What is a Sales Funnel?

Do you know some people could use your solutions yet they haven’t heard of you? Also, not everyone who shows interest in your product ends up buying it. That is where a sales funnel comes it. Sales funnel is the analysis of the potential customers’ journey from learning about your product to purchase. A great sales funnel can elevate you from a small-time loss-making business to meeting all your business goals.

Read on to find out all the essential information about sales funnel:

Sales Funnel Stages

Awareness

The first step in developing a sales funnel is identifying the customer’s pain point. At this time, the customer is yet to determine the exact problem. You must help them define the precise issue. For example, the customer is feeling back pains every time they wake up. They are yet to realize that they need a better mattress.

Research by Hubspot shows that most marketers find prospecting the most challenging step. Some of the means to reach your prospective clients at this stage are blog posts, quizzes, infographics, and webinars.

In the awareness stage, you are not looking to make any sales, instead of reaching out to as many people as possible. You want to create awareness of your products and raise interest. This is where you turn the untouched prospects into leads.

Interest

This is when the clients have defined their problem, and they are actively looking for solutions. This is where you come in with excellent content to attract them.

Create a consistent brand message that the customer can relate with. Also, use various channels to ensure you reach as many prospective customers as possible.

Some of the means to use to create interest are blog posts, chatbots, email campaigns, and social media trials.

Pay attention to your prospective clients’ reactions. Tracking the emails and social media posts with most interactions is one of the ways to monitor the exact problems your customers face. Also, offer any additional information on questions and concerns prospects raise at this stage.

Decision

This is when the prospect is interested in your solution. They are looking for more details about your product, like pricing, packages, and options before they decide to purchase.

Assure the customer that your product is within their budget and will provide them with a desirable solution. Show them what it will feel like to use your products by offering discounted pricing or free samples. Some of the useful content at this stage are testimonials, customer reviews, discount codes, and case studies.

Action

Once the earlier stages are successful, this is the stage where you seal the deal. The client buys your products. While it might seem this is the ultimate goal, you have to ensure the solution works for them. Demonstrate to them how best they can use your products.

Consider using special discounts, customer success tips, and follow up emails to ensure customer satisfaction.

Long-term Relationship

As a company, your main goal is to have loyal customers who are happy to use your products. Customer retention saves you time and money. The cost of customer retention is five times cheaper than acquiring new customers.

Having regular customers also help in consistent revenue as they make regular purchases and are likely to refer other people to you. Some of the strategies to ensure long-term customer relationships include referral programs, email campaigns, and product tutorials.

How to Improve and Manage Your Sales Funnel

Understand the Target Audience

Not all your customers are the same. They come with different needs and pain points. You have to understand and address their challenges and concerns. It is the lack of sufficient pain point solutions that stops them from buying your products. Once you know and provide the right solution, your customers will purchase and become loyal to your products.

Eliminate Friction on Sales Process

Sales friction is anything that makes it hard for the customer to make a purchase. Some of the sources of sales friction include slow loading pages, unavailable search boxes, and a poor display of products. These factors lead to confusion and stagnation on the sales funnel that makes it hard to complete.

Even though you cannot entirely eliminate the friction in sales, limit them as much as possible. Your content should resonate and be easy to use by the target audience. The content should also be informative and easily accessible. Also, make it easy for the customers to contact you through several means. Your page must also have a “contact us” page or phone number.

Be Ready to Adjust

Your products are all about your customers than any other thing. To ensure you maximize your sales, give the clients what they need. This is not a call to overhaul the whole product; rather, you make some little adjustments depending on client needs. Continually look for customer feedback and reviews to decide what the clients need. Once you make changes, let the customer know that it is based on their suggestions. This promotes long-term relationships.

Use Sale Metrics

Data is the most critical evaluation factor in your sales funnel. Collect, analyze, and interpret all sales data to measure your sales funnel success. After this, you will decide whether to change your tactics or brand message depending on your sales funnel performance.

Build Trust with the Customers

If you are looking for loyalty from your customers, then you must give them reasons to trust you. Show them that you care about them, not their money. One of the ways to build trust in customers is through constant communication. Create useful blog posts and support articles to show that you care for their success. Customer rewards also goes a long way in showing your appreciation.

Leaky Sales Funnel

A leak in sales funnel is when you keep losing leads. It ensures loss of revenue and slows business growth. You must determine and sort the source of the leak in your sales funnel early enough. Identifying the leak involves both the marketing and sales team working together to compare strategies and outcomes.

The first step towards determining leak in your sales funnel is by conducting a funnel analysis. The analysis helps you understand the lead acquisition until the drop off point. After which you come up with ways to ensure high conversion rates.

The best way to measure sales funnel leaks is by using analytics tools. Some of the most popular analysis tools are Google Analytics for smaller businesses and KISSmetrics and Mixpanel for larger enterprises. These easy to use tools integrate with the sales funnel enables you to observe and notice all the data within the system. Your conversion rates determine your sales funnel efficiency.

Once you have determined the leaks on your system, the next step is to look for ways to improve the conversion rate by blocking all the possible causes. Some of the possible solutions are clearing browser and device incompatibility. For cases of low visitor conversions, consider using more visible opt-in buttons. Also, optimize your page for different traffic sources and talk to your customers to determine their challenges and provide solutions.

Increase your customer engagement to improve your conversion rates.

Mistakes in Sales Funnel Management

These are some of the errors that lead to failure in most sales funnels:

Lack of Proper Sales Training

Your sales team runs significant parts of the sales funnel. Other than recruiting skilled and experienced staff, you also need to offer regular training. The training ensures they are well equipped with information on the products, and they stay motivated. This helps them solve customer concerns and questions comprehensively.

Assuming Leads that Don’t Buy are Useless

Some organizations tend to discard leads that don’t buy as useless because their main goal is sales. They don’t realize that customers fail to buy due to various reasons. The best way to go about a failure to purchase is to interact with the lead more. Inquire if they need a different variation if it is anything to do with pricing or any other factor. After this, you look if you can provide what the client is looking for.

Failure to Measure Each Stage of the Sales Funnel

Most companies concentrate on the last stage of the sales funnel, thus cannot establish issues in the earlier stages. Identifying the issues within the entire system allows you to solve problems early enough. You also get to train your sales team on how best to improve on each stage hence more leads and eventual conversion.

Failure to Create long-term Relationships Opportunities

Most organizations, once they make sales, get back to the first step of the sales funnel. They unknowingly miss the opportunity to create a repeat client when going for new ones. This leads to loss of revenue as repeat clients account for 40% of company revenue.

Bottom Line

Creating a perfect sales funnel involves a lot of work. Apart from the sales funnel tools, your sales and marketing team must work together for the success of the funnel. Breakage at any stage leads to failure of the whole system. Ultimately, getting the right sales to funnel right assures you of meeting your business targets.

The Beginner’s Guide to Sell Digital Products

Beginner's Guide to Selling Digital Products

If you’re starting an online business, one of the options that you might consider is starting your own online store. Once you decide to start an online store, you’ll then have to decide between selling physical products or digital products.

The difference between selling physical or digital products comes down to personal preference and skillset. Digital products are great for those that don’t have space to store physical inventory and for those that don’t want to deal with the logistics of shipping. However, if you’re interested in digital products, you’ll also need to have the skillset to design and create those products.

If you’re considering launching your own store to sell your digital products, here are some tips to keep in mind.

Know what you want to sell

Start thinking about what type of digital products you’re interested in selling. Whether you’re an avid musician who wants to produce jingles to play in the background of advertisements or a travel photographer who wants to sell stock images, there is a lot of room for innovation and creativity when it comes to producing digital products.

