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Measuring Success: Key Performance Indicators for Digital Marketing

Measuring Success: Key Performance Indicators for Digital Marketing

Hey there, data-driven marketers and business owners! Ready to dive into the world of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for digital marketing? Grab your favorite analytics tool and get comfortable, because we’re about to explore how to measure and maximize the success of your digital marketing efforts.

Before we jump in, let me share a quick story. Last year, I worked with a small online clothing boutique – let’s call it Chic Styles. The owner, Emma, was investing heavily in digital marketing but had no clear way to measure her return on investment. Fast forward six months, and with a strategic KPI framework in place, Chic Styles had increased their marketing ROI by 150% and gained a clear understanding of what was working (and what wasn’t). How’d we do it? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to explore today.

Understanding KPIs in Digital Marketing: The Basics

First things first, let’s break down what we mean by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in digital marketing. KPIs are quantifiable measures used to evaluate the success of an organization, employee, or campaign in meeting objectives for performance. In digital marketing, KPIs help you understand if your marketing efforts are paying off and guide your future strategies.

Here’s why KPIs are crucial:

  • a) Measure Progress: KPIs help you track progress towards your marketing goals.
  • b) Identify Strengths and Weaknesses: They show you what’s working and what needs improvement.
  • c) Inform Decision Making: KPIs provide data to guide your marketing decisions.
  • d) Justify Budget: They help you prove the value of your marketing efforts to stakeholders. e) Set Benchmarks: KPIs allow you to set realistic targets based on past performance.

For Chic Styles, we started by identifying their primary business objectives and aligning their marketing KPIs with these goals. This immediately gave Emma a clearer picture of her marketing performance.

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Boosting Your Subscriber List: Your Guide to Digital Engagement

Boosting Your Subscriber List: Your Guide to Digital Engagement

Are you trying to boost your subscriber list? Well, you’re in the right place. I will share some insights we’ve used at Mandy Gilbert to help businesses in Toronto and beyond. So grab a coffee (Tim Hortons, anyone?) and let’s dive in.

Offer Something Tempting

Let’s start with a little incentive. Everyone loves a good freebie, right? We’ve seen this work wonders. Like this one time, a local bakery in Toronto offered a recipe ebook for signing up. It’s about giving people a little something that keeps them wanting more.

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Unlocking Engagement: Discovering Effective Incentives for Your Audience

Unlocking Engagement: Discovering Effective Incentives for Your Audience

Let’s chat about something that’s as important in digital marketing as a good cup of Tim’s is to our mornings – incentives. At Mandy Gilbert, we’re all about getting this right. So, what really makes an incentive tick? Let’s break it down: Canadian style.

Know Your Crowd

First off, it’s all about understanding who you’re talking to. It’s like knowing whether to recommend a Leafs or a Raptors game – you gotta know what your audience loves. Tailor your offers to match their interests. Like this one time, a local café here in Toronto boosted their subscriber list by offering discounts on their killer lattes. Spot on, right?

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7 Reasons Why Commercial Storage Units Are A Smart Solution For Business Start-Ups

7 Reasons Why Commercial Storage Units Are A Smart Solution For Business Start-Ups

Starting a new business can be an exciting venture, but it also comes with its fair share of challenges and one challenge that many new business owners face is finding suitable secure storage space to store their inventory, equipment, furniture, and supplies. Commercial storage units offer an ideal storage solution for business start-ups, and by reading on you will discover seven reasons why that is so.

Reason #1 – Storage Space Flexibility

Start-up businesses often have limited space for storage, making it difficult to find a suitable location for inventory, equipment, and supplies. Commercial storage units offer the flexibility start-up businesses need by providing a range of storage space options.

Businesses can choose from units of varying sizes and configurations, allowing them to rent only the space they need for as long as they need it. This space flexibility can help start-up businesses to grow and evolve without the need for costly offices or warehouses. Additionally, businesses can adjust their storage needs as their inventory and equipment requirements change over time.

