Weston's Blog

The biggest goal for companies is to increase profit, and have a huge impact on society. Especially in today’s world, it is so important to maintain a solid brand and company name. It is so easy for consumers and customers to bash on a certain product, or the entire company. One post on a social media can explode across the web in minutes, or even seconds. Knowing what you can do to better manage your company’s brand is so important. In this blog, I’m going to cover some tips and tricks that will help you create and maintain the best brand possible! Here we go!

Voice.

One thing that is important when it comes to building a brand and maintaining it is having a voice. When your company has a voice it seems more personable and therefore can make more connections with people on various platforms. You need to be engaged with people on social media, your website and emails. This can show people that you are putting time and effort into your marketing strategy efforts and you want to build up your brand!

Integrate Your Brand Everywhere.

Don’t just use social media and your website to show your brand. You need to integrate it everywhere. You want your brand to be recognized everywhere. In the office, in your store, everywhere. This will help build it up and get people talking about it even more.

Respond.

One of the biggest things a company can do to manage their brand is to respond to the comments and feedback left on their website/social media platforms. It is so easy for people to bash on a company, and their marketing managers getting upset over it. The best thing they should do is take the feedback kindly, and work towards making a better product or experience for the customer. It doesn’t just end there though, responding to the specific comments or feedback shows that you care about their voice and are working towards a better product/service for them!

Stay True.

The biggest mistake a company can make is switching your marketing and brand efforts midway and flipping it. If you spent a bunch of time on a brand strategy, try to stick with it. It takes awhile to build it up and if you just ditch everything it can prove to be very difficult to build something back up. Especially if you are getting some great feedback, then definitely do your best to stick with it!

Sources:

Goldman, J. (2018, January 8). 7 Essentials for Any 2018 Digital Marketing Strategy. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/jeremy-goldman/7-essentials-for-any-digital-marketing-strategy.html.

Llewellyn, G., & Chaffey, D. (2019, October 25). 10 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy in 2019. Retrieved from https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/digital-strategy-development/10-reasons-for-digital-marketing-strategy/.

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://freshsparks.com/successful-brand-building-process/.

Okay, you just started your own business and you are trying to spread the word. How are you going to do this — Pen and paper and a few days time? Door to door talking with the Jones’? Probably not. You will be using Email Marketing. Email Marketing is used for advertisements, solicit sales or donations, and brand awareness. Email Marketing is one of the most important tools a company can use when trying to spread awareness of an ad, new product or anything the company wants their market to know! It is used by almost every single company out there. Seems pretty simple right? Write up an email and send it out.. Well it’s not that easy, there are so many things that can contribute to the succcess of your email marketing and I’m going to show you how you can knock it out of the park. So let’s go!

The Subject Line.

Okay, this is key. Think about all the emails that are sitting in your inbox. They all have at least ONE thing in common, they have a subject line. Whatever you choose to put on your subject line is going to be the first impression left on you audience, it’s the first thing they see when they open up the email. Depending on your desired outcome, your subject line is going to change a little bit. Let’s look at a few styles of subject lines that are out there —

1. Simple – Trying to get straight to the point with no nonsense? This is your go to. Put exactly what you are trying to accomplish and let it run. These types of subject lines can be used for order updates, anything going on on their social media activity amongst other things.
2. Funny – Tired of seeing the boring and dull subject lines? Throw in something funny to get the reader’s attention, having something humorous on an email is a great way to pull people in!
3. Personalized – These subject lines are meant to really connect with the specific market. Let’s say you are t-shirt business in Portland, Oregon. You could get personal and send out and email like ‘Best T’s In Portland, Oregon’. This could grab the attention of the people living there and could get some conversions!

Get Your Emails Opened.

The main goal of your emails is to have them actually get opened. I know I’m not the only one when I say that over half of the emails I receive never get opened. How can we change this for you? Let’s dive in.

1. Don’t talk to the audience – What I mean by this is stop trying to talk to everyone at once. Focus your writing like you are writing to one single person. It makes the email more personal and therefore is going to increase the amount of opened emails.
2. Don’t email just to email – Only send out emails when you truly have something of value to your audience. No one wants to get blown up on emails for no reason. Got an ad you want to send out? Awesome, shoot out an email! The office got a new coffee machine? Yeah, keep it in the office.
3. Reward Them – They just read through your entire email, that’s awesome! Leave something at the bottom that helps them in some way. Whether it’s a quote that inspires them, a joke to make them laugh, maybe even a discount code for an online store. Just something that says, ‘Thank You’.

Use Personas.

Alright, so you want to write the best content for you audience. Sometimes this can be difficult and it can be easier to focus on a specific person. This is where Personas come in to play. Personas are fictional representations of the customers in which you are putting your focus on. After you’ve done the research, you should be able to create personas of the desired target audience. You could go as far as to make up their job, where they live, how much they make a year. Once you have certain personas created, writing the content to reach out to them is simple! That’s why using personas in email marketing is so important to success!

Ending

Now that you’ve read over some of these tips and tricks, your email marketing efforts are going to sky rocket, and with that, so is your business! Keep in mind, I only covered three topics within email marking, there’s a lot more to it and a lot more tools that can be used. Keep improving, keep learning!