If you’re already blogging or running your own website, you might want to leverage your current reputation to sell an ebook or an educational course. Your followers already see you as an expert in your field. An ebook or an educational course would allow them to further benefit from your knowledge.

Other popular digital content includes software (such as plugins and website templates), graphic designs, and podcasts. If you have an idea for a digital product, find an existing market and figure out what the products generally sell for.

Have a production plan

Once you have a product or two in mind, think about how you’re going to actually produce that product. Think about workflow and what needs to happen.

Some products, such as an ebook or a song, can be produced once and then resold countless times. At the same time, however, you’re going to need a plan in place for producing more books or songs. Other products may require you to be more actively engaged. For example, if you’re teaching a course, you’re going to need to engage with the students. And if you’re interested in something such as producing posters, you’re going to need to set aside time to customize artwork for each client.

The more strategic you can be upfront, the better. This will allow you to create a sustainable business model.

Think about your platform

Once you know what you want to sell and how you’re going to produce it, think about what sort of platform you want to use. This is going to vary depending on what you’re creating and what your skillset is.

There are plenty of existing websites and applications where all you need to do is create a user account and start selling. These platforms are easy to find and generally already have a pool of potential customers that are looking for products just like yours.

If you already have your own website or blog, however, you might want to create an online store on your existing site. A few simple adjustments, such as adding landing pages that direct people into a sales funnel, might be all you need to start selling. Click here for a sales funnel software comparison.

Decide how to launch your product

Finally, start developing a marketing strategy. Marketing your digital products is just as challenging as marketing physical products. You can’t just upload your products to the web and start expecting to make a profit from them overnight.

Ideally, you’re selling a specific product that will appeal to a specific audience. Find ways to begin reaching this audience. This might be going onto social media groups and giving them a small teaser of what you’re selling. Or it could be using specific keywords within descriptions to build strong SEO.

Sometimes, you may have to offer a free sampling of what you’re selling to draw in potential customers. For example, if you’re selling an ebook, consider making the first few chapters free to download. Once they’re hooked into your book, there is more of a chance that they’ll pay for the remaining chapters.

Conclusion

There is profit to be made selling digital products, as long as you are strategic about what you’re selling and how you’re selling it. Start examining the existing market to see what others are selling. This will give you insight on what is (or isn’t) working for others and may give you the inspiration you need to start your own store.

Integrated Marketing: Why your business should be using integrated marketing?

Marketing, in an increasingly desensitized society, is finding itself in unfamiliar territory. Markets are now becoming more and more fragmented and companies are finding it difficult to develop a coherent marketing strategy. With the emergence of various social media platforms and the evolution of markets, is there still such a thing as effective marketing?

The common pitfall is the false dichotomy that it should be easier to reach markets with a plethora of available social platforms. However, marketers fail to realize that people use social media, email, TV, radio, and other platforms differently from one another. Gone are the days when cold calls and door-to-door operations were the core foundations of a company’s marketing and sales efforts. Nowadays, people are not just interested in your products–they’re also interested in how consistent your brand is.

In the advent of rapid digital innovation and consumers wanting more from companies, is there still a way to unify the customer experience?

What Is Integrated Marketing?

Integrated Marketing is the practice of unifying various marketing strategies and leveraging these strategies to ultimately complement each other. Put simply, the overall purpose of integrated marketing is to create a holistic approach that will ensure consistent messaging across different communications platforms as well as align its goals with the company’s overall brand.

The common misconception is that integrated marketing is under the umbrella of marketing. However, according to Data Marketing & Analytics, an Association of National Advertisers partner, integrated marketing “attempts to meld all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and social media, through their respective mix of tactics, methods, channels, media, and activities.”

This means that integrated marketing does not only deal with promotions, but it is also a process that combines different disciplines of marketing and communications to ensure that all messaging strategies are customer-focused and consistent across all channels. In integrated marketing, all channels should work in unison rather than in isolation.

Figure 1: The key differences between Integrated Marketing and Traditional Marketing

Why Is Integrated Marketing Important?

A recent article by ReachForce, a data management solutions agency, has described integrated marketing as a process that provides customers with a seamless brand experience across all channels. In other words, integrated marketing does not only rely on the quality of a company’s products and services but also in the quality of the company’s overall brand identity.

In the past, brand identity has been often overlooked as traditional promotions and advertising practices focused on mass marketing a brand/company’s products using print, television, and radio advertisements. Very rarely do these ads tell a story or are purpose-driven. That’s what sets integrated marketing apart.

Integrated marketing shines where other aspects of marketing and sales fall short— it prioritizes providing value. In the modern business landscape, where companies post the same ubiquitous type of content day in day out, consumers now care about authenticity and uniqueness from marketing efforts more so than the product itself.

How Does Integrated Marketing Provide Value?

Integrated marketing provides value through seamlessly bringing together all forms of communications with consistent messaging and branding strategies. A unified marketing approach also increases the probability of your target audience actively seeking your brand. However, it doesn’t stop there. Simultaneously, integrated marketing positively affects other aspects of a business such as:

Brand visibility

For example, a restaurant is planning to run a campaign that tells the story of a couple going to their restaurant for every milestone in their lives. Using integrated marketing, the story would be broken into segments with the bulk of the story featured in the company’s website while shorter parts/segments of the story will then be shared through visual content on social media, TV, or radio ads. The most important thing to remember is that posts on each platform should tie-in with the overall campaign strategy. This strategy will allow the restaurant to gain greater visibility (by generating interest) across all of its communications platforms.

Companies that know what customers want already to have a competitive advantage over other companies that don’t. The best way to craft a story is to know the conversations your target audience is having. Search marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) are great skills to utilize to develop content that is relevant to a company and its consumers.

Consistency in internal and external communications

In addition to consistent messaging, integrated marketing can also help with a brand/company’s creative consistency. In an integrated marketing campaign, ensuring consistency in graphics, copy, and other types of content are key for leads and customers to gain a holistic view of a brand and its products.

Consistency in communications does not only apply to customer-facing deliverables but also in employees exemplifying a company’s values. Having employees “live and breathe” what a company stands for is important in integrated marketing as it bolsters culture-building initiatives. When your employees understand and embrace what the company stands for, the easier it is to deliver consistent messaging to customers.

Cost-effective

Being consistent in marketing communications means that a company can repurpose graphics, copy, and other multimedia content thus saving money by eliminating the need to address specialized content for every platform. If done correctly, integrated marketing helps optimize the marketing budget by allowing companies to allocate money toward the most effective strategies.

Build a following

Tools like social media, SEO, and search engine marketing have made it easier for companies to understand a customer’s journey. As a result, it has also become easier for companies to develop content that would resonate and reach their audiences better. However, an increase in visibility does not translate into an increase in engagement. Getting more hits and views on your website does not equate to building a following.

Building a consistent following will allow a company to nurture a greater relationship with its audience by further understanding what your following wants and what conversations they are having. Having a consistent following will also help establish a company as a thought leader in a congested and influencer-filled landscape. Offering thought-provoking and insightful opinions about relevant trends and topics will also help position a business in the middle of the conversations your followers are having.

Customer-focused

Data plays an integral part in building a customer-focused integrated marketing campaign. Through data collected from search engine marketing efforts, companies will be able to understand customers better and create strategies in order to make the customer journey as seamless as possible.

With the right data (and a little bit of patience), companies will be able to gain key information about how customers interact with the company or the company’s product.

Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), in today’s digital landscape, has evolved from recommendations from one person to another to recommendations from one person to the world. An increasingly connected society means word of mouth perfectly ties into integrated marketing campaigns through conversations made via social media platforms.

In building trust through customer-focused integrated marketing campaigns, companies are simultaneously creating brand advocates that are willing to share products or services with their respective audience. A Nielsen study in 2015 claims that 83% of consumers are likely to believe recommendations from family and friends over traditional advertising methods.

Word of mouth marketing has also paved the way for other types of modern marketing practices such as affiliate marketing and influencer marketing.

Step-By-Step: How to Create an Integrated Marketing Campaign

The most important thing to remember is that integrated marketing is data driven. Knowing who your customers are and what your customers search for and then optimizing your content to revolve around those search queries is a great place to start. Here are a few tips on creating an integrated marketing campaign:

Develop SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) campaign objectives
Keep your messaging compelling and consistent in every communications channel to ensure brand consistency
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, spend time in defining your target audience and understanding customer decision-making.
Create evergreen content (as much as possible, when possible). Evergreen content will be easier to repurpose and will have a longer content lifespan.
After creating great content, carefully select your channels. In knowing your audience, you would be able to properly target the channels that your audience is using the most and allocating majority of your budget on those channels.
Measure, analyze, and adjust accordingly. As with any campaign, integrated marketing is not perfect and requires a good amount of data analysis to determine whether or not you are achieving your goals.

The more time spent in creating a marketing campaign, the better the chances for companies to avoid scattered marketing efforts and inconsistent messaging. Integrated marketing also allows companies to better understand where the budget is going and where to allocate it in the future. Integrated marketing efforts may seem overwhelming and tedious at first but it’s a worthwhile investment as it keeps companies ahead of the curve.

About the Author

Aron Frost is the technical SEO specialist at First Page Hong Kong. As an integrated marketing agency – it offers paid social, paid search, SEO, branding, and content solutions.

Aron enjoys looking into big data for insights and believes analytics and UX are big factors when it comes to online success. You can find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and on his blog.

Top 5 Tips For Hiring an SEO Agency

When it comes to hiring an SEO agency it can be a tough decision because there are so many to choose from.

So here are some of our top tips for when you hire your next SEO Agency.

The Top 5 Tips For Hiring an SEO Agency

1. Make sure they have experience and case studies

You want to be sure that the agency you are going to work with has got top rankings in the search engines with other companies.

Preferably you want to find agencies that have had success with companies in your industry because this will make it easier for them to get success for you.

You should do your due diligence and call these companies and ask them in person what their thoughts are about this agency, as this will give you a more accurate picture.

2. Don’t go for a cheap deal to save money

When it comes to SEO time is money, so the quicker you can get your website to the top of the search engines – the quicker you can get the lion’s share of the customers.

Most people click on a top 5 result so if you are not there then you are losing out to your competition.

So you want to invest a good amount into your search engine optimisation efforts because it will pay off quite quickly once you reach the top of the search engines.

If you go for a cheap deal to save money then it will take a lot longer to get to the top and the opportunity cost of missing out on all those free customers every day will more than outweigh the cost saving of a cheap deal.

3. Make sure they use White Hat SEO techniques

SEO is expensive so the last thing you want is to get to the top of Google and then your website gets penalised because of using dodgy tactics to get you to the top.

So you want to know that the way your agency gets results is strictly in a white hat manner so that when they do get to the top – it means you will stay there.

4. Have good SEO goals

You want to be clear with what you are looking to achieve by doing SEO on your website.

Are you looking to boost revenue for specific services, are you looking to build your brand awareness or are you looking to build your email list or free trial participants?

There are many reasons to do SEO, so just make sure you are clear with what you want because this will define the strategy from the beginning.

5. Take your time in choosing your SEO Agency

Hiring an SEO company should not be a quick decision because it is the basis of your future online success.

You wouldn’t just buy the first car or house that you found, you would naturally do your research.

It is the same for hiring an SEO agency, you want to do your research, take your time, have conversations with several different agencies and ask them good questions.

Good Questions To Ask SEO Agencies

What SEO processes do you use to rank websites and why do you use them?
What will you do to improve our search engine rankings on our specific website?
Have you worked on similar websites and what were the results?
What kind of reporting do you do, and how often do you send a report?
How many hours per month will you be working on our website?
What are the payment options and is there any extra fees on top?
Can I cancel at any time?

Some Search Engine Statistics

Google currently holds 92% of the total search engine market share

57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative

75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines.

70 to 80% of people ignore paid search results, choosing to only click on organic search results.

Tips From Top Digital Marketing Agency Business Owners

We have asked top digital agency owners to give a good piece of advice for other agency owners, and we put the best on here.

Whether you are looking to start an agency or your running a digital marketing agency and are looking to scale there will be something on here for you.

You will find digital marketing insights and advice from some of the best in the business.

We asked them to answer one of these questions.

What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time?

What advice would you give someone just starting an agency?

What challenging situation did you have that you overcome?

What advice would you give to someone who wanted to scale their agency?

Here is Some of the Best Advice and Insights We Got

Neil Patel

When I first started an SEO agency, I was a little kid – 16 years old and I had 5 major problems.

1. When your 16 – who wants to give money to a 16-year-old?
2. I didn’t have money
3. I didn’t have a college degree
4. I didn’t have any experience, it was really tough.
5. I was going to school and running my agency on the side

But I still made the SEO agency work, I got into 5 figures per month in high school.

I am not trying to brag but I am just trying to prove a point, that if I could do it when I was 16 anyone can do it.

That’s the first thing you need to know, if you want to start an agency and go and create something – don’t be afraid and just believe in yourself.

Neil Patel
www.neilpatel.com

Brian Dean

I think in the early days it is good to work a lot because you don’t know anything.

When I first started I worked a lot more, and I got more done.
there is something to the fact that if you have 10 hours a day then do something that will take 10 hours.

There is something to it where if you work 5 hours per day or you work 10 you are going to get more with 10 in most cases. That’s what I was doing most days when I was first getting started. I remember I had a cutoff, I would get up at 6 and start at 7 then I stopped at 7 in the evening.

The number of hours I put in was good because I got to figure out what worked, what didn’t – I tested tons of different stuff all over the place. If I was only doing it in small increments by only doing fewer hours per day I wouldn’t have learned that fast.

Over the years of doing it, I have been able to figure out what works best so I can focus on just doing that thing and ignoring everything else.

But in the early days, I didn’t know what to ignore and what to focus on but by constantly asking what works best and moving forward quickly in small increments that was a helpful exercise.

Brian Dean
www.backlinko.com

Ryan Stewart

I am a process nut, and I firmly believe it is the most important aspect of any business but especially agencies because of how much there is to do.

A lot of businesses use a framework, which is a high-level template. But it is not enough.

For example, for SEO you know you need to do a technical audit, keyword research, onpage optimisation, content creation and link acquisition.

But this is a framework, it is not a process.

You can’t just go to an employee and say “Hey we are doing SEO – go run a technical audit or do some keyword research”.

They are going to do what they know and often times it is going to be wrong.

If you want to be an effective agency your people need to be on point and your service has to be amazing.

You can manage that by having a detailed process because that is a roadmap on how to execute that framework.

So break all your tasks down into micro step by step tasks so you can give the job to anyone and they will be just as effective as you would be.

This is what I have found to be one of the biggest keys to scaling my agency.

Ryan Stewart
www.ryanwashere.com

Steve Napier

I’ve learned the best way to grow a business is to maximise client retention and you do that by keeping them happy through delivering results and ROI.

