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Digital Marketing Tactics You Must Avoid

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Digital Marketing|Digital Marketing Tactics You Must AvoidWhen trying to get noticed online, it’s easy to resort to desperate measures. Here are just a few ‘desperate’ digital marketing tactics that could end up annoying consumers, as well as a few tips on what you should do instead.

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing involves stuffing as many keywords into an online text as possible. The intended purpose of this is to boost one’s search engine rankings. However, keyword stuffing can often have the opposite effect – most algorithms will negatively rank your content if it comes across as too keyword-heavy. Excessive use of keywords also doesn’t look natural and could make text hard to read.

You’re much better off hiring an SEO expert and finding more subtle and natural ways to boost rankings. This could include off-page SEO and maybe even ways to improving your site’s speed.

Buying followers

Having business social media accounts with lots of followers can make your company look popular and successful. However, you need to be careful about how you acquire these followers. If you choose to buy followers, you’ll be deceiving people. Such followers are also likely to be inactive accounts, so may find that you’re not getting much interaction with your posts despite having so many followers.

There are many organic ways to build followers – such methods may be much slower and not always guaranteed, but it’s much more honest. Paid social media ads is just one example.

Faking reviews

Writing fake positive reviews of your company may seem like a way to quickly restore your reputation, but there are dangers to telling lies. If people find out that you’re lying, they’ll mistrust you even more deeply. You’re also lying to yourself by writing faking reviews of your company – and you’ll likely be left feeling guilty.

Rather than writing fake reviews, you should focus on encouraging happy customers to leave genuine positive reviews. There are lots of ways to encourage positive online reviews.

Pop-up ads

Pop-ups can be intrusive and irritating. This can be particularly the case with multiple pop-up ads. There are times when pop-ups can be used productively such as getting people to sign up to your mailing list or accept cookies. However, pop-ups of promotional deals and adverts can feel a lot like the virtual equivalent of hassling someone in a shop.

Try to use pop-ups sparingly and sensibly. A pop-up doesn’t have to take up the entire screen and you can trigger them to appear at different times.

Email spamming

Email marketing can be an effective way to convert customers. However, you should be careful of how many emails you’re sending per week. Several emails per day could be seen as excessive and you could find that you’re flooding their inbox. If they receive too many emails from you in too short a space of time, you could find that they unsubscribe.

As a small company, there may only be a need to send two emails per week. Focus on quality over qu

SEO vs. PPC: Which Is Most Valuable?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |PPC|SEO vs. PPC: Which Is Most Valuable?You can find countless articles and blogs about SEO and PPC when you browse around the web. A lot of people are writing about these topics, and it can be hard to know what to think when you’ve read so much. Of course, though, one of these marketing tools has to be better than the other, right?

To give you an idea of how they stack up, this post will be exploring search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising. By comparing their benefits, it should be nice and easy to see which of these methods will be best for your business.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and is the process of preparing a website to make sure that it always has a good position in searches on sites like Google. The speed of your website, the content found on it, and the links between it and other websites all contribute to this area.

Most people don’t understand SEO, though, and this can make it hard to know what needs to be done to get your site into good positions. An SEO company will be able to help you with this, providing you with everything you need to get your website higher in searches. Doing this by yourself will take a lot of time and effort, and will have far from guaranteed results.

What Is PPC?

PPC stands for pay per click, and is a name given to a specific type of online advert. Hosted on loads of different websites, adverts like this cost you money each time they are clicked, but don’t require any special work to get them working properly.

The placement of your adverts will depend on the money you’re willing to spend on them. Using Google Ads, you will have the chance to set up bids and daily caps for your spending, ensuring that you don’t spend too much to get your adverts to the right people. There are a lot of companies out there which can help you with this process.


Benefits Of SEO

SEO comes with a lot of different benefits. To start, giving a professional SEO company work on your site will mean that you only have to pay for this service a few times each year. Their work will last, and will only need to be updated as the market changes.

Alongside this, organic searches have been proven to garner higher quality results than PPC adverts. People who find your link in normal searches will be far more likely to buy things from you than those who discover it in sponsored ad sections.

Benefits of PPC

The results of PPC advertising can often be much faster than working on SEO. While you will have to wait for your adverts to be approved, this will still be quicker than having your site indexed by Google, and this is a benefit which a lot of people can’t ignore.

You will also benefit from being able to choose which demographics see your adverts, using tools like cookies to make sure that no one sees your ad unless they’re likely to be interested. PPC adverts also give you the chance to have your ads in more locations, with services like Google Shopping proving to be incredibly successful in recent years. Of course, though, you have to compete with a lot of other companies with PPC adverts. PPC advertising may seem complicated, but there are many tools that can help you to work professionally and effortlessly. In order to make your PPC advertising more easy and effective at the same time you can use software for PPC management like the one from Adplorer.

