According to the reading provided on canvas this week, deciding whether to believe what we see online or not would be a challenge faced by most of us every single day. In this article, people are inclined to believe false news at least 20% of the time.

More information: https://time.com/5362183/the-real-fake-news-crisis/

What if the fake news is negative information about your online brand? What if this negative information are the fake new using by your competitors against you? How would you respond to this?

negative information about your brand showing online would damage your brand inevitably. According to some research, 22% of customers are less likely to purchase your products or service after encountering a negative review. If a business doesn’t address negative feedback—or does so in an unprofessional way—they’re likely to suffer a backlash from customers. You know what? Your competitors would like to use any of your potential weaknesses against your brand to gain your market share and to steal your customers. If you build a bad reputation by these negative information online, you are providing them a good chance to against yourself!

So what digital marketers should do to better manage their online brand. Some useful tips are below:

ORM: Online Reputation management

ORM is the act of monitoring and engaging in activities to understand and improve the overall public impression a company has online. Review and content about your online brand might exist everywhere on the internet that it is not easy for marketers to track and monitor this information. Based on this, there is an increasing number of organizations investing in online reputation management.

How could you respond to the negative content?

The first step is to apologize for the experience and take the conversation offline! When the feedback is negative, you should not become defensive or to attack. The best action is to give a short response to recognize the issue, apologize, and then invite the user to send a direct message or an email. The reason why giving a short response and taking the conversation offline is that your company should avoid mentioning the brand or product names in your response. Doing this could make the webpages with negative comments better optimized to rank for keywords your company cares about.

Responding rapidly is also a key point. Based on research, customers who received a rapid response were willing to spend six times more than those who received a response just fifteen minutes later.

Another key point is to take enough time to hear the customers’ frustrations and make sure you understand where the frustration is coming from. They know exactly you’ve heard them or not. Listening well will also help you decide whether and how to offer an apology.

Citation:

• James, L. (2019, March 14). How To Manage Your Brand’s Online Reputation. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2019/03/14/how-to-manage-your-brands-online-reputation/#b9fe43d137ea.

• Gero, I. (n.d.). How to manage your brand’s online reputation. Retrieved November 2019, from https://www.lucidpress.com/blog/how-to-manage-brands-online-reputation.

• Steinmetz, K. (2018, August 9). How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News. Retrieved from https://time.com/5362183/the-real-fake-news-crisis/.

How to define a user persona?

By answering the following question, you might have a clear understanding of user persona:

• What is a user persona?

User personas are fictional characters, which were used to represent the type of your ideal customer.

• Why you need a persona?

When you sell a product or launch an app or website, it is really important to know who is your target customer and what kind of problems your product or website could solve for them? Thus, you first need to have a deeper understanding of your target customer and their demand.

• What are the advantages of a persona?

Creating a user persona could help you find the right keywords for people who will be using your products as well as create relative content. Plus, user persona could be a useful tool for building a link during identifying targets.

• How to clarify who is your target customer?

You will know the answer after you answer these questions: Who is my ideal customer? What are the current behavior patterns of my users? What are the needs and goals of my users? What issues and pain-points do they currently face within the given context?

Here are some examples:

Before you create a user persona, you’d better do some research or survey for getting more information about your users. While creating the demographic questions of the research or survey, you should not differentiate your segments by only age or gender, instead, you should consider more about the motivation, behaviors of your customers. There is also a time- saving tip for you that you could search whether or not your user personas already exist in other teams or departments of your company, such as the design department. According to the video assigned this week, the speaker, Ashley pointed out that the company could also look back to their historical customer information, such as ICP (ideal client profile) to know what’s their target customer looks like?

(More information: https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/0_gdmjk9hb)

How does this relevant to the SEO?

If you have a user persona, you would know better about your target customer. If you know well about your target customer, then you can craft a content strategy that’s designed to reach that segment. Once you have created the specific content, which relevant to your target customer, you could pull out all your neat SEO tools to rank it. People in the segment who see it will likely respond positively. In some cases, if you have two different types of target customers, you need to create personas for each of them. When you doing the SEO, you might need two different ads to reach each of your targets because they would look different when they have different needs.

Thus, it’s significant to build personas not only so that you can segment your market, but also so that you can adapt your SEO strategy to people in each segment.

Citation:

• Veal, Raven L. “How To Define A User Persona.” CareerFoundry, 1 Mar. 2019, https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/how-to-define-a-user-persona/.

• Desai, Rashi. “Defining User Personas.” Medium, The Startup, 18 Mar. 2019, https://medium.com/swlh/defining-user-personas-b01934ed2d26.

• Lincoln, John LincolnJohn, et al. “Personas & SEO: What You Need to Know [Infographic].” Business 2 Community, 25 July 2017, https://www.business2community.com/infographics/personas-seo-need-know-infographic-01887261.

Because an increasing number of people spend time shopping online for everything from electronics to clothing, more and more businesses choose online advertising as one of their marketing strategies. However, while the benefits of advertising online include the potential to reach a large market and the ability to measure results, online advertising also presents lots of disadvantages or even harmful impacts. I believe that the current model of online advertising is dangerous for our society. If I need to rate the level of danger on a scale of 1-5 (where 5 is highly dangerous and 1 is not dangerous at all), I would like to say 4, which is very dangerous.