It’s much easier to keep a client than to convert a new one and the number of recommendations including second and third generation recommendations you can receive can be astonishing.

Steve Napier
www.seomark.co.uk

Fernando

In the early stages, you need to get the systems right because it will save you so much time and headaches.

There is so much to do in an agency that finding ways to maximise your time efficiently is having well-built systems.

I was also reluctant to get the software I needed like accounting software and website checkers, and I was doing it manually to try and save money.

But what I was saving in money I was losing in time that could be best spent elsewhere.

So when I finally got the software I needed it helped me have a more streamlined system.

So any invoice issues could get solved easily and quickly and I was more effective at running my agency.

If you want to scale you need to get the tools that enable you to do the more important tasks.

The quicker you can get all the best tools the quicker you can get better results for your agency and your clients.

One last tip I wish I could go back and tell myself is to get customers on a direct debit payment plan because it would have saved a lot of headaches.

It’s tough to do as clients are reluctant at times to do the right thing, but it’s worth the pain of pushing the client to do it.

It allows you to have less wasted time and the ability to fully focus on getting results without the distraction of chasing payments.

Fernando
www.clickdo.co.uk/fernando/

Jacob Cass

Short and snippy pieces of advice I would give to my younger self.

Don’t undervalue your work.
Seek criticism, not praise.
Always keep learning & don’t be a static learner: do this by reading books, magazines, blogs and by practising.
Collect & share things.
Teach others.
Never give up.
Keep practising.
Failure is just lessons learned for next time.

Jacob Cass
www.justcreative.com

Ted Kubaitis

I had access to over 250 million Facebook fans in my past e-commerce days. What I found is every time we did promotions on social media, our brand searches would spike in search.

So do something popular on your social pages and immediately your brand searches go up in Google.

If you can, create gross revenue reporting that you can share with your clients. By being able to show they got this many sales from this many people which adds up to xyz revenue.

Once you do that, you have a seat at the executive table – you are no longer an outsider to their business but a valued asset.

Everything we do is data-driven, we let the data show us where to go, so when our data agrees we tend to go in that direction.

We are always testing to see what is ranking factors correlate on the top ranking websites using my SEO testing software, and then we let the data tell us what to do.

Ted Kubaitis
www.seotoollab.com

Kyle Roof

We have found transparent reporting to be a key relationship builder with our clients.

The biggest thing I can say we do, which has been fantastic is we will benchmark when we start a new project.

We will often take the average of the 3 months before showing stats for users, clicks, impressions – that sort of thing.

Then we keep that up as a benchmark so when that month’s stats come in the business owner can see where they were and where they are now.

Sometimes you will have a month that is kind of flat and using normal reporting it would be like “Hey this was a flat month” and the client is up in arms over what happened and you end up explaining your way out of it.

But by showing their previous 3 months on each report it gives a clearer perspective and it makes those flat months more manageable.

Kyle Roof
www.hvseo.co

Clint Butler

There are tons of project management tools, first off you need to find the one that your team is going to use.

I found the hard way that you can’t force a project management system on somebody.

We have tried nearly all the management systems, and really you need to test with your team to find out what is going to be best for you.

Your team needs to all be able to use it effectively so things can get done.

Clint Butler
www.digitaleer.com

Josh Bachynski

We use the highest level of scientific experimentation to try and find out what the ranking factors are in Google. We do single variable tests on a constant basis to know exactly what ranking factors are important today.

Most SEO agencies use what I call GuesSEO because they read a blog or watched a video on Youtube that told them a piece of information that may or may not be correct.

Only through testing can you find out the truth, which is why through our scientific testing methods we are consistently able to get results for our clients.

The point of me saying this is you either need to run tests yourself to find out what is going on in the search engines or you need to join a group of people who are.

Being able to say to our clients that we know how to rank their website because we do scientific testing gives you a stronger position to negotiate from

Josh Bachynski
www.secretseo.guru

Ruan M. Marinho

I ranked number 1 for New York SEO in less than 90 days.

A few months ago I was thinking what is the best city to target for SEO services, and one of them was Boston but the one that I wanted was New York SEO.
It’s kind of a funny story because when I was ranking this keyword my website domain authority wasn’t what it was today – it was low.

There was a lot of people telling me that I shouldn’t go for the keyword because my site is too small, there are people already ranking at the top and that has had this position forever the list goes on. In fact, some people even challenged me and said I couldn’t do it – so guess what I did – I went and did it.
What I did was very simple.

The first thing you have to do is put your mind to a big keyword, too many people go for little keywords inside of Google because they are scared of going for the larger keyword.

Once my mind shifted from fear of targeting a difficult keyword, I went in and started creating the content necessary for the page.

Then I did my research on the companies at the top of the search results and I started to notice that they weren’t all that special.

After I did all my SEO the website only made it to the third page but I instantly knew it was possible to make it to the first page.

So I started to think about some strategy to get it on the first page. So I made a video about buying links on Fiverr which now has over 30,000 views on Youtube. In the video

If more people click on your website and more people stay on your website, Google is going to think that you are popular and is going to rank you higher in the search engines.

So once I made that video thousands of people were typing in New York SEO into search, clicking on my website and having a look around to see what I was doing.

Literally in one day, Google ranked me at the top of the first page from the third page.

Neil Patel did a similar thing a while back, where he took out an advert on Instagram with a sexy girl holding up a sign saying ‘Who is Neil Patel?’ which got people to search his name and click on his website.

So think big, be creative and learn from other industry experts.

Ruan M. Marinho
www.develomark.com

Daryl Rosser

I couldn’t run my agency how it is, without using virtual assistants. But I travel and move around a lot, so to do that I need good virtual assistants to manage my business properly.

Most of the SEO is outsourced to my VA’s, anything that doesn’t require any thinking – they are doing. Which means most of my time is spent on coming up with strategies and ideas to grow my agency. I have full-time VA’s and they have been with me for quite a while now.

When you are hiring people whether it is from Upwork or a full-time person, you want to do a few things to filter out a lot of people quickly.

You should put a test in your job description, something like “include the word purple in your reply”, then you know that they have read it.

Next, you need to get on a Skype interview because you want to test how well they can write and speak good English if they have some basic knowledge of SEO that’s a bonus.

I hire untrained people the reason for this is because I create training videos so they can do the tasks I give them.

It is a win-win, you can hire full-time people for as little as $350 per month and they get a valuable skill and decent money for their country. Plus when they are working for you longer you can raise their pay and give them bonuses.

They also need to be fast with their responses, as I want people who can do things quite quickly.

Then if they qualify I give them a free trial, which is a small task like a 500-word article and I give each of them the exact same article title.

I do it in batches of 3 or more and this lets me compare them which is an easy way to see exactly how good they are. Then i put them on a 2 week paid trial and go from there.

Daryl Rosser
www.lionzeal.com

Tim Kitchen

You should focus on your message for your agency in other words, what are saying and how are you saying it.

This defines everything about your business which includes what you say on your social media, what you say on your website and what you say over email or on the phone.

Then you need to understand the driver behind the decision makers.

Why are they making the decision?
What are their criteria for choosing their supplier?
What are their needs and pain points that you are solving?

You need to make sure your message really identifies and really talks to these people.

Next is how do you reach these people.

Where are they spending their time online?
What are the blogs or magazines they are reading?
Which of the social channels are they spending the most time on?

A lot of people are surprised that actually, their target audience is spending a lot of time on Facebook.

Most people think of Facebook as a B2C marketplace. But think about it we are all people and every one of those decision makers has a Facebook account.