Which Is Most Valuable?

Deciding which of these marketing methods is more valuable is a very challenging job. In reality, the answer to this question will usually lie with your company and its needs.

Those which don’t mind waiting for results will almost always value SEO more. While it won’t be as fast, it will draw higher quality clients in, and will cost far less than using PPC ads. This can make it easier to sell expensive items, with those who want goods like this finding it hard to trust sponsored adverts.

Companies which need to make sales very quickly are more likely to find PPC ads more valuable. While it will cost more, this could give you the chance to start selling far faster, and this is a benefit which few businesses can ignore.

It’s crucial that you work on things like SEO as an ongoing process for your business. At the same time, though, it can also make sense to take a more direct approach sometimes, and this is where PPC comes in. Neither are better; they both have their own purpose, and this is well worth recognising.

Seven must-haves of a marketing communication strategy

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article|Marketing|Seven must-haves of a marketing communication strategyAs an owner of your business, your first and foremost goal is to attract maximum revenues and sales. Unless you master this skill, your business will always go through uncertain scenarios and yearn for stability. Do you know why some of the brands are particularly good at this job? it’s because they have crafted an impeccable marketing communication strategy.

Marketing communication strategy is a broad term that covers so many small aspects. However, you should not miss out on the following must-haves while designing a marketing communication plan for your company.

Identify Your Target Audience

If you don’t have in-depth information about your audience, you can’t expect any of your marketing campaigns to be successful or even come close to the desired results. The same stands true here. The more information you have about your customers, the better it is.

You can develop buyer personas around questions like:

  • Who currently buying your products?
  • Which geographical location is adding most to your bottom line?
  • Which pain points are pushing people to purchase from your brand?
  • Which age group and gender are more inclined towards your products?

Answers of these questions will give you a complete picture of your target audience. You can find out more about your online customers through Google Analytics and other tools.

However, in case your brand is fresh and lacks the necessary details to build buyer personas, you should invest in surveys and researches. Once you have identified the target market, you don’t have to be an exceptional salesman to deal with customers. When people are getting what they are looking for, why you would have to influence them?

Come up with an effective branding message and Be Consistent

Every famous brand has done and achieved this. Brand messaging is something that can be dubbed as the philosophy of your brand. The brand message is what appeals to the audience, makes them curious and eventually pushes them to buy your product.

Begin with the tagline. It should be woven into words in such a way that people do not have to put any effort to remember it. Apart from that, you should craft a single paragraph conveying your brand values and the mission you want to accomplish. You can even assess the effectiveness of the message with a certain group of people before finally settling for it.

Remember, people will forget your tagline if you don’t repeat it everywhere. So being consistent is very important. Be it your social media accounts, website or application, your tagline should be all over the place to represent your business.

Uncover your business objectives

Increasing sales, expanding reach, and building brand awareness: all of them are the key objectives for any business. Some owners would like to take one thing at a time. They would pick one objective first and then the others will follow. So if you happen to be one of those businessmen, it is obligatory for you to outline the particular objective you want to achieve first and then move on to the second one and so on.

At times when you are trying to incorporate too many things in your marketing campaign, people don’t get a clear message and walk away out of sheer confusion. How can you be successful when people don’t know what you are trying to convey to them?

Focus on the unique selling proposition

A unique selling proposition (USP) means emphasizing one factor that makes you “unique” from the rest of the competition. Here, you need not mention the features which people readily find in the other products. In other words, USP is a problem that nobody can solve better than you.

When you want people to change their old brand and shift to yours, the first thing they ask is “what makes your brand different than the others?” That’s where USP swings into action. People won’t come to you unless you address their pain points better than others. To sum up, a compelling USP separates you from “noise” and gives you “voice”.

Pick the right marketing mix

Today, we have too many podcast hosting sites to market a brand. We are no more limited to billboards, print media or TV advertisements. There are options like email marketing, content writing, social media and much more. However, the drawback of having too many alternatives is that you could pick the wrong medium where you may or may not find your targeted audience and end up wasting your resources.

For example, if you choose to market your brand on social media then you have to realize all social media channels are not the same. What appeals to a Facebook user might not charm an Instagram user. That’s where you have to pick and choose very smartly. Make sure you don’t throw all your eggs in one basket. Always market on a variety of platforms for good results.

In order to be on top of your media campaign, you need to have a calendar by your side and schedule your posts at optimal times. if you feel confusion, SEO service in Singapore can help you to design the best digital marketing strategy that will make a clear strategy for you to woo your online customers.