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10 Best SEO Tools Used To Help Boost Google Rankings

10 Best SEO Tools Used To Help Boost Google Rankings

Unless you are prepared to pay for traffic to your website via PPC advertising, the other main source of online traffic will likely be the organic search traffic from search engines, the primary one being Google.  To rank well on Google so that your website appears in the results when a prospect is searching for the types of goods and services you offer, a significant amount of search engine optimisation (SEO) must have taken place.

SEO is one of those fields within marketing that is almost enigmatic, given that so many people have tried and failed to make it work. One of the problems they encounter is that for SEO to be effective, you need a lot of data and information relating to your website, your competition’s websites, keywords, and many other elements of SEO, and they do not know where to obtain that information.

The answer is SEO software and tools, of which there are many. However, only a select few are tried, tested, and used by most top SEO experts and agencies. Here is a list of the top 10 SEO tools that SEO experts, the Perth SEO company use and recommend;

Ahrefs: Regarded by most SEO experts as the ‘must-have’ SEO tool, Ahrefs is second only to Google in the amount of data it collects while crawling websites. It generates a ton of data relating to everything from keyword search volume, backlinks, and competition analysis, and it also allows you to track all of it.

SEMrush: Knowing what you need to do to beat your competition in terms of Google rankings is essential for implementing SEO that will achieve it, and that is where SEMrush comes into play. It provides exceptional data concerning your competition’s pages and how their SEO compares to others.

Moz Pro: Another highly regarded SEO tool, Moz Pro provides several SEO tools. They include a site auditor, keyword research, and backlink analysis. Before purchasing, you can try them out with a free toolbar for your browser.

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3 Ways To Update The Appearance Of Your Commercial Lift

3 Ways To Update The Appearance Of Your Commercial Lift

Any business which has the responsibility for one or more commercial lifts within its business premises will have several ways to ensure it is safe and works as and when it should. Specific actions include cleaning the inside of the lift, and ensuring that the specified level of routine maintenance is undertaken.

Despite all that effort, there could come a point when you start considering whether it is time to give your commercial lift a revamp or an update. There are two distinct elements of your lift this could be applied to. The first is mechanical, by which we mean the actual technical workings of the lift, and the other is the aesthetics of your lift.

For this post, we are only going to consider an aesthetic update rather than a technical one. This is because as long as regular maintenance takes place, it is unlikely that within the lifespan of a lift that you are going to be required to completely update and replace the parts of the lift that no one using the lift would usually see. However, there same cannot be said about the interior of your lift.

The interior is where people using the lift spend a few seconds travelling up or down several times a day, and it is here that you are most likely to want to update at some point. There are several reasons why this might be, such as the interior looking aged, cosmetic damage, impossible to clean markings, and even more serious damage such as cracked panels, flooring, and broken lighting bulbs.

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How Landscapers Can Create A Highly Successful Blog For Their Business

How Landscapers Can Create A Highly Successful Blog For Their Business

Many landscapers have websites to help promote their business and the landscaping services which they offer to local residents and businesses. Each of those websites will differ, both in their quality, and their design, and you do not need to be a digital marketing expert to know it is the ones that have been professionally designed with high-quality content that will be more successful.

Part of that will be due to how much those who visit the website become engaged with it, to the extent they may request a call to discuss a landscaping project. The other reason is that better quality websites with great content are identified by Google as being so, and therefore those websites are likely to enjoy higher rankings when someone searches for landscapers in their area.

One of the most successful strategies for gaining the positive outcomes we have just mentioned is to have a blog as part of your website. A blog is the part of a website where content such as articles, videos, images, infographics and audio are all posted by website owners with the view that visitors to the website will enjoy and consume that content.

Many landscaping business owners are unaware of just how many benefits creating a blog on their website can generate which is a pity because there are several as you can see below.

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7 Reasons You Should Hire Professionals To Clean Your Office Carpets

A Guide To Choosing The Most Appropriate Office Storage Furniture

Whilst much of the commercial furniture you purchase will be selected based as much on its aesthetic value as it is the practical usage it provides, there are other items where the number one factor in choosing is what it does, with its appearance often being an afterthought. One such type of Atama Commercial Furniture to which that can apply is office storage furniture.