Which means you can get right in front of exactly who you want with the offer for specifically for them.

Tim Kitchen
www.exposureninja.com

Dan Ray

If I could go back in time and give myself some advice, this is some of the tips I would give myself.

Tip 1 Choose a type of SEO, there are loads and loads of different things you can do within SEO. My philosophy is just do a single service and do it very well – I chose link building.

Tip 2 Choose a single person to follow and stick with whatever they teach, at least for a little bit because you don’t want a lot of advice that contradicts each other.

Tip 3 Fail and fail again, succeed and fail. You want to constantly be calibrating, learning from your successes and your failures. Get better and better because the more experience you have, the more confidence you will have with it. Figure out what is working for you and just keep doing that.

Tip 4 If you’re looking for clients, you will be surprised how many business owners you, your team or your friends and family probably know. Whether it is your dentist or chiropractor they probably need your help, so find their contact info and tell them you will do some work for them for free in exchange for a video testimonial, as a video testimonial is absolutely essential.

Tip 5 Go to meetup’s in your city, whether this is BNI or meetup events. I went to a meetup called the Yorkshire Mafia where a handful of billionaires get on stage and people can ask them questions. So you can imagine the types of people this attracts. Also, don’t just go to marketing meetups where you will bump into people in your field, you want to get out your bubble and go to a lawyer meetup for example as you will be the only SEO consultant there.

Tip 6 Put anyone that enters sends you a message into an email autoresponder which sends out an email each week with a case study. This will keep you top of mind so when they are ready, you will be on their short list.

Tip 7 Have a win-win money back guarantee type of deal. What I like to do is “if you’re not seeing a traffic improvement in the first month you can have your money back if you want”. If you are doing the work right, it is very unlikely that you will not get traffic improvements.

Dan Ray
www.danray.me

Chase Reiner

Whatever type of service you are selling in your agency – make sure you can streamline it. I mean because if you can’t scale it – then you can’t really sell it.

Because if you are just doing all this stuff manually or you don’t have processes in built in – to kind of show how to do these tasks in a streamlined way. Where you are taking somebody from point A to point B in 3 steps.

Then you are going to end up spending a bunch of your time just trying to figure all this stuff out for every new client.

Trying to personalise what you are doing to everybody, its a lot easier to say “OK we do SEO for plumbers or we do PR for Accountants, these are our case studies and this is how we do it”.

Simply just showing people in a transparent way what you are doing goes a long way.

Chase Reiner
www.chasereiner.com

Bradley Benner

What I have found as a marketing consultant running my agency, I found that most of the time I have been able to secure clients is when I am going out and doing outbound marketing – where I am contacting them.

I know you can get inbound leads but personally, for my own business, I don’t get a lot of inbound leads. Most of the inbound leads I do get are from referrals from existing clients.

But I don’t get a whole lot of cold leads coming from Google. I rank well for SEO Virginia and things like that, but I don’t typically get a lot of leads from that.

What I get my most leads from, was me doing the outreach. I hate cold calling and sales – I absolutely despise it.

So I built a video lead generation system so now instead of cold calling I shoot videos and send them with email prospecting.

Videos are a great way to get noticed or get a conversation started with potential prospects. Because think about this – if you are just starting to build your own agency – I can tell you now – it is a saturated market out there when dealing with local businesses.

Business owners get hammered – relentlessly by marketing and advertising companies. All the time they are getting some solicitation whether it is cold emails or cold calls and there are even people knocking on their door.

So you need to get through all that noise which is why having a video lead gen system is a great way to separate yourself from the rest of the pack.

Bradley Benner
www.semanticmastery.com

Ryan Scollen

The key thing I have learned since becoming a consultant is how much time admin sucks up.

I always imagined by day being 7-8 hours of doing the work that I enjoy doing.

But the hard reality is that 40% of my day is sucked up with work such as invoicing, chasing, sales and general day to day admin work.

The key thing to overcome this is processes.

If you can get into a routine and have a structured process to follow, the laborious admin side of being a consultant doesn’t feel so bad.

Ryan Scollon
www.ryanscollon.co.uk

Top Tips From Digital Marketing Agencies

So that’s all folks – this has been the top tips by agency owners for agency owners.

If you are a digital agency owner and you would like to contribute to this post – feel free to send us a message.

We will pick the best and add them to this page.

If you are looking to learn how to start a digital marketing agency read the guide by Neil Franklin

The importance of understanding your audience (Top 6 Tips)

Whys is it important than ever to understand your audience?

In this article, you will learn the importance of understanding your audience and how to target the right audience with insight about their behavior. When I started ClickDo I didn’t focus on understanding the audience and I kept writing. But it did not help me with sales and get more customers. So once I paid attention to get to know the importance of understanding our audience everything changed. ClickDo grew rapidly to become one of the best SEO agencies in London.

Now let’s look at the tips to finding your audience and why it’s important.

A while ago market visit was something done only by the bigger companies, as it was so expensive but smaller start-up companies could not afford to do in-depth market research. With market research being the most important thing to ensuring the success of the company, it is great news that there are various tools and data now available on the Internet in order to conduct this research.

These tools enable companies to look into their market and only sell products that are proven to be popular in their target audience saving them thousands of pounds in the long run.

By not doing market research you may be missing out on a critical segment of your market audience:

If your market audience has not been looked into carefully, you may be missing out on a large proportion of customers. By knowing your customers it allows you to fully utilise your marketing techniques as well as not wasting precious company resources and capital and marketing to the wrong segment of people.

Know what your customers want:

Your business is defined by your customers. In order to market to them successfully and convert it into sales, it is very important to know what your customers are looking for and what appeals to them as a wider audience. You need to connect to them.

Without people, you do not have a brand to promote or sell as there is no money and profits being made. Your target audience needs to be identified and they will usually consist of:

Anyone, whether they are customers or businesses who need your product.
The people upon who’s opinion and desires your brand is based.
Your promoters. This could be Instagram influencers or celebrity endorsers.
Anyone who pays you for your product, or convinces others to buy your product.

Keep communication regular within the organisation:

After identifying all of your customers and the market segments that you are targeting, you need to relay this to your team. Your most valuable source of brand promotionalbrand promotional is your employees.

By making them feel as if they know and understand your target market, employees will connect with them on a better level, helping your brand grow faster.

Create Emotions:

By getting to know your audience it allows you to understand their wants, hopes, and desires. These factors can be used to evoke huge amounts of emotion in your clients. To do this there are certain demographics that need to be fulfilled and understood:

Your customers’ demographics: These are things such as the age range, gender, race, occupation, earnings, education of your customer base. This allows you to create products to target these people specifically.
Their location: Where people live will have a huge impact on what they buy. For example, people living in the countryside are less likely to buy a suit, whereas a city dweller is more likely too. This can impact where you sell your products.
How do your customers’ shop: With the internet, there is a wider range of online options available than in brick and mortar shops. Looking at where your customers’ shop can greatly help in deciding where you sell to maximize profits.
Their thought processes: Every segment of the market will have a slightly different way of thinking and understanding something. This means that the thought processes when buying something will differ from the market segment to market segment. By interviewing potential customers, focus groups and other forms of market research like google analytics you can find out this information.

Accuracy is key:

It happens very often that we identify our target audience but completely misunderstand their needs. This information needs to be accurate or else your product or service will not live up to their wants or needs. Thus resulting in major issues with the way your target market perceives your brand.

Being specific is key:

Aiming to sell to every single person is a recipe for disaster. Brands like Adidas only target people who like sportswear and Chanel only targets people who like high-end luxury goods.

