational and helpful content around a certain keyword you want to rank for – instead of just another advertisement.

Defining Content Marketing

As defined by HubSpot, content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract and retain customers through the creation and sharing of valuable, relevant, and consistent content. Content marketing can be executed through many different channels, including email, social media, display advertising, and search engine marketing.

Content marketing is a customer-centric approach focused on creating useful content to drive profitable customer action. Content marketing makes use of various types of media to keep the target audience informed about the company’s products or services. This includes blogs, videos, webinars, whitepapers, and eBooks.

Why Content Marketing is Effective

Content marketing is more effective than traditional advertising because it's more personal. When you create quality content that speaks directly to your customers' needs, they're more likely to respond. And when they respond, you can build trust with them over time. This creates a relationship that makes it easy for them to buy from you again and again.

Content marketing can be an extremely powerful tool for any business. It's cost-effective compared to other forms of marketing, and it has many other benefits as well:

• It establishes your brand as an authoritative source in your industry.

• It attracts new customers by providing useful information about their challenges and needs — information that will help them solve their problems.

• It increases search engine rankings by creating more relevant content on your website (which improves your domain authority).

• It provides potential customers with case studies showing how other people have benefited from using your products or services (which helps build trust).

Should Your Business Use Content Marketing?

Content marketing is not a new concept, but it has become increasingly important as more companies focus on developing an inbound marketing strategy. The ability to attract users through quality content is essential for any business today.

In fact, conversion rates are almost six times higher for brands that use content marketing. Moreover, content marketing costs are 62% less than traditional forms of marketing,

Content marketing helps businesses to:

• Attract new customers.

• Increase sales.

• Build trust.

• Build Brand awareness.

• Generate leads.

• Increase visibility with viral content.

One of the main goals of content marketing is establishing trust with your audience. Many people are put off by sales pitches, especially if they don't know anything about the company that's selling the product or service being pitched. If you can provide valuable information to prospective customers without pressuring them into buying something from you, then they will be more likely to trust you when you do eventually make a sale pitch.

Therefore, your business should use content marketing any chance it gets. It's not just about creating "pretty" content – it's about creating value through your blog posts, videos, infographics and more. In fact, it's about creating so much value that visitors would be crazy not to subscribe to your email list so they can get more of your great content in the future!

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Why is SEO Important for Your Business?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned" results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

What are the benefits of SEO?

SEO can help a company reach higher positions in search engine results pages (SERPs), thus resulting in higher traffic. Other benefits include:

 

• SEO allows your company to appear on the first or second web page of search results.
• SEO allows your company to appear as a relevant search result for a specific keyword, which in turn increases the number of visitors who visit your website.
• SEO increases traffic to your website and boosts brand reputation.
• SEO allows your company to increase its search engine rankings and thereby increase traffic to its website.
• SEO is very cost-effective as it involves minimal costs.

Why SEO is important for today's business?

SEO allows you to easily connect and engage with your potential customers. In a past study conducted by Dimensional Research, 90% of buyers admitted that online reviews influence their decision to buy a product or service. Thus, if a company wants to capture those customers, it will need to know how to optimize its website to appear on search engines.

SEO provides companies with the opportunity to take advantage of these customers. SEO increases brand awareness and helps build company reputation. Search engine algorithms favor websites that have SEO strategies. This favorability results in higher rankings and more traffic.

Conclusion

SEO is used by businesses to ensure optimum visibility on search engines. It helps companies attract visitors, thereby resulting in more business, and higher sales. Placing your website on the first page of search results helps you market your brand and increase website traffic. Therefore, businesses should invest in SEO to increase website traffic and improve brand awareness.

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What are Google Microments?

Every business has a story to tell. No matter what industry you're in, Google Microments can help you reach the people that will care about your story. And because Google Microments are built on artificial intelligence, they'll help marketers do more with less--leaving them more time, money, and energy to focus on delighting the people they want to reach.

What is a Microment?

Microments are increasingly popular in the digital world. Google defines microments as "small moments of time when someone might be looking for something to do or an answer to a problem". They are short periods of time (between 3-5 seconds) when people are willing to engage with brands. It is important that marketers pay attention to this trend and start using it in their marketing strategies.

Google Micromoments are divided into four categories: I want to know moments, I want to do moments, I want to buy moments, and I want to go moments. These are the moments when someone is searching for something specific on Google, but they're not sure what. This type of search is usually exploratory in nature.