Office storage can come in many forms and there are so many items of commercial furniture, or more specifically, office furniture that can provide storage. As we have mentioned, those purchasing often focus solely on how much storage is provided, and whilst that is very important, it should not be the only consideration when purchasing office storage furniture.

This might be triggering some thoughts in those who are thinking about buying office storage furniture, that the process of doing so is more difficult than they may have imagined. Whilst we would agree that it may take a few more steps and a bit of time, firstly, this should not be difficult, and second, that investment of effort and time will pay dividends as it means the office storage you buy will exactly match your needs.

As for what that time and effort should look like, all it means is that you assess more of the facets of the office storage furniture you are thinking of buying and weigh all of them up, rather than just how much storage is going to be created as a result of your purchase. To help you with all of this here is our quick and easy guide to what to evaluate when purchasing office storage furniture.

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7 Reasons You Should Hire Professionals To Clean Your Office Carpets

7 Reasons You Should Hire Professionals To Clean Your Office Carpets

If your business is based in an office building, or part of your business premises has offices, then we assume that if those offices are carpeted you have some arrangements in place for carpet cleaning perth. If not, then we strongly recommend that you make some as soon as possible because having clean carpets in your offices has so many advantages for both your employees and your business as a whole.

Dirty carpets not only look awful, but they also carry health risks due to the germs and allergens that can thrive in them. In addition, what kind of first impression do you think it makes on those who visit your business if the first thing they see is grubby carpets that look as though they have not been cleaned properly since the day they were first laid?

Even if you do have arrangements in place for your office carpets to be cleaned, are you sure they are being cleaned properly? Unlike general cleaning such as wiping surfaces, dusting, and vacuuming, carpet cleaning requires a significant degree of specialised knowledge as well as experience to ensure specific carpet types are cleaned the correct way. This brings us to the seven reasons why you should only hire professionals to clean the carpets in your office.

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7 Ways To Boost Your Business Cashflow To Generate Investment Funds

7 Ways To Boost Your Business Cashflow To Generate Investment Funds

Many business owners want to diversify how they earn so that their business is not their sole source of income. In discussing this with financial advisors, it is almost certain that one of the ways which will be discussed is investments. Independent financial advice will not only provides income, but is an excellent means of ensuring your financial future, so when you retire, your finances are not a concern.

That all sounds great, but one of the barriers business owners often come up against is that they have insufficient cash assets to make the investments. That is not to say their net worth is an issue, but instead, that much of their capital may be spoken for such as what they have invested in their business, their home and so on. This can leave them feeling frustrated knowing that their financial advisor’s advice to invest is sound, but they cannot act upon it due to limited cash funds.

If that sounds like a scenario you are in or could be, then there are solutions. Below were have outlined seven ways in which business owners can generate the liquid funds they need to create an investment portfolio. Not every one of these will suit your particular circumstances but if at least one of them do then you should be able to generate the cash you require.

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5 Essential Elements That Ensure Your Garden Maintenance Business's Website Design Is Effective

Why Landscapers Should Strive To Reduce Their Fixed Costs

Landscapers whose landscaping businesses are expected to make a profit can do many things to increase not only the chances of making that profit but also inflate the amount of profits that are made. These methods fall into two categories which are 1) Those that increase income, and 2) Those which reduce outgoings.

As for specifics, the ways to increase revenue include gaining more clients, increasing average order values, and increasing the fees charged for services. More often than not it will be these sorts of tasks that most business owners will try to focus on as they perceive earning more income as the only way to increase profits, but that is not true.

A business can increase its profits considerably by earning the same as it has, but by then reducing the amount of its outgoings. This means that with not a single extra client you could see profits increase. Taking this a stage further you need to identify what costs can be reduced, and some costs which can have a huge impact if you can reduce them, are called fixed costs.

What Are Fixed Costs?

Before you reduce costs, you first need to know what they are, and this is why we want to first define what fixed costs are. Often referred to as “overheads”, these are the costs whose amounts do not usually change each month, or if they do, it is only by small amounts. They tend to be costs that a business must pay to remain trading. Examples of fixed costs include:

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Avoid These 7 Mistakes If You Want Your Office Relocation To Be A Success

Avoid These 7 Mistakes If You Want Your Office Relocation To Be A Success

Whenever an office relocation occurs, there is the potential for problems to occur. Invariably, the reason for issues is not because the removalists failed in their role, or staff were uncooperative, or simply that the weather was foul, but because the person or people responsible for organising the move made one or more fundamental mistakes along the way.