Get as specific as you possibly can when creating your target market. This is key to successfully selling your product. Let’s take as an example a shop that sells baby clothes their target market would be adults aged between 20 to 40 expecting children or who already have children.

Stand out in the market:

People talk about memorable brands, which is free marketing for your company and an increase in sales. Multiple new customers are gained via word of mouth recommendations and it also helps people to trust in your company.

By ensuring that everything you do is memorable to your target market you ensure that you tap into this valuable source and increase your sales drastically.

How to maintain online reputation for your Brand?

Every business owner should make sure that their brand has a good online presence. As the internet usage is increased by the users in the recent days. It’s always important to maintain the online reputation for the business.

Here let’s see some smart tips to maintain the online reputation for your business in the best way.

Optimize your website:

It’s always important to take care of the business website and optimize it to look better and perform better when the user lands on the website.

Business Website remains as a medium to showcase to the target audience that what you are offering.

Website UI, Content and the performance of the website in the search engines will have the significant effect in the conversion rate.

Optimize your Social profiles:

Having well optimized social media profiles will help you get more reach for your business.

Share the regular updates on the official social media profiles to keep the users engaged. This will help you get more reach.

Even if you are starting a new business, you can use the Facebook Advertising to get likes and shares for the posts from the custom targeted audience.

Create official business profiles in all the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.

Even having company profiles at platforms like Medium, Quora will help you get more reach for your brand online.

Keep sharing the regular updates daily on the social media profiles, this will make the new users to follow your page and keep the existing ones engaged.

Earn Positive Reviews:

Being a business owner, without the positive feedback from the existing users, its always tough to take it forward.

Get good online reviews for your business, even though if you have some poor reviews, sort out the issue and reply to them.

Having good online reviews for your business will help you get quality customers from online.

Not only Google reviews matters, Give importance to other sources of reviews like CrunchBase, etc.

Having a good number of reviews from the wide range of websites will help you get new customers.

Even at times, you may have negative reviews due to some unavoidable reasons, In such cases, you can solve the customer’s issue and can reply to them

Even big corporates will have some negative reviews, but it depends on how you work on the client’s issues and make them sustain.

E-Mail Newsletter:

Be in touch with the existing customers, Send them weekly/monthly newsletters and keep them engaged with your business.

Sharing quality contents to the users will make them to be engaged with your business for a long time.

Send seasonal offers through E-Mails, this will help you to get more conversions.

This will make the customers to be in touch with you. Even this will bring in more sales for your business.

Thus these are some of the few tips to maintain the good online reputation for your business.

Paid Advertising:

Use Facebook Advertising to get good reach for your latest blogs and new services.

By using the Facebook Ads you can target the customers who have visited your website previously and also the people whom you may think are the right audience.

Facebook Ads helps you to target a wide range of audience based on the user interests, job titles, etc.

Hence as a business people, spend some bucks in Online Advertising to get good brand outreach and keep the customers engaged with your business.

We at ClickDo Ltd help business owners in the UK to get good online reach for their brand. For Facebook Marketing or Remarketing services just drop a mail to digital@clickdo.co.uk, Our Expert team will get back to you with the Business plan.

Smart Tips to build the Successful E-Mail Marketing Strategy

Usually, Business people spend more bucks on collecting the E-Mail id’s of the potential customers from the other. But you can save the money and collect the database by yourself if you act smart.

If your site has quite a good amount of Traffic, but if the conversion rate is low.

Then its time for you to set up a perfect E-Mail marketing strategy to increase the conversion rate,

How to collect the customer database?

It’s not a tough process to collect the potential customer’s E-Mail Id’s. Being a Marketing consultant, you should always have the seasonal offer pop-ups on your website.

The pop-up should be capable of collecting the user’s information like E-Mail Id, Phone number if possible.

Even if the user bounces back without making any purchase, you can easily outreach them through E-Mail and get converted.

Big corporate giants like Amazon use the E-Mail marketing strategy to promote their latest offers and increase the sales.

It is found that the sales is increased by more than 30% with the E-Mail marketing.

How to setup up Pop-up to get the user information?

If you have either WordPress website or even hardcoded site, you can use the “SUMO POPUP”. By using this, you can set up the offer pop-up on your site and collect the user’s data.

Even you can connect the accounts like Mailchimp to this and push the data that you are collecting here directly to the other platform.

Even you can create the autoresponder mail for the users who subscribe to your brand.

How to Outreach?

When you try to outreach the customer, you should plan strategically and should mail the user with the information what he is actually in need of. Sending irrelevant emails will make the users to unsubscribe from the list.

Well planned E-Mail outreach will help you to increase the sales by more than 30%.

If you need the proper E-Mail marketing to be set up for your business, you can mail to digital@clickdo.co.uk. We will help you and do a strategy plan for your business.

10 Tips on How to Tell your Business Story

Business storytelling is an art in this guide I will share the top 10 tips fo tell your business story.

The last few years have ushered in a new market thinking that has greatly changed the way things are done. Marketers and strategists have long understood the connection between emotions and their roles in selling. In other words, a great story generates an emotional connection. It doesn’t matter what industry or business you’re into, the fact of the matter is that a compelling story can instantly fire up your startup and place you ahead of the rest.

How?

You see, the way you package and convey your product matters a lot to consumers. Why is Coca Cola such a famous brand, always coming up with new adverts for their products, despite being such a successful brand? More recently, the sporting giant Nike waded into the muddy waters of racism in the US by adopting a new, bold message, a new marketing line. That simple act saw Nike’s sales jump to over 31% in a single day! For the sake of clarification, kindly note a business story is more than just standing in front of an audience and sharing your story, literally.
Instead, a story can be in the form of an eBook, blog, whitepapers, about us pages, motivational videos on social media, and so on. As such, this post will seek to guide you on how to come up with a workable story that will captivate your audiences, hopefully making them try out your business.
As your business progresses, you can even start training sales reps and arranging seminars where you equip attendees with your skills. Everyone loves a great story and it is possible to convert your audiences into leads. Remember, we live in the age of millennials and to connect with them, you have to speak the language they understand; the language of authenticity and something they can relate to. No better way of doing this than by crafting a unique business story.
A good story converts ordinary customers into loyal customers; it enables you to impress investors, employers, influencers, and other related players.

Tips for coming up with the perfect Business Story:

