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Strategies To Grow Your Website Traffic

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Traffice|Strategies To Grow Your Website TrafficAll business owners want the same thing, ‘more customers’. Their second answer being more traffic to their website, which will bring in more customers.

So how can you attract more customers to your website? There are many different strategies to consider.

Advertise

This may seem obvious, but advertising is key. Consider your target market and advertise in ways that will reach them. You could consider paid ads, social media, magazine or newspaper adverts, TV, radio or display boards as excellent ways to attract people, building your brand’s awareness, and getting your site out there in front of people.

With any advert, consider the wording and language used and the outcome you want for more people to see your site. For example, if you are looking to convert a visit to a sale, you could include a ‘call to action’ within your advert.

Make Sure Your Content Is Valuable

What is it that you offer, that makes you, your site, brand and product stand out? Think about what your customers (now and future) will gain by visiting your site. You might be able to help them solve a problem, sell a product that will help them overcome a hurdle, teach or educate.
If you’re unsure of where to start, have a look at keyword research tools and google trends to see what is popular.

Social Media

It is never enough to have a great product or service in the hope that everyone will just stumble across your site. You need to proactively promote your brand, product, and service. There are many different channels of social media and the luxury of this and you can utilize them in different ways to get the word out.

For example, Twitter is great for immediate short-term influence, whilst Pinterest can offer a longer-term visual solution for continual advertising and Instagram can allow a more interactive way for customers to engage and ‘tag’ you and your business.

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is most likely a strategy you’ll of heard of already. In short, it refers to boosting where a website ranks in search results. The higher you rank, the more your website will be seen.

An SEO company can assist with this and work with you to build a plan of action for your business to list higher when customers search for certain words or phrases.

Create Catchy Headlines

Like your products and services, you need to stand out from your competitors. Your services and products could be the best, but unless you have a compelling heading or caption to draw customers in, they could scroll on by.

Consider your customer, use their language and phrasing to engage them. You may want to write out more than one heading out to consider which is most appealing and eye-catching before pressing the publish button.

Offer Variety Of Content

Not only will variety in social media channels boost your exposure but it is also worth considering once you’ve got your customers to your site, how to maximize their visit. Think about your content and your clients. In today’s world, a lot more customers buy and appoint services through their mobile devices whilst out on the move. With this in mind, it is important to ensure you have a mixture of content to cover all bases. Include short and snappy articles, blog posts, videos, photos as well as longer content articles.

Link Internally

Using internal links on your site. That way you can guide customers to other services or products they may be interested in, which they were unaware of, or link to reviews and feedback confirming how wonderful your product or services is.

Have Evergreen Content

There possibly will be times when you focus on an upcoming holiday or occasion as a driving force to get traffic to your website however it is vital that you can maintain a steady stream of traffic for the rest of the year.

It is recommended to use ‘evergreen’ content available that will always be relevant and will continue to attract that footfall.

Examples of evergreen content would be how-to guides, product reviews and answers to frequently asked questions.

Include List Posts

Articles with numbers in the title such as ‘10 ….’ act as a good way to draw attention. By having a number in amongst words it makes it stand out and eye-catching, which will draw in more click-throughs to your website.

These aren’t always the best types of content to build regular viewers/customers – so this is where those internal links to other articles can help – but they offer a great alternative way to drive the traffic to your cyber front door.

Have A Plan In Place

Like all things business we have to work hard to get the results. Driving traffic to your website is no different. It takes hard work and dedication, along with the ability to multitask planing your content, advertising, social media presence along as with the day to day tasks needed within your business or brand. So, it is always a good idea to generate a plan. Plan out your what you are going to post on social media and site or sites you will be using. Plan any new content you’ll be releasing and how you plan to advertise it.

You can get specialize content calenders to help you with this so you’re releasing all your content in a logical order.

Repurpose Your Content

You might be debating how much more work you’ll be taking it but it will pay out in the end and like anything new you’ll find you get quicker at this the more it is implemented. One way to help keep times down is to revamp and repurpose older content in different formats. You might have some amazing older content in your locker, so dig it out and reuse this content in a YouTube video, for example, a Video Pin on Pinterest.

By doing this you are maximizing the amount of value you are getting out of one piece of content.

Email Marketing

With the majority of the population having email, email marketing is a great way to drive traffic and to keep you and brand in your customers’ minds. All you need to do to benefit from this to get customers to sign up. There are many ways to do this, some sites use pop up boxes for this, others have a ‘subscribe here’ open on their side bar. All you have to do, is come up with a compelling reason that they need to sign up and subscribe now.

