In today’s fast-paced, global world, being instantly recognized is important for your business. Potential customers are bombarded with information from numerous sources throughout the day; if they recognize you as a trusted source, then you are already ahead of the game. 

This is possibly the number one reason why digital marketing and your online presence are so important. It gives you a global platform to increase product awareness and get your brand recognised. 

Technological change is another reason why your business needs to be on the web. Web design agencies can keep up with these changes, and with the customers’ changing use of technology. This ensures that you are always able to be found, and found easily. 

Having an effective online presence is also extremely cost-effective. Posting on social media, updating your blog and monitoring website traffic cost you very little. You can read up on SEO 2020 for more information on this.

Relying on print media does not hold this advantage and limits the scope of your audience. It is also worth remembering that the internet does not have a closing time. Information can be accessed all the time, meaning that you are available when your potential customer needs you.

Social Media Marketing

You need to understand the importance of social media marketing to be able to support the development of your business. While an expertly designed and professional website that is regularly updated with excellent content is essential, it cannot exist in a vacuum and support your business.

When discussing your needs with potential web design partners it is important to turn the conversation towards social media marketing. Any agency you approach should be able to convince you of the need for a social media presence by explaining at least some of the ways it can support your business. 

One of the main reasons to consider investing in social media marketing is that it increases your brand recognition, allowing you to increase your visibility on numerous platforms and reaching more of your intended audience. Your potential web design agency should also be able to explain how utilising social media provides you with more opportunities to increase your conversion rate. 

By increasing the interaction you have with both potential and returning customers you increase the potential for brand loyalty based on a positive experience. Not only does this mean that those you interact with are more likely to become customers, but they are also more likely to share your posts and further increase your reach and appeal. The opportunity to become a voice of authority is also offered through social media interaction. As existing customers post positive comments, and you answer the questions of potential customers, the trust that you instil increases.

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Advertising is an essential for any business, no matter what size your business is or what products or services you might be selling. But it’s absolutely essential that you keep as up to speed as possible. When it comes down to it, the way companies advertise has drastically changed over the past few years, as brands are trying to keep up with consumer use of technology. Sure, print advertising still has its place, such as billboards, leaflets, posters and more. But more and more consumers are spending more and more time, so your company should ensure your ads appear online too. This will get the most views or digital footfall and can convert a higher number of sales. Advertising online can help to ensure potential customers see your products while they’re working on their computer, browsing sites on their tablet while commuting, using their laptop at home or using their smartphone. Here are a few tips that will get you started on the right path.

Set a Budget

Before we even suggest any different types of advertising, it’s important to advise that you set some sort of budget. While online advertising costs can be low, there are so many different ways to advertise that if you engage with them all, combined costs can quickly skyrocket. You need to set yourself a budget so that you only commit a set amount of money to advertising and have money left over to invest elsewhere in your business.

Use Adwords

Adwords is an advertising platform run by Google, where you can pay a set amount of money or your ads to appear in search engine results. This can prove extremely effective. The vast majority of people will use Google at least once a day and Google is already a specialist in matching ads to keywords that users are inputting into its engines. This means you benefit from a highly targeted form of digital advertising that can make you a lot of money!

Collaborate With Social Media Influencers

Social media influencer advertising is a relatively new branch of advertising. But it’s one of the most effective nowadays and that’s why so many brands are engaging with it. Put simply, a social media influencer is someone who has thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers on social media platforms like Instagram. They can expose these followers to your brand, promote it and influence their followers’ behaviour by encouraging them to buy with your brand. Generally speaking, you’ll pay them to place one of your products or to promote one of your products on their page, their story, or to post some sort of video about it. This can convert a lot of sales and is usually worth the investment.

These are just a few suggestions to get the ball rolling. There are plenty more means of advertising out there, but these are some of the most popular and effective methods that could really work for your company and brand!

The post Different Types of Advertising to Engage with to Boost Sales appeared first on Atterbie.