Wes

Sources —

Lee, K. (2018, November 30). The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Marketing Personas: Buffer. Retrieved from https://buffer.com/library/marketing-personas-beginners-guide.

The 9 Best Email Subject Line Styles to Increase Your Open Rates. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/31/email-subject-lines.

Carter, J., Mangles, C., & Chaffey, D. (2013, November 5). Using Personas for Email Marketing. Retrieved from https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/using-personas-email-marketing/.

The first thing I have for you is this, Don’t Panic! If your webpage is not performing as well as you would like, don’t lose all hope. There are all sorts of stuff that contribute to how well a webpage ranks among the Search Engine Results Page, the main page that pops up when you search for something. That’s pretty important right? You want to be ranked as high as possible in order to get the most traffic. I’m going to show you how to do just that, get ranked as high as possible. So let’s go!

Length of Content

This is HUGE when trying to crank that rank up. Google loves having long-form content. People love getting all of their information from a single source, so having all of your content in one spot could be super beneficial in getting your rank up. According to serpIQ Blog, the average length of content that ranks near the highest is around 2,500 words. Pretty sweet right? It doesn’t end there though, you need to make sure that not only does it meet the 2,500 word benchmark, that the content is of good quality. Check and make sure the content is free of mistakes, contains plenty of keywords and is written to address the specific needs of your audience.

Alright, step one is complete. We are already climbing up the ladder!

The Backlinks

Another thing you can do to boost up your ranking is use inbound and outbound links! These are crucial when trying to get your webpage ranking higher than others. But you can’t just throw in any type of links, try throwing in some relevant links that match your content and what you are trying to push to the audience. Try to use keywords when creating your links!

Almost there..

Page Speed

This is actually a fairly new factor that Google has been using, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. You need to test your webpage as much as possible and make sure it is up to speed and performing as fast as possible. Doing this will not only improve your rank, but it will also provide a very solid user experience, and who doesn’t love that?

To the top.

There are plenty of more things to consider when looking to increase your ranking with google. Just by doing these three things you will see a significant change with how your webpage is ranking among others. The ultimate goal is to get up to number one, doing these three things are a great start to doing just that. Try them all, and good luck!

Sources:

Websolutionsinc. “10 Google Hacks to Improve Your Search Rank for Free.” Web Solutions, Inc, Web Solutions, 24 July 2018, https://www.websolutions.com/blog/10-google-hacks-to-improve-your-search-rank-for-free/.

“Five Ways to Improve Your Site’s Ranking (SEO).” Michigan Technological University, https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/seo/.

I’m going to be completely honest; when I first started as a Marketing Intern for 10 Barrel Brewing Company, my familiarity with landing pages and conversions was slim to none… great for a marketing major huh?

But after my time there and actually doing some of my own work on these topics I began to feel more and more at home. It made me realize how important landing pages and their conversion rates are to your company. So being how important they are, you want to increase your landing page conversion rate to its’ maximum potential. How exactly do you do that? Follow these 5 steps and you will be a conversion wizard.

NSAMCWADLP

A lot of letters right? This is one of the main things you are going to need to know when beginning your creation of a landing page. This acronym stands for, Never. Start. A. Marketing. Campaign. Without. A. Dedicated. Landing. Page. Absolutely nothing matters until you have established your goal or what your campaign stands for. Once you have established this, it’s easy. Form your landing page to fit this goal or campaign and you will see conversions blast through the roof like Wonka.

BE SIMPLE.

Boom. Simple as that, get it? But really, let’s be honest, you don’t have a lot of time to capture the attention of the audience. Make your landing page headline short and to the point in order to capture the visitor’s attention. You want to drive the attention of your audience directly to your call to action. I used a perfect example below, their main header has a total of FOUR words. They got straight to the point and got it across in those four words. No one wants to sit there and read a story while shopping for the next hot thing, just Be Simple.

BE CONTENT WITH YOUR CONTENT

Like I said earlier, you are trying to get the point across with the smallest amount of words necessary. If you can’t use a lot of words how do you do that? You use content, whether it be some images of your product or a nice video in the back. You are trying to get your audience to stop and really engage with your landing page. If you have existing images from your social media then that makes it even better!

Build The Trust

I don’t know about you, but one thing I always look for in a product or a company are the reviews. Have some great ones? Awesome, use them to your advantage! If you can find the best reviews about your company, feel free to put them on the landing page. It shows you that people have used your product or service, and have liked it. Most importantly, it shows them that you have credibility!

Test, Test and Test Some More

When you think you are all finished with your landing page, and you think it is the one. Test It, make sure it is the best landing page you can create. Should you go for a short form landing page, or roll with a long form? How are your loading speeds? Should you add some more images, get rid of any? These are all questions that should be running through your head when testing your landing page. Able to answer them all and think you have the best landing page? Conversion city here we come!

Wes

Sources:

How to Create a High Converting Landing Page (12 Essential Elements). (2019, February 26). Retrieved from https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/landing-page-essentials/.

Cook, K. (n.d.). 19 of the Best Landing Page Design Examples You Need to See in 2019. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-examples-list.

MRKT 484 Ryan on Testing Landing Pages. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/0_j1xoorhb.

Gardner, O. (n.d.). The 7 Principles of Conversion Centered Design. Retrieved from https://www.stukent.com/expert-sessions/the-7-principles-of-conversion-centered-design/.