These mistakes are flagged up repeatedly whenever a business’s move to new premises does not go as smoothly. Professional removalists want you to avoid these mistakes if you are considering relocating your office. What better way to do that than to tell you what those mistakes are and how you can ensure you do not make them yourself?

Mistake #1 – Poor Planning And Advance Thinking: Any project will be poorer if it is not planned properly, which goes equally for office relocation. If you do not plan properly, it could become shambolic, which could harm your business, not just in the short term but also in the long term.

Mistake #2 – No Advance Preparation For Your New Premises: The final mistake is another related to planning, having no preparations for your new premises. Essentials such as water, electricity, phone lines, office cleaning and internet all need to be switched on in advance, plus you need to determine the layout of your new office, so when everything arrives, it goes directly to where it is required without delay.

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10 Awesome Time Management Tips For Family Lawyers

10 Awesome Time Management Tips For Family Lawyers

We are sure that day to day your Perth family lawyers business keeps you busy. Whether it be appointments with clients, representing your clients in the Family Court, creating the arguments you are going to make in court, or the basic daily tasks that your role demands, there are bound to be days where there does not seem to be enough hours to complete everything.

You are not alone, and it is fair to say that a large number of family lawyers need ways and means to manage their time more efficiently. The irony is that there are so many books, audio programs, and video courses on the subject of time management there is not a family lawyer on the planet who has enough time to study them all.

We are not going to pretend that we have a magic wand that can conjure up an extra 2 hours for you each working day. However, what we will share with you are ten simple and easily implementable tips that family lawyers, including yourself, can use to make the working day more organised and less wasteful of time.

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Pros And Cons Of A Partnership As Your Business Structure

Pros And Cons Of A Partnership As Your Business Structure

Whether you are starting a new business, buying a share of a business, or purchasing a business, as Rowe Bristol Lawyers will advise you, that business can be structured in several ways. It is important to know what these structures are and more importantly, the pros and cons of each of them. In Australia, you will usually have four different business structures to choose from. These are the basic details of each of them:

Sole Trader: Legally and financially, you are the business and are wholly responsible for fulfilling its obligations, including the payment of debts, and taxes. As a sole trader, your business is not a separate legal entity to yourself.

Trust: A trust has members or beneficiaries rather than owners, and the responsibility for running that trust and carrying out the necessary administrative tasks falls upon trustees appointed by those beneficiaries. Trusts are complicated and you most definitely require input from commercial lawyers if setting one up.

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5 Key Data Points Removalists Can Use To Measure The Success Of Their Online Marketing Strategy

10 Financial Terms Every Family Lawyers Business Owner Should Know

For ordinary people on the street, their perception of what family lawyers do is likely to be limited to phrases such as ‘appear in court’, ‘divorces’, and ‘child support’, to name but three. However, experienced lawyers advise that not every task that a family lawyer undertakes within their business is associated with family laws and courts.

It has to be remembered that family lawyers are a business, and thus, issues relating to employees, office premises, and, most importantly, their finances also need to be addressed regularly. The latter, finances, must surely be considered one of the most important.

Sadly, many family lawyers have limited knowledge of financing and accounting and struggle with the many terms used within them. So, for any family lawyers who are likewise confused by the plethora of financial terms, here are explanations of ten of the most important financial concepts you are likely to encounter within your business.

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7 Ways In Which Digital Marketing Can Benefit Your Family Law Firm

7 Items Most Businesses Forget To Clean And Why They Matter

We are certain that the vast majority of business owners take the cleanliness of their business premises seriously and act to ensure that regular cleaning takes place within them. Be that to create a great first impression to visitors, to ensure their staff are happy and healthy, or simply because it is the right thing to do, does not matter. What does matter is that their business premises are cleaned.