Nowadays, a website is essential for any small business’ success. You just have to have a website if you want to experience as many sales as possible and high levels of success.  At the end of the day, we’re living in a technological age and people are living their lives online a lot more. We work from our laptops. We socialise through our smartphones. We get most of our information online. Perhaps most importantly for your business? We spend our money online. There are plenty of reasons for this. The main reasons that people seem to like to shop online right now tend to be convenience, ease and variety. When you set up online, people can browse your stock at any given time and can make purchases at any given time – in the middle of the night, on weekends, on bank holidays. This maximises the amount of sales you’ll make. They can also shop with you regardless of their location, as long as you offer international shipping. People from around the world can tap into your brand and you never know where your biggest market may lie. So, if you don’t have a website yet, it’s about time you set one up. Let’s go through some more of the details below!

Why Focus On Your Website?

Of course, we’ve outlined why you should have a website above. However, it’s important that you prioritise and focus on your website rather than simply setting one up. At the end of the day, you need a high quality website. Running an online store takes a whole lot of effort if you want it to be as successful as possible. It takes a completely different set of skills to setting up and running a traditional brick and mortar store. Your customers can’t come into your store and look at your products in real life. They can’t touch them. They can’t try them out or (if you’re specialising in clothing) try them on. So, you need to make sure that your site can give them all of the details they need to feel confident in making a purchase. Remember, this is the only source of information your customers will have. On top of this, you need to make sure that you can actually get people onto your site and encourage them to stay on your site. There are so many different sites online and you need to put effort in to make sure your competitors don’t secure sales before you do. This means focusing on design and development.

Secure a Domain

So, let’s start focusing on the steps you need to take to secure a high quality website. The first step that you need to take is to secure a domain name. This is the website address that you will have. While there are free platforms out there, they’ll generally include their brand name in the site URL, so it comes across as much more professional. Sure, you’ll have to pay for a domain name, but it’s generally not all too expensive and is more than worth the investment.

Collaborate with Web Designers, Developers and UX Designers

Next, you need to find yourself a competent and reputed specialist in Web Design and web developer. These professionals will ensure you have a site that works well and looks great. Aesthetics and functionality are essential for a great site. Studies have shown that people tend to decide within a matter of seconds whether they’re going to stay on a site or click the exit tab. You need people to stay in order to get them to look around and make purchases. You need the site to work so they don’t get frustrated and leave. Your web designer and web developer will help you to achieve this seamlessly! Just make sure to give them the information they need and to stay in touch throughout the process. Ideas to highlight include your branded colours, your logo, your branded fonts and different pages you’ll want included on your site, including product pages, an about page, a contact page and additional features such as a mailing list sign up. As well as this, you need to focus on user experience for people landing on your page. User experience or “UX” is essentially the process of ensuring customers can use and navigate your site easily and in a straightforward manner. A UX designer will ensure that customers can find any products or information that they’re looking for. Clever design can also encourage customers to direct their attention where you want them to. All of these different factors can work together to make your site as good as it can be!

Product Photography

Another area that you need to really place importance on is product photography. When it comes down to it, product photographs will allow your business to show its products in the best light, giving different angles, showing products being used, lifestyle shots, ingredient or materials labels shots and more. So many small business owners, especially those with a small budget often attempt to take product photographs themselves. If this is your only option, you can rest assured that smartphone cameras are constantly improving and you can get some good quality pictures. But if you do have the budget to invest in professional product photography, this will be a whole lot better. An experienced and specialist product photographer will have much better quality equipment, years of knowledge and training and the creative flair that will produce images that can see a spike in product sales.

Website Copy

You may not be familiar with the term “copy”. Copy is another word for saying words, so website copy is any written content on your page. This is so important and much more important than just page titles. It spreads to product descriptions, important information such as shipping options and details explained, as well as further content, such as your website’s blogs, social media and more. If you want high quality words that employ psychological elements that can encourage customers to purchase products or become loyal to your brand, you need to have the right words. This involves using the services of a professional copywriter with a great portfolio.