Determine success metrics

As they say “what can be measured, can be improved”. You must measure your performance to know where you are heading so that if the performance is not up to the mark, you can improve it. The list of various key performance indicators (KPI) is given below:

  • Social media shares
  • Number of website visits
  • Number of leads generated
  • Mentions on social media
  • Backlinks acquired from quality websites
  • Retention rate on your website
  • Number of followers on social media channels

As you can see, every platform has different criteria for performance. There are so many other metrics that we have not mentioned here, for example, likes and retweets. It is because relying on these metrics will not do any good for you.

Communicate your success to people

Once you are done with measuring your success, make sure you share it with your audience. It is a way to thank your consumers and make them feel important for being part of your success journey. Of course, nobody would like to be a part of a failing business. That way, not only old customers will show more faith in you but new ones will also start to engage.

The final verdict

As mentioned above, a marketing communication strategy is a blend of a variety of things. You can’t take any of them lightly. From the first to the last step, all of them need to be undertaken with thorough planning. We have sketched out the must-haves of an ideal marketing communication strategy, you just have to implement them and wait to be awed by the results.

Do You Need Help With Your Marketing?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Do You Need Help With Your Marketing?

Marketing is one of the central processes in the running of any business. If the marketing is done in the right way, then the business itself is going to be a success. However, if it is not right, you never know what fate might befall the company. But perfecting interactive marketing is a real challenge. There could be many times when you find you need help with it. It’s helpful to know for sure when you need that help, so that you can seek it out in time and make the most of it. In this post, we’ll look at a few of the clearest signs that you might need some help with your marketing.

Your Sales Are Low

One of the surest signs that you might need to consult a marketing agency is that you just aren’t shifting any products. Most businesses experience the occasional dip in sales, and that can be the result of a number of different things. But sometimes marketing is the problem, and it’s good to be aware of when that is so. Even if that is not the reason, you will find that improving your marketing is going to make a huge difference to how many products you sell, and for that reason it is absolutely worth looking into anyway. If you feel that you could be selling more, take a look at your marketing and see whether you might need any help with it. That alone could well be enough.

A Weak Brand

As a business, you need to have a strong brand which people can immediately recognize and relate to. This is central to keeping your business in line with what you want to achieve, and it is one of the things that you are going to want to keep an eye on throughout your business. However, if you have come to realize that your brand is actually relatively unclear, then you might find that it is necessary to step back and allow some marketing experts to take a look at it. If they can improve your brand in any way, you are bound to find that this will improve your marketing generally, and the performance of your business.

You Don’t Have The Time

Marketing well takes time, and if you just know that you don’t have the time, then that is one of the things that you are going to need to think about. That means that you will benefit greatly from giving your marketing over to the professionals. It is a good idea to make sure that you bear that in mind when the issue of time management crops up and becomes hard to bear. By giving the work to someone else, you can keep your eyes on the prize in other places, and hopefully it will all come together in a business that is functioning much more accurately and expertly.

With an awareness of when you need to get help, you will be able to keep the business operating much more efficiently. Consider this early on if you want to make a big difference in your company.

The “Four P’s” of Marketing a Law Firm Online

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article|Online Marketing|The “Four P’s” of Marketing a Law Firm OnlineIn the course of my years partnering with web developer and SEO specialist Sagapixel, I’ve learned a lot about how to market my firm. I am a busy Philadelphia appeals attorney and had to learn the hard way that running and marketing a law practice has nothing to do with the practice of law. They don’t teach you this in law school!

Hopefully this synopsis of what I’ve learned will help anyone starting their own law practice, or anyone who has trouble marketing their law firm and needs more clients. The Four P’s work!

What Are the “Four P’s” of Marketing?

First, I learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing—Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. This is a fundamental marketing model that worked 80 years ago and will work 80 years from now, regardless of what new technology arises that changes the way we shop for and purchase goods or services.

If you keep the four P’s in mind, you will have a clear, defined marketing strategy that supports your client acquisition goals.

The First P of Marketing a Law Firm – “the Product”

A lot goes into choosing an area of practice to focus on. Often, an attorney will get a job out of law school, become highly skilled in one area of law, then go out on her own to open a solo practice without looking first to see if the local market is saturated.

Not ideal.

Before you commit to paying for advertising services in a market that you may or may not be able to compete in, consider the following:

1. Is there a big player that already dominates the market?

If there is, be prepared to languish as a very small player for a very long time.

For example, in the Philadelphia area market there is a law firm that does TV ads, places billboards all over the region, and spends a few million dollars on Adwords a year. Yes – a few MILLION dollars.