According to the article “ The end of privacy” by Kenneth Taylor, the author states that because most people are mostly blind to the effects of framing on their behavior, we are often easy to manipulate by those who have mastered the art of effective framing. This is precisely why truth in advertising is an important moral imperative. But the author also points out that there is little to no truth in advertising.

In another article, “ The Murky Ethics of Data Gathering in a Post-Cambridge Analytica World”, the author takes the Cambridge Analytica scandal as an example to show how the online advertising hurt the privacy of the platform’s users. The author argues that “Social networks and other advertising platforms may set up various processes that notionally screen out data aggregators or manipulative advertisers, but as long as these companies run on advertising revenue, they have little incentive to promote transparency among data brokers and advertisers,” The author points out that Marketers on Facebook could traditionally leverage three types of data streams for ad targeting, one of those types is that advertisers collected themselves and uploaded, such as names and e-mail addresses of the customers who visit their stores. Thus, online advertisers could collect or even resell the customers’ personal information but their customers might not even notice that.

When online advertising works well, it works for the advertiser and the consumer. There is some useful code of ethics for digital marketers.

• Focus on the truth

Ethical online advertising should focus on the truth. The online advertisement must be truthful and not misleading. When dealing with advertisements for food, drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, in addition to children’s products, the advertiser should pay special attention.

• Provide substantiated evidence

When dealing with health products, over-the-counter medications, and dietary supplements, it’s especially important to provide solid backing for any claims or testimonials. 

• Disclose All Affiliations

Based on the FTC regulation, any disclosures be made in online ads as close to the claim as possible. For example, if an online ad makes a claim that can be misleading or deceptive, then certain qualifying information must be disclosed — otherwise, the ad is no longer considered truthful. The FTC insists that any affiliations within the ad or promotion be clear and conspicuous.

• Avoid Costly Penalties

If an organization is producing ads that do not follow the truth-in-advertising laws, the FTC will prosecute them, resulting in large fines and poor publicity for the company in question. An advertising agency based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was required to pay a fine of $2 million for issuing advertisements for weight-loss supplements with no substantiated evidence that they actually worked.

• Never compromise consumers’ personal privacy

Advertisers should never compromise consumers’ personal privacy in marketing communications, and their choices as to whether to participate in providing their information should be transparent and easily made. As marketers develop increasingly advanced means of online behavioral targeting, consumers worry about their privacy. In response to consumer concerns and government warnings, marketing and media trade associations are launching an online self-regulatory initiative to give consumers greater control over the collection and use of online viewing data.

• Take time to discuss ethical concerns

Advertisers and their agencies, and online and offline media should discuss privately potential ethical concerns, and members of the team creating ads should be given permission to express internally their ethical concerns. Taking the time to discuss and resolve ethical dilemmas is essential to practicing the highest ethical standards. The industry must maintain an open environment where professionals feel free to express their opinions, both positive and negative. The main consideration behind all advertising should be what is best for the consumer, and this will lead to the best plan of action.

• Follow the local advertising law

Advertisers should follow federal, state and local advertising laws, and cooperate with industry self-regulatory programs for the resolution of advertising practices. The Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau, and Food & Drug Administration are just a few of the regulatory bodies that advertisers can look to for guidance regarding ethical practices.

• Full disclosure and transparency

The popularity of social media and word-of-mouth marketing raises questions about the credibility of content. Advertisers must be transparent about whether bloggers are expressing their own opinions or are being compensated by a brand.

Digital marketers should follow these codes of ethics when advertising to their consumers that they can earn more money and also maintain a better online environment for customer.

citation:

• Gigante, M. D. (2018, October 11). Eight Principles Of Advertising Ethics. Retrieved from https://www.mdgadvertising.com/marketing-insights/eight-principles-of-advertising-ethics/.

• Friedberg, C. K. (2018, August 21). Code of Ethics for European Advertisements. Retrieved from https://bizfluent.com/12087777/code-of-ethics-for-european-advertisements.

• The End of Privacy. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/end-privacy.

• Brookins, M. (2019, February 5). Disadvantages of Online Advertising Options. Retrieved from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-online-advertising-options-10212.html.

When you optimize the text of your post, you could easily result in a higher ranking. But sometimes unfortunate things might happen. Your page is still not on top of the search result page. In this post, I’ll talk about some reasons why your webpage doesn’t rank even though the text of your post has been optimized with some plugin. Also, I’ll provide some tips for you to address these problems.

Why your webpage doesn’t rank?

• Too much competition

In most cases, one of the biggest reasons why your webpage doesn’t rank on the 1st page is because the term is too competitive. For example, you will build a website to market jeans. There is a lot of search competition for “jeans”, so it’s very hard to stand out and chances are high you won’t rank for that term. There are lots of niche opportunities for jeans, such as designer jeans, traditional jeans, etc. However, a large number of sites and posts have established themselves in the niche, your site doesn’t have the authority and other sites in the niches are probably also enable to write SEO-friendly texts.