The fact that not every business owner gets the cleaning 100% correct is another matter, which can occur for a couple of reasons. The first is, instead of hiring commercial cleaners to take on their commercial cleaning needs, they employ one or more cleaners, who, whilst they may work hard, likely do not have the same expertise as professional commercial cleaners.

Another issue is that if they do employ cleaners in-house, is they may be failing to clean everything that needs to be. Specifically, several items within business premises are often forgotten about. We have listed seven of them below, along with reasons why they must be cleaned effectively.

#1 Door Handles

It Matters Because…

…surface contact areas that are touched by numerous people are the most likely to spread germs, bacteria and even viruses, as the recent Coronavirus pandemic proved. Wiping door handles should be done daily at the very least.

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5 Tips Which Will Help Your Blog Posts Boost Your Kitchen Renovation Company's Online Marketing

5 Tips Which Will Help Your Blog Posts Boost Your Kitchen Renovation Company’s Online Marketing

If your kitchen renovation company’s website has a blog then if used correctly it can provide your business with multiple advantages over your competition. A great blog can improve your branding and generate increased numbers of prospects, and it will also help boost your SEO, which can lead to higher rankings on Google.

As with all matters relating to marketing online, you will only see any of those positive outcomes if your blog is used correctly. Sadly, there are countless blogs on business websites which have so much potential, but they are sadly abandoned, empty , or the blog posts are poor. We can at least help you fix the latter of those problems so here are 5 ways to ensure your blog posts help your kitchen renovation company’s digital marketing campaigns.

Write Them In Clear English

It would be best if you remembered that your target audience is not literary scholars but people who looking to renovate their kitchen so there is little to be gained by using long, obscure words and jargon in your posts. Also avoid terminology that only specialists in your industry would recognise.

Write in as simple English as possible so that, no matter the education level of the person reading your posts, they will be able to understand what you have written fully. Go through each post you write and take every opportunity to simplify the text.

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5 Tips To Ensure Your Recycling Business's Google Ads Campaign Is Successful

5 Tips To Ensure Your Recycling Business’s Google Ads Campaign Is Successful

When it comes to marketing your recycling business online, there are two main classifications of traffic, and these are organic traffic which comes from the search engines, and paid traffic which can come from any website where your online paid advertising appears. As for which specific form of paid advertising you use, the digital marketing professionals have no hesitation in recommending Google Ads.

Using Google Ads has many benefits including increased numbers of leads, the ability to edit and improve your ads, you can see immediate results (often within minutes), and you are in full control of your budget which means you can move your ad’s budget up or down depending on your current marketing strategy.

If you do decide to set up a Google Ads campaign there are several ways in which you can improve your chances of success, and most importantly increase your return on investment. Here are 5 of them, which, if you follow them, can make a huge difference to your Google Ads campaign’s performance.

Tip #1: Spy On Your Competitors

One of the best ways to ensure your Google Ads campaign is successful is to model it on the campaigns of other businesses who are using it successfully, especially your competition. Now, we are not for a second suggesting you copy or steal their ads, but instead to look at them and emulate them. Look at what types of images they use, what keywords they are targeting, check the call to actions in their ads, assess the ad copy, and try to better them all.

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Best 7 Social Media Marketing Tools

Best 7 Social Media Marketing Tools

Unless you have been living on a desert island for the past 20 years, you will be aware of the impact and indeed the influence that social media has had on our lives. It has many uses including staying in touch with family, providing the means for giving your personal opinion on just about everything there is to, and most importantly for any business, you are running, marketing.

If your business is not yet using social media in any way, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity. If you are but are not seeing the results you had hoped for then the reason might be that you are not managing your social media campaigns effectively. The resolution to the former issue is to start using it now, and to the former, start using social media marketing tools and software. To help you choose, here is a quick guide to 7 of the best social media marketing tools.

Social Pilot

For any business that is seeking a cost-effective and simple social media management tool, you will find that Social Pilot fits that description. It has an easy to understand interface that allows you to schedule all your social media posts and to analyse their performance. Another great feature is its content curation which suggests posts from several business sectors. Has a 14-day free trial and affordable tiered price plans based on the number of social media accounts.