Your mission should be progressive: every startup, every business that’s been founded has a mission. Yours will be to package that mission into a context that can impact or have relevance to the life of your customers. For instance, most of our clients here at ClickDo are small and emerging companies still trying to brand and promote their business. They may have everything in place, have skilled employees and so forth, but they still lack experience, and experience has no substitute! Thus, as ClickDo, ours is to guide our clients through the tricky waters of business competition, share with them our own story on how we began small, the challenges we faced and how we overcame them. And also marketing tools they can use to market themselves across different channels.
Connecting with your audiences emotionally: like aforesaid, readers like a compelling story. It’s simply human nature and the encouraging thing is that people find it easier associating with your weaknesses and challenges. From your audiences, there are upcoming entrepreneurs who’d wish to start businesses but aren’t sure how to promote and market them or are afraid their capital is too little. There’s a business that’s struggling and stagnating, looking upon you to speak a word of advice, motivation, encouragement. Thus, start your story from that low beginning, feel free to share your businesses’ humble start. Once you connect emotionally with your readers, they’ll be curious to find out how everything unfolded.
Do not exaggerate, do not brag to your audiences: have you ever attended a seminar or forum and the speaker struck you as someone proud or arrogant? Someone who spends lengthy minutes talking about their expensive watch, shoes, car, how they make 6 figure incomes a week? That’s totally irrelevant and a sure way to make audiences lose interest in your brand. Honestly, no one cares whether you graduated with 5 university degrees or whether you’ve rented an entire floor for your business. While these achievements are good, people would connect more to your failures and weaknesses. As ClickDo CEO Fernando Raymond puts it: “Human beings are more likely to connect with your failures and challenges than with your success. It’s from those challenging and messy moments that your audiences will draw inspiration and motivation.”
Public speaking skills: Business storytelling is a skill and if you want to leave a mark on your audiences, you’ll have to embrace the tried and tested storytelling skills. If you’re addressing a gathering and explaining to them about your brand, your body language will need to be credible. Create those “Wow and Aha moments” on stage by using gestures, tonal variation, use of facts and figures, creating curiosity and suspense and the likes. For instance, you cannot talk about a huge milestone like making a million $$$ a week or monthly and say it in a dull, plain tone. Look your audiences in the eye, mention the figures in a deliberately slow manner, try to be a bit dramatic if it helps.
Keep your story simple: expunge any irrelevancies and unnecessary jargon from your story so that audiences understand it easily. Again, no one needs to hear about how you met your wife and she ran away when the business started struggling. Or how you wasted your time in your previous job. While you may think you’re encouraging someone facing a similar predicament, you’ll need to rise above that. Just talk about how you created your startup, how you founded your company and initial challenges you encountered, how you handled them, why and how you do things differently, and so on. Try and keep it business, personal and family stories should only be sprinkled over the story in moderation if relevant.
First person singular: a common mistake that most business speakers do is addressing the audiences as you; you do this, don’t do that, all the time. But the story is about you. Let the reader listen, decide, and make up their mind on what applies to them and what doesn’t. Opt for language like; “I quit my real estate job in New York to pursue my passions.” Or “I started my first business at 15. I had no one to turn to when the first client failed to pay me.” Do you get the drift? Using first person singular gives the story a personal feeling to it, a good way to capture and hold your audience’s attention. See a perfect example of a business story told in first person.
The story should spur action: remember that a business story is different from creative writing. This is marketing and it should spur some action once the readers have gone over it. At the end of the story, the reader should be eager to try your product or service, they should enroll and subscribe to whatever programs you’re organizing, or even leave their phone numbers behind. Thus, like a great love story, let your business story start with your difficult beginnings, how you encountered and confronted challenges, and finally a happy ending. By the time the story is over, everyone would want to be associated with you. It’s a form of hypnotizing them with the bliss and beauty of a happy ending or happy feeling. Ever heard of something called a call-to-action? Buy one – get two, 70% discount for all items purchased today, freebies for following you on social media, etc. All these are calls to lines used at the end of the story to woo and invite your audiences to try your brand.
Consistency: the good thing about speaking the truth is that you don’t have to remember what you said. When you lie and exaggerate your business story, you’ll start making open mistakes that will make audiences doubt your sincerity. Today you say that you started your startup 2 years ago with only $100 in your pocket, then the next day you forget all that and tell your audiences that you inherited the business from family. Such inconsistencies are harmful to your brand and to your business. Seeing that you’ll be posting your story on your website, on social media, via ad campaigns, you have to ensure that the message remains consistent. If you have other team members with access to the content, ensure that they’ve grasped the message in full.
Practice makes perfect: your first story won’t necessarily be the best or yield the desired results. In fact, there are times you’ll write the first story, read it and tear it apart, come up with another, cancel entire paragraphs. All this is normal and to be expected. If you’re making a tutorial video for your business, for instance, you can always do a dry run in front of your mirror; look at your face, be audible and hear whether you need to raise or lower your voice. Are you nervous fidgeting? If you’re writing the story in a blog or other platform, take time reading the speech loudly. It’s easier picking irrelevant phrases and confusing sentences that way. In a nutshell, the more you practice something the better you become at it. See how you can improve your public speaking skills here.
Interactions: the final tip to telling a big business story is to interact with your audiences and readers. Encourage them to ask questions, pick a few members of the audience to illustrate examples, and so on. Even the use of rhetorical questions is a good way to keep your audiences engaged with your story. It’s important that your readers are able to leave comments on social media, reviews on your site, as well as an email any queries they may have. Even when you’ve shared your story in a public forum, always have the courtesy to shake the hands of a few people, make acquaintances where you can. You’ll meet good contacts here that you can learn from, partner with, and so on.

What not to do: before telling your business story, take a moment to get your house in order. Considering the amount of interest you’ll elicit, it’s only fair that you have a long-term plan to adhere to. You attend a business forum to promote your products, and at the end of the talk, everyone wants to purchase. You run out of items, start making excuses like “oh please buy online, oh we can ship it in a week”. Shrewd business people always make the most out of the moment! Come ready to make a business kill by selling as much as possible. If you’re writing a nice story online and at the comment section everyone is asking where are you located or how can we see you and you’re busy giving excuses, you won’t get the results you want. Frankly, excuses suck and no consumer wants to deal with an unreliable business. If you can’t deliver, don’t promise. Simple.

Please feel free to share with us your experience of doing your first business story and how the above tips worked for you.

ClickDo – Who We Are And How We Help

We’re a digital marketing agency that offers customized, tailor-made solutions for all your online business needs. We believe that a great business story is the best way of setting the record straight when dealing with your customers, competitors, investors, and so on. Therefore, we are offering bespoke and valuable business story publishing and writing services: https://business.clickdo.co.uk/your-story/

We can help you cultivate a perfect image whether for your business to consumer channels, or business to business liaisons.

The investment of £50 for having your unique business story published on our popular UK Business Blog or having it professionally crafted and published by our experienced web content writer, Manuela Willbold, for a fee of £100 will give you an excellent return in value. Why?

It’s not enough to have a great story out there, it has to be pushed and promoted vigorously via different platforms using SEO-friendly content and techniques.

Modern marketing tools allow for your message to reach a larger audience more affordably and effectively and we have the skills and resources to do this for you.

Get in touch for a free consultation or meet up in our London offices and let’s discuss ways of taking your business to the next level. We can easily help you package yourself perfectly for your target market. Make your business story count!

Can You do SEO Yourself? – How to Save Money and Rank on Google

Can you do SEO yourself?

Do you want to learn how to save money when trying to rank on Google?

In this post, we’ll be going over exactly that.

I’ll be revealing if you should be outsourcing SEO and if you should actually learn it.

Also, I’ll be revealing 3 do it yourself SEO tactics that are easy to implement and will skyrocket your rankings.

Do you need to hire a marketing agency?

In short, no. There’s no need to hire a marketing agency if you want to rank on Google.

You can learn SEO and do it all yourself.

HOWEVER…

If you’re a business owner and don’t have the time to be fiddling with a website…

…it’s probably worth it to hire a marketing agency to do the SEO.

If you’ve already given SEO a shot and decided it’s not something you want to do…

…this is also a great way to outsource the things you don’t enjoy doing.

Even if you’re outsourcing your SEO to a marketing agency, I would still recommend at least having a basic understanding of the topic.

WHY?

So you know exactly what’s going on with your website.

You’ll be able to understand what the agency is doing to your website and identify any shady tactics.

Interested in outsourcing your SEO? Email me at zukais@clickdo.co.uk

3 do it yourself SEO tips

Focus on user experience

User experience is critical to SEO.

If you’re not serving users as best you can, you can forget about ranking on Google and…

…you may as well forget about learning any more about SEO since user experience is the foundation when it comes to ranking.