Once subscribed you’ll be able to communicate directly with your customers. For new subscribers, you can send a welcome email series out to them. This will allow you to make a good impression and allow your customers a ‘get to know you and what your brand or business is all about’. So remember, this is your opportunity to make a good impression. Keep them notified of all new services, product and valuable content you’ve created.

Within the body of these emails you can also include your social media links and start the process of building yourself ‘super fans’ that follow you across of media channels.

With all of these suggestions, it is worth completing research in advance as there are numerous sites and technologies available to assist and make these steps easier to achieve. If that fails there are also companies out there that strategies and support in different fields that you could outsource too.

Inexpensive Ways to Engage Your Clients in 2021

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Engagement| Inexpensive Ways to Engage Your Clients in 2021Thanks to the technology available nowadays, engaging them has never been easier or more affordable.

When done right, your engagement strategy will result in a customer-focused business which will, in turn, boost more growth and loyalty.

Follow these steps and learn all you need to know about inexpensive ways to engage your customers!

Ask for Feedback

Feedback is an absolute must for every customer engagement strategy.

Your clients want to be asked about their experience with your business. It makes them feel valued.

By asking and responding to feedback, you show them their opinions matter. People need to feel heard and valued in order to be motivated and open to collaboration.

When your customers can freely express themselves, they will also want to communicate and engage with your business.

Feedback also develops emotional connections.

When your customer realizes they are not dealing with a faceless corporation but a real person behind it, it is the foundation for developing a stronger relationship.

Once you accomplish that, it will lead to more loyalty and more customer engagement.

You should create a feedback strategy that is sustainable for your business. Don’t be afraid to redefine it and try different approaches.

For example, you can include surveys, net promoter scores and social media monitoring. None of this requires spending too many resources or developing an extensive strategy.

Asking for feedback is one of your most important methods of motivating consumers to engage with your brand.

Engage Across Social Media Channels

Make sure you use multiple social media channels to communicate with your customers.

Being reachable and responsive across social media channels shows that you are ready to assist your customers at any given time.

Using your social media accounts will not only help you stay on top of trends, but also enable you to nurture your relationship with your customers on a daily basis.

You are there for them if they have any questions or concerns. Your customers will recognize the value of that.

When you create an online community on your social media, you engage your users to get more insight and information.

It is a cheap and effective way to present any news, products and quality content. Interesting and engaging information you provide on social media will keep the communication going.

When one person shares your post, you can reach hundreds of people at virtually no cost.

Even when you invest in a social media campaign that produces tons of shares and generates more views, you are still gaining more publicity than with many other, more traditional strategies.

Social media channels will help you build a reputation of being responsive and engaged with your customers at all times.

Host Webinars

You need to embrace the opportunities that come with 2021 — and one of them is hosting webinars!

With interesting webinars, you are keeping your attendees engaged from start to finish.

If the audience is invested and attentive, your customers will be open to learning more about your business and feel like a part of your community.

By making sure your webinar is informative and interesting, you will leave a strong impact and achieve better conversion rates.

Engaging webinars or seminars deliver more value to the audience.

When your customer leaves a webinar with a positive experience, his or her satisfaction will result in their loyalty to your business.

Maybe you can cover a topic that you notice your customers struggle with often.

These events don’t have to be long or expensive, but your customers will appreciate all the effort you put in and the advice you provide.

With the right webinar strategy, your webinars will be a valuable tool both for you and your customers.

Build a Loyalty Program

You absolutely need a loyalty program for your customers.

Your primary motive is to make your existing customers feel valued.

When they feel like you are willing to go that extra mile for them, they will have the motivation to continue buying from you.

This will not only elevate the customers’ appreciation of your product or service, but increase the chances that your customers share their experience with others.

Loyalty programs will also increase your revenue.

Loyal customers already have trust in your brand. When you increase customer retention, it will also increase the profit. Your customers are likely to spend more.

It is estimated that loyalty members spend 5 to 20% more than non-members on average. They also buy more frequently. This is a win-win situation for both sides.

Loyalty programs are an important part of customer experience and engagement, especially on a highly competitive market.

Conclusion

Customer engagement comprises all interactions with your customers, including feedback, social media channels, and webinars.

By following these steps and shifting your focus to loyalty programs and other engagement strategies, the interaction stays positive.

When you create your strategy around those interactions, you will help your existing customers — and bring in some new ones, too!