CoSchedule

This could be described as a hybrid tool that not only lets you manage your social media campaigns but also helps you plan and schedule your other marketing activities. Its ReQueue function provides a means to automatically schedule posts for optimal times. This tool can integrate with many other platforms including WordPress, HubSpot and Zapier. It has a free 14-day trial and very affordable monthly fees.

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5 Best Cloud-Based Marketing Tools

5 Best Cloud-Based Marketing Tools

Not that long ago, almost all of the software and tools that a business would use to make many of its operations quicker and easier had to be downloaded onto a desktop computer or laptop. While it may not have seemed a problem at the time, using software that way presented a few issues.

The first is that the software or tool could only be used on the computer that it was downloaded to. This meant that if a business needed more than one person to be able to use it, it had to buy multiple downloads or purchase a corporate licence, which invariably cost a significant amount.

Another issue was that as the software was loaded only to one computer if an employee’s role meant they went ‘on the road’, any task that relied on the software in question could not be done until they returned to their place of work and logged on to their primary computer.

There were other issues, such as if the software started to act up, no one was sure if it was a problem with the software or the computer it was loaded on. There could also be problems due to the computer not having enough disc space or having a slow CPU causing the software to run slowly. That is a lot of the issues created by something that is supposed to make life easier for a business.

Thankfully, software and tools for many functions, including those relating to a business, have moved on with the growth of what is called ‘cloud-based’ software. The cloud is nothing to do with weather but rather a term that describes software, tools, apps, and file storage running and operating online. This means instead of being downloaded to a single computer, it remains online and thus can be accessed from anywhere and from any device.

Cloud-based software and tools operate in every niche and can help with every task a business could need. As for any digital agency  there is a vast array of cloud-based solutions, but to narrow the field down for you, here are 5 of the most popular cloud-based marketing tools available today.

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10 Advantages Of Including An FAQ Page Within Your Web Design

10 Advantages Of Including An FAQ Page Within Your Web Design

When anyone lands on a website for the first time or is visiting a website to find information, one of the first things they will look for is either a search box, where they can enter a search query as they do in Google or for a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page (FAQ).

Of the two, a search box might be more accessible, as often all it requires is a plugin or app to be added to the website. Also, consider that an FAQ page needs the questions to be established and the answers determined, plus they all need to be written and published. However, that extra effort in creating an FAQ page and adding it to your web design can generate several advantages for your website and its performance. Listed below are ten of them.

People Appreciate Quick Answers To Their Questions: The most obvious advantage of getting your web designers to add an FAQ page is that it gives visitors to your website quick answers to the questions they want to be answered. It could be one of those answers is that takes them to the next stage of your sales process.

Conversions Are Increased: If they have answers and it moves them closer to a purchase, ultimately, you will find that conversions on your website increase. Even if you do not have an eCommerce site where sales happen directly, it should mean that more visitors follow the calls to action that are on your website.

Boosts Trust In Your Business: If you are prepared to answer as many questions as possible on your FAQ page including those which the answer might not always seem positive, then that honesty bodes well for visitors having a greater level of trust in your business than before.

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Top 5 Influencer Marketing Platforms

Top 5 Influencer Marketing Platforms

Have you ever bought something because it was recommended by someone else? Was it someone online who had written a glowing review? Perhaps it was a respected figure whose article shed a positive light on the product or service in question.  The scenario we have just outlined is what happens on millions of occasions every day online, and such is its impact that it has been given a name, influencer marketing.

Before we go any further, we must clarify that influencer marketing is not the same as movie stars or sports heroes promoting products on TV. That is advertising. Instead, influencer marketing is mostly content-driven. In other words, the content written by influencers is what persuades people to act in a certain way, including purchasing products, but that content is not an out and out advert screaming “Buy This!”.

The question this raises is “Why would a business use influencer marketing instead of simply have a celebrity endorse or advertise their product?” The simple answer is the return on investment from influencer marketing is over 10 times that of traditional advertising. Also, there is fly in the ointment of the modern consumer having barriers up to persuasion when most adverts appear on TV.

