How Website Optimization Can Help Grow Your Business
Remember the first days of the Internet, when it felt as though every single person had a Geocities page, full flashing graphics and crazy clip art-inspired interfaces? This was in an era when search engine technology was miniscule, which most of us now rely upon. In this day and age, there are many more options for businesses to build impressive web pages. But all the features in the world won’t necessarily make for a better website: the key lies between optimized design and optimized content. The team at our Florida marketing agency is ready to break down ways for business owners to do both – here, BIGEYE brings you a few thoughts regarding web optimization, and how it can help grow your business: Website optimization: Designing a great website requires a calculated mix of graphic design and user experience design. Most companies that have great graphic teams may be lacking in the UX department, meaning that even if a website looks beautiful, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to navigate. One solution to this is to enact user testing on your website, both throughout the development process and periodically after the site launches.[quote]Google Analytics offers powerful tools to help track users’ behaviors once they reach a website.[/quote] A high bounce rate may mean that your Google AdWords strategies are misleading, or that your site takes too long to load. Business owners can also test website functionality by asking about user experience through survey data or even informal questioning. Collecting qualitative and quantitative data as to friction points can help business owners find ways to ease user concerns. Some small businesses note massive increases in conversion to sales after installing quick and easy fixes such as a call to action on the front page or seamless shopping cart functionality. Business owners can also optimize their websites using tools like Optimizely, which helps facilitate A/B testing to see which website designs work best within a given user base. Additionally, data mined using Moz can help boost the SEO ranking of your website through design optimization in accordance with Google’s search algorithm. Content Optimization: Even the most beautifully designed website isn’t going to gain search engine traction if the content isn’t optimized. Website content optimization doesn’t just depend on the actual text on a website, but also is contingent on metadata, tags and a whole host of other facets that content writers can read about at Moz. The number one rule of SEO website optimization is to avoid tactics that seem slimy, such as linkbaiting practices and poor-quality, keyword heavy content. These will seriously damage SEO rankings, and it may take a long time for a domain name to recover after losing rankings due to bad practices. Companies can also improve SEO rankings by blogging. Focusing on a few keywords and posting about relevant topics pertaining to that field can give companies even more opportunities to appear in organic search. Site content is just the start of search engine optimization; Moz and a host of other companies offer packages to help optimize the backend of your website using a variety of tools and facets, many of which are updated frequently to reflect constantly-evolving search engine ranking algorithms. Our Florida ad agency hopes you can use these tools to help optimize your site to get more money for your dollar. While website optimization in some cases may be a large investment, it can have a major payoff when it comes to the bottom line. For more information as to how your business can optimize its website, please contact BIGEYE’s Florida advertising agency.
Not Just For Cats & Kids: Up Your Marketing Campaigns With Videos
Cats and kids have long ruled the online viral video scene, with images of dancing babies and cats doing, well, pretty much anything, flooding our inboxes daily. Just how much do people love videos? A recent ComScore study revealed that 181 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 37 billion online content videos in April of 2012. That’s a lot of cats playing the piano—and marketers can’t ignore those types of numbers. People Are Visual Of course there’s more to online videos than felines, and as a marketer, using video in a campaign feeds our instant gratification, I’m-too-lazy-and-or-busy-to-read lifestyles. Most people are visual and would rather watch and listen to a brand’s story by clicking play than by plodding through paragraph after paragraph of black-and-white text. So, consumers not only will watch your video, but they are probably seeking it out. Everyone loves a good how-to video, and these can serve as extensions of product videos and commercials. Short videos are easy for an audience to digest, and they ramp up click-throughs and open rates for email marketing campaigns. Videos Bring Brands To Life In a world where consumers can shop in their underwear from the comfort of their home, videos can do more to not only tell the story of a brand, but to promote a sense of closeness to that brand, bringing its products and the people behind them to life, and recreating the experience of shopping at the store. Who doesn’t want to know what it’s like to work at their favorite brands? Videos can provide that behind-the-scenes element that draws consumers in and makes them feel like the brand is a part of them and they’re a part of the brand. Consumers can see products at work or clothes in motion, making them more likely to purchase. Choose BIGEYE to assist in your Orlando video production, helping you create videos to integrate into your marketing campaigns to see results. [quote] Let us bring your brand to life with our engaging and exciting video production. Send us an email and get your free quote today! [/quote] Search Engines Love Videos When an Internet user types a query into a Google or other search engine’s bar, a study shows they are 41 percent more likely to click on a video result than a plain text article of blog post. Statistics like this one make videos a must in marketing campaigns. In ranking video content, Google puts the same emphasis and uses the same algorithm as text content. Videos Are Fun Our agency can take your product and your brand to a new level with Orlando video production, helping you create videos that will enhance your marketing campaigns. Adding professional-grade videos to your arsenal will boost credibility and trust from existing and potential customers. Unlike most of the tasks you probably perform throughout the course of a work day, making marketing videos is a chance to let loose, have fun and be creative. How have you used videos in your marketing campaigns? What type of results have you seen?
Caring about your consumers time could change the ad world
It’s a fact that people are inundated with branded content hundreds of times a day. The advertising industry is worth billions of dollars, and brand marketers latch on to this by finding ways to reach you EVERYWHERE, including billboards, television, smartphones, tablets, magazines, websites and search engine pages. If you’re developing an advertising or marketing strategy, then chances are that you’re thinking about how you can get the word out about your brand or business. (Of course that’s what you’re thinking about; after all, that’s the primary goal of the entire industry!) However, as you develop your new video or concept, I encourage you to think carefully about the end result. Many times, the specialists at our Florida advertising agency see competitors carefully craft high-budget interactive media projects without giving much consideration to the most important aspect of the campaign: the end user. If you are creating digital content, you are, in essence, asking people for a piece of their time, which, for many people, is more valuable than money or material goods. As a goods or services provider, once you have peoples’ attention, you are then asking them again to convert; i.e., to make a present or future investment in your product or service. The question then becomes: what are you offering this person that makes it worth their time? [quote]Numerous advertising campaigns fall flat because the advertising doesn’t reach the person in a meaningful way.[/quote] Rather than focusing on companies that have tried to reach their readers and failed, I thought it better to highlight innovating digital marketing projects that have succeeded beyond expectations. If you represent a deodorant brand, you have to work hard to convince your audience that you’re superior to anything else your potential customers may be able to find on the shelf. But, if you’re a company like Old Spice, you’ve managed to prove that you’re a lifestyle brand. After discovering to the interesting insight that women often purchase deodorant for their boyfriends or husbands, Old Spice introduced “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” which featured a muscular male model. The campaign proved such a hit that the man soon had his own following. Rather than leaving the rest up to fate, Old Spice took advantage of this and offered opportunities for fans to interact with the Old Spice Man through their website and social media platforms, including a series of YouTube video responses that were extremely popular. Another innovative video concept came from Mitsubishi, in conjunction with B Reel Productions. The project, called Mitsubishi LiveDrive, allowed people all over the world to test drive the Outlander from their own computers, using the buttons on the keyboard to drive. The concept was the first of its kind, and garnered massive publicity, as people were impressed with the ability to control a car from thousands of miles away. When Jay-Z came to Droga5 for ideas as to how to help launch his book Decode, the company partnered with Bing to come up with a concept that offered insight into the places that Jay-Z references in his book, as well as a gamification element that kept people returning for more. The only thing that truly sets these campaigns apart from numerous other failed campaigns is that they all encompass a single quality: an appetite for innovation. Our agency believes that we can also help you develop an innovative digital marketing campaign on any budget. Contact us to help create your own innovative digital marketing campaign!