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Joe PetersJoe Peters is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters

Personal Finance Management: What It Means Before And After You Retire

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Personal Finance|Personal Finance Management: What It Means Before And After You RetireManaging personal finances is one of the critical tasks that every adult must consider. Without effective management of what you have, or what you might have, you’ll always be struggling to make the ends meet.

However, it is noteworthy that personal finance management is not the same for everyone. Particularly, when it comes to managing finances in the present, for the future.

So, how to do it the right way?

When You’re Working…

When you’re young and employed, you can take up much more than you think. To put this into perspective, in younger years you have surplus energy and time to put into strengthening your personal finances. Take a look at some of the tips below to learn how.

Invest and Save for post-retirement

Though it seems difficult, saving for retirement can help you live the life for when you’re not earning. Before you invest in any Risk Management & Insurance, however, you need to know a few things. For instance, you need to assess how much you can spend on these financial investments. In addition to this, you must also try to figure out the returns you can expect when your investments mature.

Create and Scale your Income Sources

Having a primary income source is what you need to stay sustainable. However, if you wish to save and invest for retirement, you need to grow your income. Notably, looking for a secondary income source such as rental income from real estate investments can be a good option. Likewise, you can also invest in mutual funds and reap profits. All of this secondary, or passive income, will help you support better during unlikely times.

When You’re Retired…

When you’re employed it is way easier to earn and invest, as already mentioned. However, when you’re retired, you do not have the same income sources as before. After all, that is what retirement means.

So, how do you manage your personal finances when you’re retired?

Prepare your Retirement Budget

The very first thing that you must do as soon as you retire is assessing your savings and retirement plan’s value. You need to create a budget for your day to day expenses based on the money that you have. If possible you can also think of creating a secondary income source after you retire. For example, you can start offering consultancy services. Or you can scale your rental income during your retirement years. Notably, you should create sources demanding minimal investments.

Optimize your Expenses Efficiently

This might seem a bit obvious, but believe us when we tell you that most people fail to do the same. In most cases, the retirement funds, also known as Provident Funds, are disbursed in one payment. And people usually don’t know what to do with all that money. Perhaps, they end up exhausting their funds before they know. A rather easy way to escape this tragedy is to break your expenses for day to day errands and chores. And the remaining amount can then be used for reinvestments. Thus, creating you a secondary income source too.

The Bottom Line…

Managing personal finances is all about preparing for the future that you don’t know in the present. And only with the right knowledge and skills is it possible to live out a life that you dream of, both pre- and post-retirement.

The Feeling Economy and Customer Empathy

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Artificial Intelligence|The Feeling Economy and Customer EmpathyArtificial intelligence (AI) and automation as a workforce disruptor is a genie out of the bottle. The Brookings Institute, a little more than a year ago projected about 25% disruption of the U.S. workforce – about 36 million jobs – in the coming decades. But at the same time, the needle also is moving on A.I.’s transformation of how businesses and their customers interact.

To give this collective shift more context, AI has moved from replacing jobs associated with inspecting equipment, manufacturing goods, repairing things to replacing humans in thinking tasks–the likes of data dives and calculations. The shift originated in the Industrial Revolution and gave rise to the current “Thinking Economy.” Just as the industrial revolution automated physical tasks by decreasing the value of human strength and increasing the value of human cognition, AI taking over thinking tasks is further reshaping the landscape and ushering in a “Feeling Economy.”

AI in this Feeling Economy is doing more of the ‘brain’ work. Subsequently, humans increasingly are handling the ‘heart’ work, including social interaction, emotion recognition, nuanced communication and genuine care for customers. In the workplace, the feeling tasks of jobs – communicating with co-workers and clients, selling to or persuading others, and building and maintaining interpersonal relationships – are more important than the thinking tasks of jobs.

The rapid proliferation of “thinking AI” also is significantly transforming the goods and services marketplace. The consumer interface to the business often is AI-driven.

Online-connected consumers with smartphones can tap digital assistants — from Apple’s Siri, to Google Assistant, to Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung’s Bixby, and Microsoft’s Cortana — to answer questions, order supplies and control home electronics among other capabilities, some of which have not even been thought of yet. As time goes by, as digital assistants become more understanding of such things as context and can do a better job of personalization. GPS navigation systems, such as Waze and Google Maps, simplify the difficult navigation task of finding destinations, even if the consumer has never been to those destinations before.