SEO

Now, it’s all good and well having a high quality website ready and waiting to go. But you also need to focus on getting people onto your site in the first place. To achieve this, you’re going to have to join the majority by focusing on and investing in SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is the process of getting your website to rank top of search engine results. Now, you may be wondering how this benefits your business. Well, when customers shop online, they will often search for key terms in a search engine. If they search for terms that apply to products that you are providing, you want to be top of results so that you’re the first website that they click. This will give you a better chance of getting the sale before one of your competitors does.

Of course, there are many more areas of your site that you need to focus on. But these are the bare basics that will help to get the ball rolling in the right direction. Implement the steps into your process and you should see sales start coming in!

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Gear up, it’s time to return to work. At least, pretty soon it will be, anyway. But before you return to work, you can’t expect to pick up where you left off. Although this attitude right now, you have to accept your employees will be a little rusty, it will take time for all your systems to be back up to speed and you will need to make a lot of changes and updates. It’s good to have the determination to get back into the thick of it, but let’s not pretend we’re not in a very unique situation. The lockdown has created a lax in business operations, both in skill and in mobility. In order to return to a business that is going to dig itself out of this profit-losing hole and economic downturn, you need to be incredibly productive.

A stay-at-home team

Governments are going to advise you to allow a skeleton crew to return, in the new week or so. This means you’re essential, going to be encouraged to only allow half of your workforce at the most, to return. This is to stop a second wave of the novel Coronavirus from occurring and also, not being hit with a slew of sick employees. So, you need to implement a stay-at-home team who will operate from home, but still get to work at the same time. You should have cloud systems so your at-home employees can work on tasks using their own laptops and desktops. When it’s time to call a meeting, allow the relevant employees who are at home, to join in via conference call software. Managers must remain in full contact with all employees, so using a webcam and mic at their desks or via their tablets, is crucial. 

Updates and patches

Every kind of business, small and large, has been ineffective for almost 3 months. You need to set aside a day or two, to update all your software. Many services companies are going to be returning to work at the same time, and you can expect they will want to help their customers. They will do so by rapidly updating their software and patching over any cracks. To manage your software effectively and stay one step ahead of any hiccups, hire an IT Monitoring and Management company who will look after your systems and networks. Employee productivity falls through the floor when their software and programs are simply not working or not updating correctly. They will seek to improve your competitiveness and therefore profitability. 

Hire a productivity service

There are companies dedicated to improving business productivity. Their employees are specialists in many respects, often they come from a business administration background. If you don’t have your own admin department or employees, hire a productivity service who can come in and show you where you’re losing time, effectiveness and money. Working with individual employees and departments, they will fill the gaps and alter the design of your day-to-day operations.

It’s vital that you realize productivity will be the key to your and the economy’s recovery. Start by setting a day aside to bring all your software, networks and services up-to-date.

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Organic marketing is not, as you might think, about suddenly pivoting your brand into the wellness area. It’s recognized as the opposite of interruption marketing. Interruption marketing, most notably including advertisements, is all about your brand in the face of the audience, even when they’re trying to do something else like browse the internet in peace. Organic marketing is all about hitting them where there’s already interest. Here are a few of the top organic marketing tools and just how they can benefit you.

Capitalize on existing interest

What’s most important about organic marketing is that it targets those who already have at least some interest in what you’re offering. SEO campaigns, as described by Hubspot, are a key example of that. SEO is all about anticipating how your customers are likely to search for services and products like those that you offer and making sure that your website is positioned as best as possible to appeal to that crowd and their intention. You’re not wasting money trying to convert people who have no interest, you’re appealing to those a little further down into the sales funnel and thus more likely to convert with an extra push.

Organic marketing ensures brand quality

Interruption marketing does work in some instances. A really good advertisement can help a customer suddenly recognize a need they didn’t know about and make them more likely to use your solution as a response to this new need. However, organic marketing is all about playing up the strengths of your brand specifically. It ensures that the most consistent aspects of your brand, such as your website, are designed in the best possible way to convert. With teams like R6Digital, you can invest in making the most attractive and effective website possible. As such, you can make sure that whenever customers do land on the site, it’s better prepared to convert them the rest of the way. 