Why you should care about Google Microments

Some of the reasons why you should care about Google Microments are:

• It helps you to get feedback from your customers in real time,

• It allows you to collaborate with your employees on specific projects,

• It lets you post announcements and update your company's blog.

How companies have Uutilized Google Microments to maximize customer engagement

Companies have placed a heavy focus on utilizing Google Microments to maximize customer engagement. In order to create the perfect Microment, companies need to know what their customer wants and needs. It offers three ways for businesses to use it:

Micro interactions

Micro Interactions are the simplest way to engage with customers, they are quick and simple. This can be achieved by asking questions, giving feedback, or providing helpful information.

Micro conversations

Micro Conversations are much more involved than Micro Interactions, they can last up to 15 minutes and happen in real time. These conversations are designed to be more personalized and friendly with the customer.

Definitive engagement

Sometimes you need your customer’s permission to take action on them; this is where Definite Engagement comes in handy. It's a way of getting permission from your customer without being intrusive and actually knowing what they want from you.

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Top 5 Most Important HTML Tags for SEO

You need traffic for your website, right? Well, organic search drives 53% of all site traffic on the web, and knowing which HTML tags are best for SEO is one of the most important steps to ranking your website on the first page of search results. Here are the top five most important HTML tags for search engine optimization.

1. Title tag

Title tags are very important in SEO because they tell search engine crawlers what your website is about. Therefore, these tags should always include relevant keywords related to your website and, make a good impression, as they are often the first thing your readers will see in search engine results. Be sure to brand your title tags and make sure your robots.txt file is not preventing search engines from crawling your page.

2. Header tag

HTML header tags range from H1-H6 with the H1 tag being the primary header and H2-H6 being known as subheadings. H1 tags are used by search engines to determine what the content of your page is about. Header tags are also great for SEO because they improve user experience by diving large web pages into readable sections.

3. Meta description tag

Meta description tags are HTML snippets added to the "head" section of your website to tell search engines what your page content is about. They are usually shown in search results below the URL and title tag. Effective meta descriptions should include target SEO keywords and relevant text descriptions to increase CTR and conversions.

4. Anchor tag

Anchor tags are HTML tags that usually include a hyperlink and anchor text. The anchor text used in your anchor tags plays a huge role in SEO because it tells search engines what the sponsored page you are linking to is about. As stated in section 2.2 of The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, anchor tags are then used by search engines as vital keywords for ranking the URL your hyperlinks point to.

5. Canonical tag

Canonical tags are important for SEO because they can help you avoid duplicate content penalties if you have multiple versions of the same page hosted on the web. They are used in HTML tags to tell search engines that a specified URL represents a master (or primary) copy of a webpage. This is important for helping you to prevent indexing issues you will likely face by having duplicate content on the web.

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5 Ways to Increase Your Email Marketing Open Rates

Need tips on how to improve your email open rates? Check out these five email marketing tips below.

1.  Avoid spam filters

Email spam has costed businesses to lose $676 in revenue in 2017. One of the best ways to avoid spam filters is to build an organic list of followers who are actually interested in what you are promoting. Emails sent to these subscribers will have a much higher open rate than emails sent to lists that have been purchased or scraped from the web. You should also use valid reply-to email addresses and avoid overusing spam filter trigger words.

2. Create engaging subject lines

Your email subject line is usually the first thing your subscribers will see, so it's very important to create an engaging subject line that makes a strong first impression. A/B testing can be done to see which styles provide the best open rates - some examples can include using emojis, telling a funny (but subject-appropriate) joke, or asking a rhetorical question. Testing different email lines for open rates will make you more money and prevent you from creating email campaigns that aren't being read by as many of your subscribers as possible.

3. Segment your email lists

Email lists can be segmented into several subcategories based on many factors such as date of subscription, location, industry, purchase history, and interaction history. By sending highly relevant email campaigns to target subscribers on your list, you'll be able to increase open rates, increase deliverability, and potentially increase sales. According to the DMA National Client Email Report of 2015, approximately 77% of analyzed email marketing revenue came from segmented email campaigns.

4. Use the recipient's name

Emails are much more likely to be opened if they include the recipient's name because they are more personal and makes the reader feel like it was written specifically for them. This will catch their attention and engage enough to open your message and see what you are saying about them.

5. Create relevant content

Last but not least, no one will want to open your email unless they think the content will be interesting or relevant to their needs. If they see your email in their inbox and feel like it's similar to what they have seen before or provides no value, regardless of how enticing or engaging you may think it is, they will skip over it without thinking twice about it. Creating relevant content in your emails is one of the best ways to maintain a high open rate.

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