• Irrelevant Keyword

Your goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages (SERPs), but you will hurt your ranking if you put irrelevant keywords. “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Filling pages with keywords or numbers result in negative user experience and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

• Wrong images

Images bring an article to life and can also contribute to your website’s SEO. It’s always better to use original images than stock photos and the image should relevant to its subject. The image should reflect the topic of the post or have illustrative purposes within the article of course. If you’re choosing a random photo just to decorate your website, then you are doing wrong.

Tips to get a good ranking in SERPs

• long-tailed keywords

According to some posts, there are only 20 percent of search traffic came from top-level target vanity keywords, or the keywords that everyone wants to rank for (Dallas accident lawyer, for example). This means that 80 percent of searchers were using long-tailed keywords, phrases that are specific to their geographic region, needs and even local dialect. Thus, if you want to rank for those highly competitive terms, the long tail keyword strategy might be very helpful to you.

• Measure your organic CTR

According to this week’s assigned reading “ understanding your organic click-through rate (CTR)”, calculating your CTRs helps you judge how valuable each rank position is to your site. It also helps you to estimate organic web traffic by depending on your rates. Once you have clear data on how much traffic your site drives, you can set realistic expectations for the campaigns or content on your site.

• Choose the right format and size for images

I suggest you choose JPEG for larger photos or illustrations because it will give you good results in terms of colors and clarity with relatively small file sizes. Reducing the file size of images can increase the site speed, but I recommend using tools like JPEGmini to reduce the file size without compromising quality.

• Improve your site speed

Site speed is one of the factors that determine whether your website gets a good ranking. According to the research from the BBC, it would lose an additional 10% of users for every additional second the site took to load. Slow websites are often slow because they’re inefficient. They may load too many large files, haven’t optimized their media, or don’t make use of modern technologies to serve their pages. It will take a long time for new posts to show up in the search results. Making your website faster can lead to getting organic traffic for new posts faster and to better rankings.

• Citation:

1. https://www.fosterwebmarketing.com/blog/your-website-isnt-ranking-well-how-to-rank-better.cfm
2. https://getstat.com/blog/organic-click-rate-ctr/
3. https://yoast.com/how-site-speed-influences-seo/
4. https://yoast.com/image-seo/

Good web design is not about creating aesthetically pleasing sites but it is about generating conversions. If you are an early-stage career marketer, you need to know that the landing page has a good way to drive traffic for your brand. There are some tips for you to increase your landing page conversion rates.

Why use Landing Pages?

When you search something on your browser and click into a link, the first webpage that you can see is a landing page. A landing page is a great way to drive traffic, improve your SEO and build your brand. According to the article by Cheryl Baldwin, director of Marketing & Communications in WSI, approximately 68% of B2B businesses use landing pages to generate leads for future conversion. Thus, when you have done a good job to build your brand and create a website, the next movement for you is to make sure that your landing page has a good way to drive traffic for your brand. Landing pages are absolutely a good way to go when you are seeking for an effective lead convention tool.

Higher conversion rates mean more of your organic traffic turns into leads, and it also helps cut your ad costs because more of those clicks are becoming leads.

#1. Optimize your landing page ad copy for mobile devices.

The first step to optimizing your ad landing pages for better conversion rates is making sure they look good on mobile devices.

1. Make sure your headline and sub-headline fit nicely above the fold.
2. Correct any words or sentences that are cut off or appearing in odd places. 
3. Make your key information immediately visible to the user.

Here is an example of a good landing page :

When making decisions about the content arrangement for mobile and desktop, designers need to also be aware of differences in needs between mobile and desktop users.

• Mobile users are less likely to make a purchase on their phones
• They might look for the physical store to make the purchase.

# 2. Keep it simple

Keep your landing page simple is a good way for your visitors to get your point.

• Your page should rely on simple bullets, not paragraphs, to communicate the trial’s details and benefits. 
• There are just a few fields you need to fill out before you get started, such as email address.

#3. Color design is important

Color design is very important in optimizing your landing page. Science tells us that color elicits emotion which can result in negative or positive feelings. In a peer-reviewed journal article, Satyendra Singh determined that it takes a mere 90 seconds for a customer to form an opinion about a product. And 62–90% of that interaction is determined by the color of the product alone.

recommended reading: https://neilpatel.com/blog/psychology-of-color-and-conversions/

#4. Adding appealing images.

Visuals are the emotional foundation of your landing pages. They have the power to make your visitors walk away feeling happy, informed, motivated or reassured. And most importantly – they have the power to boost your conversions. But how exactly can you incorporate visuals into your landing pages? Unsurprisingly, there are lots of ways to use visuals – like images, videos, and even GIFs.

Images have the dual benefits of capturing attention and amplifying your message, while also being easy to use and fast to load. And page load times are a big deal for user experience! Throw in the fact that images are readily available, easy to edit and cost next to nothing to produce (when compared to video), and you can see why they are the mainstay of landing pages.

#5. Display trust symbols.

Establish credibility by displaying trust symbols like awards and accolades, or any other credentials your website or brand have. If you’ve worked with any leading brands, add their logos to your page.

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