So, if a business wants to take advantage of influencer marketing, it first needs to find the influencers creating the content. That is where influencer software becomes a business’s best friend. It is often called an influencer marketplace or influencer network but more commonly it is referred to as an influencer marketing platform. It is what allows a business to research, find, and connect with influencers, and subsequently set up influencer campaigns. Here are our Top 5.

Upfluence

Upfluence is two marketing tools in one. The first component is Reachr which allows companies and brands to find the influencers that will be creating the content. Their database covers over 200 business sectors, and you can search using 50 filters to ensure you find the match most suitable.

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Top 7 Website Builders

Top 7 Website Builders

For any business to succeed with its marketing online it must have a website. Whilst not every business will sell directly from its website, in fact, most do not, it still serves as an extremely important part of the sales process. A great website provides a visitor with an excellent first impression of the company, it can enhance its brand recognition, and develop trust from those who land on it.

All of these benefits, and the others that accrue from having a website, feed into the overall marketing and sales objectives of a business. The question now is, how do you create a website? The optimal route which we strongly recommend is to use a professional web design agency as they have the skills, experience and knowledge to design and create a website that is bound to be successful.

However, there is another option if your budget is not at the level which would justify using a web design agency, or if you simply want to experience the journey of planning and designing your website yourself. Assuming you are not a programmer or coder, the tool you need to build your website is unsurprisingly called a website builder. There are many on the market so to help you choose, here are our top 7 website builders.

WordPress

One of the most popular CMS platforms on the internet, WordPress is also a tried and trusted means of building and managing websites. You have complete control of every aspect of your website, and with WordPress, there are thousands of themes that can be used for the design. In addition, plugins help you add functionality to your site so that you can provide enhanced features for visitors.

Wix

This website building software is cloud-based meaning you can access it anywhere and from any device which many will find convenient. It also hosts your website which negates the need to pay for a separate hosting service. Wix uses AI to help you design your website with a choice of over 500 templates, and it also has loads of apps that allow you to add additional features to your site.  Wix has a free version, however,  for a business website, a paid plan is recommended.

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5 Key Questions You Must Ask When Selecting A Website Design Agency

If your construction company is in need of a new website, the options you have range from building it yourself (not recommended) through to employing a professional web design agency, which most certainly is recommended if you want the best website possible. Whether you wish to consider the specialist website designers at www.slinkywebdesign.com.au, or any other web design agency, there are five key questions which need to be answered during that selection process.

Answer each of these 5 questions, and it should give you enough evidence and insight into any web design agency in order to determine whether they are professional and skilled enough to build a website your construction company would be proud to have represent it online.

Can They Point You To Other Live Websites That They Have Previously Designed?

If you know any professional website designers, one thing they are not afraid to show you is their creations, given that they are proud of what they have produced for previous clients, with good reason. With that in mind, it bodes well if any web design agency you are considering is happy to steer you towards websites they are responsible for.

Where alarms bells should ring is if a web designer is reluctant to give you any URLs of websites and uses feeble excuses like ‘client confidentiality’. This is ridiculous given that websites are accessible to everyone online, so what are they trying to hide?

Does Their Planning Stage Include The Client And Their Ideas?

Any decent web designers will appreciate that a website exists to help promote the company which owns it, so it stands to reason that the owner(s) of that business might want to have some input into how they want it to look, and what they want included in it. A profession web design agency will happily listen to a client’s ideas and advise them what should and what should not be included to make their website the most effective it can be.

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Shopping for groceries There's an app for that

Shopping for groceries? There’s an app for that

Grocery shopping is a necessary evil, and we think, best done online without stepping foot in the supermarket.

Woolies are hoping their new iPhone app will make grocery shopping just a little easier.

The TV ad with Amanda Keller shows Amanda and hubby using their smartphones to scan barcodes from their empty cartons in to make a shopping list – that looks pretty useful. You can also search for product names and add them to your shopping list.

It doesn’t yet allow you to fire up your online shopping account and order everything to be home delivered tomorrow, but hopefully this is a future enhancement. That would make it almost the perfect solution – if it was synchronised to existing online shopping data and allowed you to amend shopping lists, and add new items to your online list from the app.

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