Ensure better retention rates

Organic marketing should see you building your own community too. Social media has become an essential arm of digital marketing and it’s not only because of PPC marketing channels within all the major networks. Spending time talking to your community, engage with the fans, offering support, and soliciting feedback all creates the image of a brand that is very much on the side of its audience. There’s something called the “Matthew principle” that comes into effect, too. The more you can foster the growth of your social media followings, the more people will start to join in naturally, too. You show the social proof that your brand has supporters and fans, and others are more likely to join their ranks simply because we tend to follow crowds.

Organic marketing works better not only for your business, but it’s likely to be more preferred by your audience as well. Even when the interruption tends to bring them a bit closer to the point of conversion, most people don’t like being interrupted. Organic marketing is a smoother, and thus much more satisfactory process.

The post The Three Big Benefits Of Organically Marketing Your Brand appeared first on Atterbie.

Over the last twenty years, the PR industry has had to adapt in many ways. Traditional forms of PR still have relevance in today’s world, but it’s a new breed of highly specialised PR teams that are the cool kids in town. 

Specialist PR isn’t a new thing. There have long been agencies that have a chosen field and favour work in that area—for example, automotive PRs or Economic PRs. Before the arrival of the internet, these companies used what we now refer to as ‘traditional PR’ which involved a process that was relatively simple, but much harder to deliver. A pre-internet press list would have taken years to build and getting your message out to consumers was provided by only a few channels—newspaper, Radio and TV advertisements – including product placement. 

Today, PR firms have almost instant access to all members of the media. The internet gave us LinkedIn, Twitter and a growing list of online press sights which list emails for journalists and PRs. You can create a press list in a day. However, the value of that list is slightly less to today’s ‘digital era’ of PR. Why go to press when you can hit your consumer straight between the eyes? 

There are multiple free channels for getting your message out there; all of them target a slightly different audience. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, continually updates its PR and sales capabilities for businesses. Want to reach your younger audience, get your dance on with TikTok. With so many trends and so many different demographics, specialist PR has evolved in more. Today, there are firms which focus specifically on Instagram campaigns for specific sectors. 

As well as a multiple choice of platforms and more complex demographics, more industries realise the need to exploit B2C relationships. Companies such as Elite Lawyer Management specialise in lawyer PR. A profession that would usually have relied on paid-for advertising and word of mouth. If you own a business, it’s not just enough to be on social media. You have to understand how to use it to reach your audience effectively. 

Direct access to the consumer isn’t always a positive for a company. The consumer now has instant access to you, and everything they say is public. This is where you need a strong Digital PR. Who understands both your consumers’ demands and needs and the company inside out. With the right person, you can put a positive spin on a negative comment.

While specialist PR has evolved, the role that traditional PR plays is still relevant. There are lots of skills from the pre-internet days that can benefit new PR companies today. However, the world of public relations has undoubtedly changed, and the benefits of working with highly specialised professionals are evident.

It will be interesting to see how the industry evolves over the next twenty years. How do you think the world will communicate? We’ll have to wait and see! 

The post The Evolution of Specialist PR appeared first on Atterbie.

The mere thought of coding can overwhelm even the most motivated self-starter. It requires time, effort, tedium, and a whole lot of patience with yourself. No wonder it’s such a high-paid gig; most people don’t want to do the job. You might find yourself between a rock and a hard place if you’re an entrepreneur, though, as many modern marketing strategies use some form of code to get their message out.

Fortunately, coders know this. That’s why they’ve simplified many of these new marketing strategies to make them user-friendly for the uninitiated. While these easy-to-use strategies range from email campaigns to multimedia user engagement, today we’ll focus somewhere in the middle with SMS chatbots.

What is a chatbot? Well, it should be pretty obvious given the name if your guess is a robot that chats with you, congratulations! You’re correct. Chatbots don’t just chat with you, though; businesses use them to facilitate customer service, among other things. They alleviate waiting time bottlenecks by answering simple, commonly-asked questions and increasing the number of customers that can be helped at a time. Some predict that AI technology could power these chatbots quite impressively in the future, thereby making it an indispensable component of customer service.

That day is yet to come, but in the meantime, you can create your own sms chatbots with relative ease. The easiest route is going with an SMS messaging service. Businesses like TextSanity, Zapier, and SimpleTexting all provide user-friendly chatbot systems for commercial use.

Before you sign up for one of these services, though, make sure you’re clear on what you want your chatbot to do. Do you want it to help confirm customers’ orders? Do you want to use it as an extra pair of “hands” to help with customer service questions? Whatever it is, make sure you know what you want to use it for before you dive in.

However, you can also build your own chatbot pretty quickly, and yes, without having to code anything. First, buy a mobile number on Twilio for $1. You will use this number to send out your SMS campaigns. Next, create an account on TextIt and enter your newly-purchased number to connect your Twilio and TextIt accounts.

The next step is a little tricky: you’re going to build your app with TextIt. Click on ‘Flow’ at the top menu and create a new flow. Here you can see some sample flows to get an idea of what you want yours to look like. Flows are essentially a list of questions or statements that your SMS chatbot will use to gather data from your leads. Remember to save your results using the leads’ full names. This step will make data analysis much more manageable.

Finally, use Zapier to transfer your data to a spreadsheet. You can also use it to email the data to yourself or to put it up on Google Docs or Facebook. You could also transfer the data to a Google spreadsheet and add a ‘full name’ column to make sure you get everything you need in there.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there today and get your new chatbot rolling.

The post What SMS Marketing Can Do For You appeared first on Atterbie.

Advertising and marketing, like many other things, are constantly evolving. Many of the ways that businesses advertised their products and services in the past are now often pushed aside in favor of new ones, including various digital marketing methods. Small businesses, in particular, can find that more modern marketing channels are affordable and easy to access. However, many businesses are still using more traditional advertising methods and are combining both old and new to achieve their goals. Ignoring traditional advertising channels could be a mistake if you want your business to be successful. These channels are still valuable and can help you to advertise your brand.

Print Media

Printed advertisements can be a great way to reach your audience. You can advertise to a fairly general advertisement with some publications and to much more specific ones with others. You can consider advertising in places such as newspapers, some of which might target specific demographics, while others don’t. Specialist magazines can help you to find the right audience too, from women’s magazines to hobby magazines, which can cover everything from fishing to sewing. Print advertising can be pricey, but it can be worth it if you choose the right publications.

Radio

Getting an advertisement on the radio is a possibility if you’re thinking about either local or national advertising. You can choose radio stations that broadcast in different geographic areas, making it possible to expand your reach as far as you need to. You can advertise on Sirius XM and similar radio platforms if you’re looking for ways to reach your customers. You can use the radio for advertising to consumers, but also to find decision-makers in businesses. There is also the possibility of advertising on music streaming platforms. A radio advertisement doesn’t have to be a cheesy jingle.

Television

Advertising on TV usually isn’t cheap. It can cost a lot of money to get your advert on television, although it’s less expensive if you’re looking at local channels. Like radio, television advertising gives you the opportunity to target people in different regions and find your audience. The right TV advertising campaign could do a lot for your brand awareness and exposure. If you’re looking for a more modern equivalent of TV advertising, placing adverts on online video platforms offers another option. It can give you a way to reach your audience by advertising before and during content that’s relevant to your brand.

Direct Mail

If you want to reach potential customers directly, direct mail is a great option. It’s still a good way to reach your audience, and it can beat online advertising too. People are likely to look at a direct mailer much longer than they might look at an advert online. It lands in their mailbox, and they might look at it on the way to their front door and even have it in their home for days or weeks. It can also be combined with digital marketing methods.

Digital marketing might be useful for your business, but don’t forget about the power of the more traditional advertising channels too.

The post Don’t Dismiss These Traditional Ad Channels appeared first on Atterbie.

Email has been around for a long time, and it has proven itself to be a powerful marketing tool – when used correctly!

It feels like people fall into one of two email marketing categories:

• Your campaign is awesome and effective
• Your campaign is a waste of money

If you’re in the second category, then you probably think email marketing is useless. It’s not, you just need to know how to use it more effectively. 

To do this, you must figure out why your current campaign is in the dumps! Typically, these are the most common causes of a botched email marketing strategy:

Awful subject lines

The subject line is the most important part of an email campaign as it draws the recipient in. A good subject line is like a good title for a blog post – it makes people click. It should entice the reader to open up the email, revealing the goodness inside. 

A bad subject line does the complete opposite. It gets ignored by the reader, meaning the entire email is pointless. Imagine all your recipients act in this way – your marketing content falls on deaf ears.

A ridiculously small mailing list

Sometimes, your campaign struggles because you aren’t reaching enough people. The average email open rate is around 22%. That’s not great, but it’s mainly low because of how many terrible email marketing campaigns exist! Nevertheless, if you have the average open rate, but you only have a mailing list of 100 people, then 22 people open your emails. Again, that’s not a lot. 

So, you have to work on increasing your mailing list. This allows you to compensate for a low open rate (though you should improve yours with a good subject line). Places like leadlists.com.au sell mailing lists that are ready-made and tailored to your business. Even if you increased yours from 100 to 200 – yet maintained the same open rate – you’d have 44 people reading your emails instead of 22. As far as email marketing is concerned, we’re looking at a ‘the more the merrier’ approach. An expansive list increases your chances of effectiveness.

Pointless emails and poor content

Lastly, the content of your emails and their frequency are killing your strategy. Stop sending out emails every single day. This will dramatically reduce your open rate and lead to so many people unsubscribing from your mailing list. Be more sporadic with your messages and only send out emails that are valuable. 

A valuable email provides something for the reader to take in. It can almost be like a mini blog post – but more direct. You don’t want to waffle in your emails as people lose attention quickly. Provide value, get straight to the point, and stop sending lots of pointless emails all the time!

Address these key issues if you want to turn your marketing campaign back around. You can breathe new life into it, and it will soon become one of your most effective and profitable marketing formats. Don’t shun email just because you’ve had no success in the past. You won’t like to admit it, but the fault lies with you, not the method.

The post Why Isn’t Your Email Marketing Campaign Working? appeared first on Atterbie.

If you own a small business, then you already know that there is a ton of importance attached to getting the little things right. Of course, there are always going to be larger things that need addressing, but with smaller businesses, it seems when you take care of the small stuff, the rest comes naturally.

Today, we are going to be looking at one of the smallest yet most significant things you can do for your small business that you may not be using to its full potential, and that is social media.

Why Social Media Is So Important

If we think back to around ten years ago, social media was more about Myspace and looking up old friends online. In truth, it probably all started with Friends Reunited, it seems though, that over the last few years, especially social media has become so much more.

Social media is now one of the biggest platforms on earth and certainly the most influential. It seems that this giant can now do so much more than we ever thought, and with over 3 billion users, it is something that businesses really need to be using to its full potential.

Start Simple

The first thing you should be looking to do is give your business boost by making yourself as visible as possible across all networks of social media. When it comes to Facebook, you should be updating your page regularly with memorable content and also encouraging your customers to leave you reviews.

You should be doing the same with Instagram and also try to gain as much traction as possible. If you are finding it tough to get your feet with Instagram, you may benefit if you were to buy instagram followers as a way to get your business out there a little bit.

By starting out like this, you will simply be giving your business the best possible chance and broadening your audience to the widest possible level.

Marketing

Another area that is still relatively underused is the ability of social media to target campaigns at people who would be interested in your product or service. 

While you could spend thousands on your in house marketing campaign trying to figure out ways to target specific people, Facebook and Instagram are able to do this for you and make it easier than ever for you to reach people that you never had access to before.

When it comes to marketing, social media is one of the best tools available nowadays, and it has helped businesses grow in ways that they have never seen before.

While there are many people who are quick to write off social media as a distraction and nuisance, these are the people who have not seen what it can do for small and independent businesses that may have closed without it.

So, if you are looking for a way to give your business a little boost, social media could be the one thing you need to use a little better.

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