The machine-to-machine transactions — consumers purchasing via the likes of Amazon Prime through Amazon’s website or app, for example — leaves the emotional connection largely to humans. To match the emotionality of the consumer, the customer-facing personnel must become more empathetic, which in turn makes the consumer even more emotionally driven – requiring greater feeling intelligence on the part of the business.

Further consider the case of the customer service representative, whose easy, repetitive tasks like providing information and making appointments are being taken over by A.I. In this context, a consumer with a non-routine problem is much more likely to be emotionally involved, and the service person to whom AI escalates the problem will need to be much more empathetic than the traditional customer service person. The emotionality of the consumer forms a feedback loop: the consumer is more emotional, so the business must become more emotional, which makes the consumer even more emotional, and so on.

In our new book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy, we describe a real-life scenario reflecting the thinking-to-feeling transition happening in customer service:

A recent doctoral graduate, an African-American man named Jared, was trying to buy a car. He started out with one salesperson, who took a more thinking-oriented approach. This was a good match for Jared, because PhDs are among the most thinking-oriented people on Earth. The salesperson, being good at his job, was trying to match Jared’s interaction preferences. Unfortunately, Jared was then passed off to an African American salesperson, no doubt to try to match Jared’s cultural background and ethnicity. This salesperson, knowing that business needs to be more emotional as time goes by, tried an emotional approach with Jared, calling him “my Black brother,” and using other emotional appeals. Such an approach will work the vast majority of the time as consumers become more emotionally driven. For Jared, though, it was not what he needed. The one thing we know, however, is that there will be fewer and fewer thinking-oriented consumers like Jared.

As thinking AI is making consumers more feeling-oriented—from their product expectations to their everyday life—companies can take advantage of this trend by tailoring sales, marketing and service to meet the needs of these increasingly emotionally-driven buyers.

About the Authors

Roland T. Rust is Distinguished University Professor, David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, and founder and Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. An award-winning scholar, he has edited several major journals and consulted with American Airlines, AT&T, Dupont, Eli Lilly, FedEx, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, NASA, and Sony, among many companies worldwide. Ming-Hui Huang is Distinguished Professor in the College of Management at National Taiwan University. A Fellow of the European Marketing Academy, she also is International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, UK, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service at Maryland Smith and incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research. Their book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Springer International Publishing; January 2021), can be found at https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Economy-Artificial-Intelligence-Creating/dp/3030529762.

How to Use Video as Business Training Materials

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Video Training|How to Use Video as Business Training MaterialsUsing videos as part of your training resources is a no brainer in this day and age.

Videos can be a great way to increase the retention of information by trainees; in some cases, up to 90% of the information compared to written text alone.

It’s not just enough to film a PowerPoint, though; video content needs to be interesting and enticing to keep your employees on task.

Stick to One Topic

Just as your marketing team will tell you that every piece of content needs one, and only one, call to action, so too does your training video.

It’s better for everyone if your training videos are shorter and designed to tackle one aspect of the role rather than an epic feature-length video that covers everything.

As a business, you’ll want to make your training videos available to your employees to come back to if they’re going to, they are much more likely to do that I the videos are in short and easy to digest chunks rather than hours long and a little on the dull side.

Decide How You’ll Approach It

How you’ll approach your training materials and training videos is very much dependent on your company culture, but it’s important to remember that people learn better if they are entertained rather than just lectured at.

Very few lecturers and trainers can be charismatic and interesting while delivering a talk, but even the most uninteresting of topics can be made better when you spend some time considering how you’d like to present the material.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Bold

Speaking of how you’d like to produce the material, there’s no reason why you can’t be bold with your training videos!

Include some epic b-roll, a few cinematic effects, and maybe even some sound effects to get the party rolling.

Most training videos will be internal, so as much as they need to be on-brand, you can afford to be a little looser with your brand than you would be in public.

Script and Storyboard Your Training Videos

Once you’ve got everything planned out, you’ll need to script and storyboard your ideas.

It’s a good idea to get them down on paper and make them official before you start, as this will be the key to keeping everyone on-task and keep the momentum up when you’re putting together your training videos.

One of the biggest bonuses of scripting and storyboarding is that you can plan exactly what to say and ensure that no important information is left out!

Stay Away from PowerPoint!

If you’ve ever seen the video ‘How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint‘ Ted Talk by David JP Phillips, you’ll know exactly what is meant by staying away from PowerPoint.

In this pandemic-hit era, many of us are used to webinars over Zoom and, although they are useful in these challenging times, it doesn’t mean they are exciting or interesting.

Ditch the PowerPoints and focus on the story of your training videos!