This firm has made a name for itself as “THE workers’ compensation firm” and it is now incredibly difficult (and expensive) to get workers’ comp clients through advertising. Keywords related to workers’ comp are about 50%-100% more expensive to bid on than keywords from other areas of practice.

The upshot is, it will be difficult and expensive to penetrate a market with a dominant player.

2. Can You Create a Niche?

Frank at Sagapixel told me about a conversation he had with Eric Diaz, a prominent real estate attorney in Philadelphia. He was telling Frank about some of what he does for his clients. During the conversation, he mentioned something his firm must do for all clients that involves tedious paperwork that many attorneys do not like doing.

Frank told me how he interpreted this as an opportunity and suggested to Eric, why not offer this service to other firms? He could train a young associate to do that tedious paperwork, then own it.

I thought this was great. I was lucky in that early in my career I gained experience in a fairly narrow area of practice in government service, then was able to parlay that experience into my own appellate law firm.

By creating or taking over a niche, an attorney will have both a strong value proposition and differentiator that will allow him or her to stand out in a market. Think of it in your own case—would you prefer to hire an SEO agency that specializes in law firms or a firm that works with just anyone that walks in the door? Prospective clients feel the same.

The Second P of Marketing a Law Firm – “the Price”

I’m not going to get too much into pricing here though I will recommend that you take a hard look at your pricing model. The hourly model that many attorneys use could be inferior to a value-based model such as those promoted by consultant Alan Weiss. I have seen that using flat fees that are standard in the region works for many types of law practices.

The Third P of Marketing a Law Firm – “the Place”

This is another area into which I will not go into much detail because this is most often specific to an attorney’s area of practice.

If you have your own law firm, you’ve probably already decided about the “place” of your firm without realizing that that decision is a crucial part of your marketing plan.

Different areas of law have different “place” requirements. A medical malpractice attorney might choose a pricey office right across the street from a hospital. But an attorney whose practice is primarily electronic, like bankruptcy, might relocate to an area with lower costs of living and work remotely.

If you can work from home, do it – for any new firm keeping costs down is vital. Of course, consult your jurisdiction’s rules as some states do require a physical office.

The Fourth P – “Promotion”

Your Law Firm’s Website

The days of people searching the phone book yellow pages are over. People go online to search for goods and services, legal services included. Even if you have a big billboard that someone happens to notice, you know that someone finds you online and checks out your website.

I’ve seen that creating an effective website is as much art as it is science – please choose your web developer wisely. Your website developer will help you:

  • Develop your personal brand – what differentiates you from other attorneys practicing your area of law?
  • Generate relevant content that establishes your knowledge and experience in your practice area
  • Generate content that starts clients on their Buyer’s Journey to retaining you
  • Optimize that content to help convert leads into clients by creating a “call to action”
  • Get your website seen by people who need your service, through SEO
  • Create a positive user experience by organizing the site logically with fast loading pages and a prominent
  • Contact form
  • Optimize the site for mobile users

Google Ads – Adwords for Law Firms

But what are Google Adwords? I certainly had no idea until I started working with Frank at Sagapixel.

Google Adwords (now called Google Ads) are an “online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users”, according to Wikipedia.

How Do Google Ads Work? Advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. Since advertisers have to pay for these clicks, this is how Google makes money from search. This is also called Pay Per Click, or PPC.

If this sounds like it takes too much time away from your law practice – you’re right. This is why you should consider hiring Google AdWords advertising agencies that handle law firm SEO and PPC to do it for you.

Google Reviews

It is important to touch base with clients after you’ve represented them to ask about their experience. If they respond that they had a positive experience, you should ask them for a review.

There is software that automates this process so that it is hands-off for you. Use it.

Tracking the Performance of Your Online Marketing Efforts

Google Analytics tracks viewer’s behavior and shows you which of your online marketing activities are working and which need some tweaking. Again, this is something your SEO firm handles for you.

As you can see, there are many moving parts to marketing a law firm online. When you establish your own firm, you are taking a big leap of faith that you are going to make it. Educating yourself, then choosing the right web design and SEO firm, will help you create the online marketing strategy that brings you the business you need not only to survive, but to thrive.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Todd MosserTodd Mosser, Esq. is a Pennsylvania appeals attorney admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Third, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits, and the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Mosser attended Shippensburg University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, graduating with honors.

Mr. Mosser worked for eight years as an Assistant District Attorney in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office Appeals Unit prior to opening Moser Legal in July 2013. Since then his firm has litigated over 900 civil and criminal appeals. Mr. Mosser is a leading legal authority in his field, having been quoted in The Legal Intelligencer and having served as a television legal commentator.