What Digital Marketers Should Do To Better Manage Their Online Brand

No matter what type of business you are running, there may be times when your customers provide you with a negative, public response to your products, services, or business practices that may damage your online brand if left unaddressed. Managing your brand’s online reputation can be difficult and overwhelming at times, but it doesn’t always have to be. Today, we will go over a few necessary steps you can take to ensure that your brand can easily stay on top of its good reputation.

Stay Informed

Keeping yourself up to date with the latest buzz about your company is crucial to staying on top of any potential issues with your brand’s reputation. A great way to keep yourself informed on any published online media about your company is to create a Google Alert for your company’s name. This will periodically sent you an email alert with any information regarding the keyword or name you used in the alert. This is helpful for staying on top of any potential feedback and will allow you time to develop an organized and well-thought response. Google alerts can also be customized to better meet your needs and provide more specific information about news regarding your business.

Developing a Response

Responding to any negative comments online in the right way is your best bet for ethically overcoming this issue and keeping your good reputation intact. Ultimately, the customer wants their needs and expectations about your products or services to be met, and it is your job to facilitate a response that will hopefully do just that. Since timeliness is key for having success with this, your company should work on developing a pre-emptive strategy or response in order to quickly combat any online negativity before it spreads and does more damage. Contacting the customer causing this issue both publicly and privately to see how you can best help them resolve whatever issue they are having will go a long ways in their eyes and the eyes of others who have seen this customer’s online complaint.

How to Avoid the Dangers of Advertising

The average person is exposed to around 5,000 advertisements a day… That is a LOT of information to process. And although we may not be consciously thinking about every single one of those ads, there are still in the back of our minds and we still process them subconsciously.

So Where’s the Danger?

Okay, so we know that there are many different types of advertisements exposed to us regularly, but how exactly is that dangerous? Today’s advertisements create a constant bombardment of information that pressure us to to buy unnecessary material things, tell us how we should look, and can influence us to develop unhealthy lifestyle habits. On a scale of 1 – 5, where 5 is the most dangerous and 1 is not dangerous at all, I would rate our current advertising model at a four. Now naturally, the purpose of an advertisement is to sell a product or service to a target audience. Successful ads are those that create a desire to purchase a product while at the same, reduce any uncertainty about that product. Unfortunately there are some companies that choose to go about this in an unethical manner. Whether it is an alcohol or e-cigarette company choosing to target an underage audience, or a clothing or beauty product company creating unrealistic views of body image, this has a negative influence on us at both on an individual and societal level over time. Especially with the rise of social media, advertisements have never been more easily viewed than today, and unfortunately today’s youth is exposed to a lot of those negative influences at a pretty early age. In addition, society has developed a mistrust against companies as it has come to light that some businesses have exploited people’s data and privacy for the purposes of advertising. However, all of that being said, there are ethical practices and ways to go about successful advertising. Below, I have provided some important ethical decision-making practices behind successful advertising.

Best Ethical Practices as a Digital Marketer

  • Take a good look at the message you are sending out. You represent both yourself and your company – if you don’t feel like the message will act in the best interest of yourself, your company, and most importantly, society, consider changing or adjusting that message
  • Be transparent with the message you are trying to convey. People will appreciate your message more, trust your company, and it will ultimately be more successful for your business
  • Develop a set of moral standards and practices that can hold yourself and your business to. If your advertisements fail to meet those standards, then re-adjust the ad until you do meet them
  • Ensure that the information in your advertisements is accurate and justifiable
  • Respect others’ privacy and data when creating an advertisement
  • Work with the leaders in your company to ensure you are following laws and standards involving advertising and media
  • Look at your actions as a marketer in the long-term
  • Keep yourself aware and informed of changing laws and standards in the advertising world

Works Cited

  • Jumpsix. “Ethical Issues in Digital Marketing.” JumpSIX Marketing, 29 July 2019, jumpsixmarketing.com/ethical-digital-marketing-part-1-issues/.
  • Steimer, Sarah, and Ama. “The Murky Ethics of Data Gathering in a Post-Cambridge Analytica World.” American Marketing Association, 5 Jan. 2018, www.ama.org/marketing-news/the-murky-ethics-of-data-gathering-in-a-post-cambridge-analytica-world/.
  • Suggett, Paul. “Some Say Advertising Does More Harm Than Good. Does It?” The Balance Careers, The Balance Careers, 25 June 2019, www.thebalancecareers.com/is-advertising-harmful-to-society-38971.

What To Do When Your Webpage Doesn’t Rank

You’ve just published your first webpage on the world wide web – it looks great and you feel very proud of it. But… you have a problem. When searching for your page, you find that it does not rank very well compared to your competitors’ sites and you have to click all the way to the fifth page of Google in order to find it. That’s going to be problematic for you since the majority of people do not wander past the first page of their browser, and currently, traffic to your website will be very limited in this circumstance. However, not all is lost as there are a few simple things you can do to improve your webpage’s rank. Below I provide three important tips that will surely get your page to rank higher, and will ultimately allow all of that great web traffic that you were expecting to flow right in!

Relevant Content

Good content creation and its relevance to your subject is one of the most important aspects of getting your webpage to rank. Without it, your page will not stand out and will be lost in a sea of pages too similar to yours. In order to keep your content relevant, you should focus on finding a good keyword phrase that will help attract people to your page. Try thinking about what people would type into their browser when searching for your topic and develop a keyword phrase based on this. From there, incorporating your keywords into your page’s content is also helpful. Including part or all of your keyword phrase into your page’s URL, title, and heading or subheadings will greatly benefit your search engine optimization. However, while this is an important part of your content’s relevancy, do not overdo it – keep your writing as natural and readable as possible and try to avoid blatantly overusing your keywords just to increase SEO.

Continuous Improvement

As WordPress, Wix, or any other web platform you might be using continues to update their features and user interface , you should be updating your webpages as well. But in order to have your webpage rank more effectively, you should consider taking it a step further by continuously improving your site in addition to just regularly checking in on it to make sure everything is running smoothly. According to Search Engine Journal, drastic changes or improvements to your page may not show results until months later. This is because Google’s algorithm has to re-evaluate your entire site after these changes have been made, which takes time. To combat this issue, continuous improvement on your page will be helpful to staying relevant and you won’t suffer from the lag time that you would normally experience when updating your site sporadically.

Effective Title and Description Metadata

Creating effective title and description metadata will also help improve your page rank. Title metadata is that bold blue phrase that you click on when searching for anything on your browser. This links you to the relevant webpage for the topic you are searching for and is the most important type of metadata for your page. Description metadata or meta descriptions is displayed under the title metadata and is usually two sentences giving brief information about your page. This is used to draw visitors to your site and to help confirm that the content your page is sharing is relevant to the topic they searched on their browser. When both of these forms of metadata are set up successfully, higher numbers of visitors will want to click on your webpage. Making sure that both the title and description metadata match the content on your page is essential for helping you rank better.

5 Ways to Increase Landing Page Conversions

What exactly is a conversion? A landing page conversion rate is used to see how well your landing page is performing and tells you how well your audience is responding to your call to action. These five steps will allow your conversion rate and your landing page to become more successful overall.

Attention-Driven Design. When designing your landing page, you want your viewers to have an immediate idea of what your overall conversion goal is. You want to capture and keep their attention, and one of the best ways to do that is to limit the amount of distractions on your landing page. If you put too many unnecessary links, pictures, or ideas on your landing page, your viewer may become overwhelmed and their focus could shift away from your conversion goal or idea that you are wanting to convey. This concept is related to the attention ratio. The attention ratio is essentially the ratio of the amount of things you can do on your landing page to the amount of things you should be doing on your landing page. The lower the ratio is, such as 1:1, the more successful your landing page will be. Your page does not need to have its space completely filled – empty space is okay.

Context. The advertisements you put out on the web have to match your landing page. If the design is different, or the message differs slightly from your advertisement’s original call-to-action, the viewer could get confused or lose interest. Another part of context is having an intriguing headline. This is extremely important for drawing your viewers in, and it should be lined up with your original call-to-action. If your headline is off from your CTA, again, the viewer will lose interest and look elsewhere.

Social Channels. Using your company’s channels across social media and other sites you may have on the web to promote your message is very helpful for driving more traffic to your landing page. If you already have a large following on these channels, use them to your advantage.

Source: Taylor Gray Visuals // www.taylorgrayvisuals.com

Credibility. Adding testimonials or client logos to your landing page is a great way to build credibility with your audience. The most important thing is that they are authentic. Fake testimonials can turn your audience away. If you do not have any testimonials from clients or customers yet, that it okay. The most important thing is that you are honest with your audience about your past work experience.

Source: https://leadsbridge.com/blog/guides/a-step-by-step-guide-to-increase-your-landing-page-conversion-rate/

Strong Visuals. Using attention-grabbing imagery, or hero photos/videos, will help captivate your customers and can even be the most effective way to get your message across. The brain can process images much faster than text and good visuals is what people will remember the most about your landing page. Incorporating strong visuals into your landing page can be very helpful for increasing conversion, just keep in mind that most of the time, less is more.