Optimising your posts for user experience doesn’t take a lot of time or money.

You just need to think like a user.

Every time you create a piece of content, ask yourself these questions:

Am I catering to the user’s search intent?
Am I getting straight to the point?
Do I have multimedia that help cater to the user’s search query?

These questions are critical.

First of all, if you’re not catering to the user’s search intent, you’re not going to rank.

For example, if a user is searching for “How to play Monopoly” and you’re not teaching them how to play monopoly…

…you won’t rank.

WHY?

Because you didn’t cater to the user’s search intent.

A proven strategy I use to help me find out what the user is looking for is to see what my competitors are doing.

I would go ahead and search for “How to play Monopoly” and click on the top 10 results…

…I would see what my competitors have written and what their headings are.

This way I would be getting a better understanding of what the user is searching for.

The reason why I would only check the top 10 results is that they’re ranking on the first page…

…so there’s a good chance they’re catering to the user’s search intent because Google has decided to put them on the first page of Google for the user to see.

Make sure you’re getting straight to the point.

Users don’t want to be digging around your content to find what they’re looking for and…

…they want to know they’re in the right place.

One way to make sure the user knows they’re in the right place is to address the “Who”.

For example, in this post you were looking for an answer to, is it possible to do SEO for yourself? and/or how to save money when trying to rank on Google.

I addressed this as soon as you landed on this post by saying:

“Can you do SEO yourself? Do you want to learn how to save money when trying to rank on Google? In this post, we’ll be going over exactly that.”

I then went on to answer your question and added anything in this article I thought you were looking for an answer to.

I tried my best to go above your expectations and answer everything about this topic.

Make sure you have multimedia to help cater to the user’s search query.

Sticking with the Monopoly example…

I had a look at the search results for the “How to play Monopoly” and found a website that used multimedia very well, check it out…

FULL CREDIT TO WIKI [IMAGE SOURCE]

As you can see, this website has clearly used images to their advantage and have clearly helped the user.

This page has managed to rank in the top results of Google because they helped the user, thus increasing the value of their page.

Create big posts

When I first started publishing articles, they were very short. Only a few hundred words long.

Because of this, my posts didn’t rank.

In fact, there have been many case studies that have told us…

…the average word count for a number 1 rank on Google is 1,900 words long.

One way I dramatically increased the rankings was by increasing the word count of my previous posts.

They were originally 300 to 500 words long and I went on to layer them with more words.

THE RESULTS?…

Higher Google rankings and more traffic.

When creating a post, make sure to at least have 1,000 words.

If you’re still struggling to rank, go back to that piece of content and update it with more words.

Build authority backlinks

Backlinks are very important when it comes to ranking.

Without backlinks, you’re going to have a tough time ranking.

Sure, you may rank for some keywords but you can take your SEO to a whole new level with a good backlink profile.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a link from one website to another.

It really is that simple and it’s not complicated to leave a link.

HOWEVER…

Not every link is created equal.

Your links should mainly come from niche relevant websites.

For example, if you’re a bodybuilding website, you should be getting links from other bodybuilding websites or fitness related websites.

Make sure you build social profile links.

Social profile links are links from your Facebook page, Pinterest profile, Twitter profile etc.

By creating social profiles for your website, you’re increasing your site’s trust and signalling to Google that you’re a legit website and not a spammer.

Links building can be a long and tough process but it’s well worth it.

How do I learn SEO myself?

There are so many ways you can learn SEO on your own.

You can read blog articles, immerse yourself in YouTube videos, listen to podcasts and even read infographics.

HOWEVER…

There’s one BIG problem with this…

…and that is…

INFORMATION OVERLOAD!!!

You see, SEO is constantly changing and you won’t know if these strategies you learn are outdated or still working.

You’re going to have to figure it out for yourself by doing a lot and I mean “a lot!” Of testing.

How to short-cut the process and learn SEO as fast as possible…

If you want to learn SEO quickly, easily and learn proven ranking methods that will last for years…

…you need to purchase a good SEO course.

So which SEO course should you buy?

Now you’re probably thinking, “I bet this guy is going to start selling me on his bloody course”.

Just hear me out…

You see, when I first got into SEO I struggled incredibly.

I learnt so much and it was information overload. My head felt like it was about to explode and I kept burning myself out.

A while later, I decided to buy a course which taught SEO…

…this was the biggest mistake of my SEO career.

In that course, this guy was teaching outdated SEO techniques and these techniques could easily get your website banned from the Google search engine.

I was there taking in everything that this guy was saying and thinking it was all relevant information.

And in the end… I did not rank on Google and was even further behind than before.

This is why you need to purchase a course that’s actually relevant.

So recently I put together a course called the SEO Blueprint.

If you’re serious about ranking on Google and want to make money, check out the SEO Blueprint.

You won’t regret it.

Conclusion

I hope I put to rest the “Can you do SEO yourself?” question.

I revealed if you should be learning SEO and how to learn SEO in the most effective way.

Do you want to learn SEO from an SEO expert?

If you do, then check out the 1 on 1 SEO Coaching page.

What is a Sales Funnel?

Sales Funnel Stages

Awareness

Interest

Decision

Action

How to Improve and Manage Your Sales Funnel

Understand the Target Audience

Eliminate Friction on Sales Process

Be Ready to Adjust

Use Sale Metrics

Build Trust with the Customers

Leaky Sales Funnel

Mistakes in Sales Funnel Management

Lack of Proper Sales Training

Assuming Leads that Don’t Buy are Useless

Failure to Measure Each Stage of the Sales Funnel

Failure to Create long-term Relationships Opportunities

Bottom Line

The Beginner’s Guide to Sell Digital Products

Know what you want to sell

Have a production plan

Think about your platform

Decide how to launch your product

Conclusion

Integrated Marketing: Why your business should be using integrated marketing?

What Is Integrated Marketing?

Why Is Integrated Marketing Important?

How Does Integrated Marketing Provide Value?

Brand visibility

Consistency in internal and external communications

Cost-effective

Build a following

Customer-focused

Word of Mouth Marketing

Step-By-Step: How to Create an Integrated Marketing Campaign

Top 5 Tips For Hiring an SEO Agency

The Top 5 Tips For Hiring an SEO Agency

1. Make sure they have experience and case studies

2. Don’t go for a cheap deal to save money

3. Make sure they use White Hat SEO techniques

4. Have good SEO goals

5. Take your time in choosing your SEO Agency

Good Questions To Ask SEO Agencies

Some Search Engine Statistics

Related SEO Blog Posts You May Be Interested In

Tips From Top Digital Marketing Agency Business Owners

We asked them to answer one of these questions.

Here is Some of the Best Advice and Insights We Got

Neil Patel

Brian Dean

Ryan Stewart

Steve Napier

Fernando

Jacob Cass

Ted Kubaitis

Kyle Roof

Clint Butler

Josh Bachynski

Ruan M. Marinho

Daryl Rosser

Tim Kitchen

Dan Ray

Chase Reiner

Bradley Benner

Ryan Scollen

Top Tips From Digital Marketing Agencies

The importance of understanding your audience (Top 6 Tips)

Whys is it important than ever to understand your audience?

By not doing market research you may be missing out on a critical segment of your market audience:

Know what your customers want:

Keep communication regular within the organisation:

Create Emotions:

Accuracy is key:

Being specific is key:

Stand out in the market:

How to maintain online reputation for your Brand?

Optimize your website:

Optimize your Social profiles:

Earn Positive Reviews: