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Marketing

How to Be Successful at Content Marketing

Content marketing focuses on the creation and sharing of content such as blogs, social media posts and video. In most cases, this content won’t blatantly promote a brand or company but instead serves to create buzz around their products or services. Follow these crucial points to ensure your content marketing is as successful as possible.

Focus on Quality

One of the biggest reasons to invest in content marketing is to give potential readers valuable information about your products or services. A blog post will generally have to meet a 300-word minimum to be effective in SEO scoring. However, more value can be added by taking the time to write more words. Longer content is great for the utilization of keywords if your content is well written. Anywhere between 1000 and 1500 words should be sufficient in most cases to concisely get a point across. Longer content is also valuable for increasing average user time on page stats and promoting engagement or shares.

Be Unique

Let’s face it, there are a lot of businesses out there that likely are promoting the same products or services that you are. For this reason, it is incredibly important to ensure your content is unique and not like every other competitor. Being unique can help set you apart from the competition in your given industry.

Be Consistent

One of the biggest problems small business owners run into with a content marketing strategy is keeping a consistent flow of new content. If you only make a blog or social media post about your newest products or services, the potential customer will likely tune out. Being consistent with valuable content related to your business or industry can help boost engagement and propel the search engine rankings of your business’ website.

You can always call the experts at Skynet Solutions for help with your business listing, website development, marketing or anything else you need to help make your business succeed. With our diverse range of skills and experience, we are sure to have the tools you need to make 2017 your business’ best year yet. You can fill out our contact form to get started today. You can also connect with us on FacebookTwitterGoogle+ and LinkedIn!

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Marketing

The Importance of Online Reviews for Local Businesses

In recent years, the importance of online reviews for local business have grown substantially. With nearly 90% of all customers saying their purchasing decisions are influenced by online reviews, it is important for local businesses to focus on nurturing this aspect of their online strategy. In time, the importance of online reviews will become even more pressing. Regardless of the products or services your local business provides, there are many reasons why online reviews are important. Online reviews can affect search engine rankings and greatly influence purchase decisions. Follow these steps to help build your local reviews.

Ask for Reviews

Some studies have shown that 70% percent of customers, whether positively impacted or negatively, are willing to write a review for a business if they ask them too. By establishing a relationship with your customer and striving for their satisfaction, you can easily encourage a positive review. Remember the old adage when dealing with online reviews, you never know unless you ask. For Constant Contact subscribers, encouraging positive online reviews has never been easier. With the in-house software we utilize named Link Tracker, you can auto-segment your customers based on their experience and likelihood to leave a positive review. If moved into the positive experience group, you can kindly ask for a review and 70% of the time achieve another positive review.

Keep It Simple

By making the option to leave a review simple, most customers will be more likely to do it. For example, if the customer has to seek out where to leave a review, they likely won’t put the effort in to do so. If you are asking for a review, send them to the closest possible place to leave that review. It is important to not make your possible reviewers fumble around the web to leave you a review. For every page they have to go through to get to the review page, the less likely they are to keep going. Strive to send them directly to the review page to help boost numbers and limit frustration.

You can always call the experts at Skynet Solutions for help with your business listing, website development, marketing or anything else you need to help make your business succeed. With our diverse range of skills and experience, we are sure to have the tools you need to make 2017 your business’ best year yet. You can fill out our contact form to get started today. You can also connect with us on FacebookTwitterGoogle+ and LinkedIn!

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Marketing

How to Drive Social Media Referrals

One of the biggest FREE assets a small business owner has is the ability to promote their business or services on social media. As you may already know, real sales happen on your website, not your social media pages. For this reason, it is important to direct potential customers from your social media pages to your website. There are many different foolproof ways to drive traffic to your website using social media. It is important to remember that unless a potential customer has the incentive to visit your website, they likely won’t. Follow these steps to help drive your social media referrals.

Provide Value

Because so many businesses are competing for the attention of their audiences on social media, it only makes sense to provide something valuable that your competitors can’t or don’t. Value can easily be found when you know your target market and the type of information they are receptive to. Strive to meet the needs or desires of your target audience.

Use a Call to Action

It can be easy to forget to add a simple call to action in your social media posts. Without encouraging the customer to pursue the desired outcome, they likely won’t have the desire to. If you have more information on your site that isn’t included in the post, encourage readers to click through to read more.

Individualize Social Media Networks

What works for one social media network likely won’t be tailored for another. When writing your social media posts, write individual renditions on the same thing to meet the word count limitations and other network-specific requirements. This can ensure your content is optimized to be most effective. Be Direct Social media interaction is incredibly personalized. Don’t be afraid to target your potential customers by using words like “you” and “your”. This can help strengthen their need for your product or services and encourage them to seek more information.

You can always call the experts at Skynet Solutions for help with your business listing, website development, marketing or anything else you need to help make your business succeed. With our diverse range of skills and experience, we are sure to have the tools you need to make 2017 your business’ best year yet. You can fill out our contact form to get started today. You can also connect with us on FacebookTwitterGoogle+ and LinkedIn!

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Marketing

Utilizing Brand Consistency in Social Media

Social media has demonstrated its phenomenal staying power in recent years. In the modern age, it is imperative that businesses utilize social media to ensure their continued success. Perhaps the most important part of any social media strategy includes the implementation of brand consistency. Brand consistency should be used across all social media platforms a business operates under. With customization features allowing brands to ensure their image remains the same across each, it has never been easier to create uniformity throughout your social media accounts. Businesses should utilize brand consistency for these reasons:

Brand Strengthening

For any company that is wanting to build their social media presence, brand consistency can help strengthen not only their brand but name recall as well. This process includes the use of the same username on each page to avoid confusion. To create more unity, use your company logo as the profile picture and adjust the header accordingly.

Maintain Personality

With a large number of people utilizing social media daily, it is important for businesses to remain consistent in both the content they release and how they interact with other users. Consistency can help explain the company you currently are or plan to become in the future. This can also give other users and expectation of your company, both good or bad depending on how you approach it.

Decrease Confusion

Without brand consistency, companies would have a difficult time limiting the amount of confusion that is experienced by the end user. If your social media accounts have no common ground, it could be difficult for other users to find your profile or determine its authenticity. This is especially true in the common age when spoof and parody accounts are being created and believed in mass.

You can always call the experts at Skynet Solutions for help with your business listing, website development, marketing or anything else you need to help make your business succeed. With our diverse range of skills and experience, we are sure to have the tools you need to make 2017 your business’ best year yet. You can fill out our contact form to get started today. You can also connect with us on FacebookTwitterGoogle+ and LinkedIn!

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Marketing

Should Your Business Start a Podcast?

Recent statistics show that nearly 21% of Americans have listened to at least one podcast every month. This number equates to a listenership increase of 75% since 2013. With the massive growth of podcasts, some businesses are beginning to ask themselves if starting a podcast would be beneficial for them. Podcasts allow businesses to connect with their audience on a personal level in their own voice.

Much like social media, this can help humanize a business as the listener can identify with the spokesman they hear through the podcast. This can convert to more brand awareness and customer connection in the long-term. Currently, few businesses are using the powerful medium of podcasting although set up and execution is easy. If you have decent audio equipment and topics to talk about you are ready to start podcasting.

While the market is growing now, it hasn’t reached capacity and this is a perfect time to start. Podcasts already exist for a wide variety of topics, so it can be incredibly easy to determine what major competitors are doing that is working for them. Once you have listened to a few of their podcasts you should be able to easily transform their strategy into something that works for you. However, it is important to remain original to ensure potential listeners see value in your recordings. In the world of online marketing, content is still king. Podcasts can function as just that, another piece of content that can be distributed across multiple marketing channels.

While podcasts can be placed directly on your blogs or website, other services like Stitcher, SoundCloud and iTunes can help bring your podcast to a broader audience. If you have thought about podcasting or the thought has never crossed your mind, now is the time to get into this burgeoning medium. If your content is original and insightful, listeners will continue to come back. Though initial growth may be slow, the long-term payoff will be worth the invested time.

You can always call the experts at Skynet Solutions for help with your business listing, website development, marketing or anything else you need to help make your business succeed. With our diverse range of skills and experience, we are sure to have the tools you need to make 2017 your business’ best year yet. You can fill out our contact form to get started today. You can also connect with us on FacebookTwitterGoogle+ and LinkedIn!

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Marketing

Why You Should Focus on SEO While Blogging

It’s not uncommon for many bloggers to disregard SEO because they don’t fully understand how to implement it. The truth is, without implementing SEO strategies into your blogs, you are missing out on valuable search ranking and potential readers. For a business, this could easily translate into missed conversions or sales leads. The recommended minimum word count for a blog is generally around 300 words if you are being concise and to-the-point to ensure that search engine crawlers have enough content to determine what the page is about and index it accordingly. However, the highest ranked blogs will generally have much more words than that.

Focus on Keywords

One of the most important aspects of SEO implementation is the use of relevant keywords to gain indexing based on those keywords and provide relevant content for those looking for it. Finding relevant keywords can be as easy as monitoring your relevant audiences social media or utilizing services like Google Trends. Once you have these keywords it is important to integrate them into your blog post. While writing the blog focus on using your keyword naturally so it doesn’t seem forced. This can also include variations of the same keyword to cover more ground. Aside from in the content itself, primary keywords should easily be found in the following portions of your blog:

  • Title
  • Heading Tags
  • URL Slug

 

Meta Descriptions

These sections are often scanned by crawlers easily and can give a general idea of what your content is about. It should be noted that it is important to avoid keyword stuffing because it can actually damage your content ranking or disable it. Keyword stuffing happens when content writers use the keyword too much unnecessarily. If you are currently hosting your blog on a WordPress platform, Yoast SEO is a phenomenal tool to aid in bolstering your SEO knowledge and implementation. This plugin will assist you in ensuring your content is SEO ready and give recommendations for better implementation. By using these tips your blog will be ranking higher in no time!

You can always call the experts at Skynet Solutions for help with your business listing, website development, marketing or anything else you need to help make your business succeed. With our diverse range of skills and experience, we are sure to have the tools you need to make 2017 your business’ best year yet. You can fill out our online contact form on our website. You can fill out our contact form to get started today. You can also connect with us on FacebookTwitterGoogle+ and LinkedIn!