Websites have already become a common requirement for businesses today, whether they may be a startup or an established one. Who can resist the wide range of opportunities for marketing it offers at such a reasonable cost? Having a website, however, does not automatically ensure success for your business. Why? It’s simple – because a bad website is distinguishably different from a good one; you’d be quite surprised at their impact. So how do you know if your website is on the right track or if it needs improvement? Note these signs of a good website: Simple Architecture Unless you are a graphic design website, or an artwork seller, your website should look as simple as possible. Removing all the peripheral elements out of the way keeps your website visitors focused on the crucial content of your website, such as your CTAs. Embellishments for aesthetic purposes are not going to hurt, but it pays to make your design simple. It might be hard for you to choose a design that’s appropriate for your brand if you are just using website templates. Hiring a web designer might be the best idea for you since they know the ins and outs of web design more than you do. If you think that this will cost you more than you allotted budget, why don’t you try outsourcing to offshore companies? For example, you’re sure to find a web design company in Davao, Philippines with rates that are essentially lower. The best part is you don’t have to worry about the quality of the work or a language barrier as their workers are skilled in what they do and are rather fluent English-speakers. Easy Navigation A good website does not give visitors additional labor by making their website difficult to navigate. There should be a standard menu bar where the links to other pages can be seen. It should be easy for them to move from one page to another, and most important of all, they should know where they will find the information they are looking for.
Engaging Content Content is the meat of your website. Do not produce content simply for the sake of having something on your site, or for SEO purposes only. The content has to be juicy, interesting, and even memorable. Remember that you are not just writing for websites, you’re trying to reach out to actual people. Write content that can trigger emotions and different behavior such as CTAs that will encourage them to perform a specific action. This is what will keep your visitors from coming back and ultimately increase your website traffic. If you have no idea on how to produce good content, it would be a good idea to outsource a web content writing service instead. Loads Quickly Never ignore this aspect because this could be one of the most important factors as to why you aren’t getting the traffic you want. Your website may look amazing and your content might be engaging, but no one will be patient enough to wait if it takes too long to load. Remember that it must load quickly enough to keep up with the average site visitor’s attention span. Mobile Optimized Don’t just build your website for desktop users. Make it viewable for other devices as well. Never underestimate the amount of traffic you can get from mobile users. Most of internet users today are on mobile because they can bring it anywhere, very fitting for the on-the-go lifestyle that many hold today. Wouldn’t it be smarter to cater those audiences as well? By following these elements of a good website, you surely cannot go wrong. And if things still go wrong, you can be assured that it’s not because of your website. You can always ask a business process outsourcing company for some assistance to help you out on other matters. With the right website and the right team to work with, your business’s online presence is bound to bloom.
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When it comes to placing ads on social media, especially on a platform as competitive as Facebook, it is agreed that it’s better to do it with a professional Facebook advertising provider. In order to do it right, however, you have to get the right provider. With the number of agencies offering such services today, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and end up choosing a less-than-ideal partner to work with, so it’s vital to know what to look for in choosing your provider. To help make things easier, here are some questions you may want to ask yourself when choosing an agency to work with. Is Their Facebook Page Certified? A certified Facebook page is more than just about appearing “fancy” online, it’s actually a legitimate pointer as to whether the page is official and more importantly, safe to transact with. Facebook has ensured the quality of these verified pages by requiring a series of tests for the marketers. Such tests require the marketers to have a certain level of knowledge in cardinal matters such as Media Buying and Media Planning, so if you’re going into a contract with a verified agency, you can be assured that these people are experts at what they do. Do They Provide Clear Pricing? Clear pricing for services does more than just help you plan out your budget better, it’s another way of gauging how your potential partner works. Flexible rates are a good thing, but if they have no initial standard pricing for their services to base from, it may be an indication of a poor grasp of their manpower capabilities as well as an open opportunity for them to allow you to “negotiate” but actually lead you to overpaying. Do You See Yourself Working With These People? Although you’re outsourcing your needs to an external team, you’ll still have to work with them to a certain extent every once in a while, so it is essential that these people are the kind you’d want to work with. Check their page’s posts and observe; does their company culture jive with the direction you want your company to go in? Do you think these are people you can reach out to any time you need updates and/or adjustments? Beyond assuring yourself that your partner agency is an efficient one, it’s about making sure that you and the agency have good chemistry to ensure the best working environment possible. With the right agency, you’ll find that successfully boosted online presence and conversions are very much possible, and can be done in a lot of creative ways, which is why it’s important that you choose yours carefully. You’ll be glad to know that scouring all over the internet for such a good agency isn’t necessary; it just might be that top virtual assistance service provider right under your nose. Not only are management and analytics provided, but creation of materials and even SEO assistance can be provided, all with one company so you don’t have to go back and forth when checking for updates and adjustments. Video marketing has gone a long way since its television ads. No longer are ad agencies required to meet-up with the client, draw up plans in the board room, and get actors plus a full-fledged studio set-up to produce an effective video ad. Nowadays, businesses are producing marketing material all on their own. Owing to a new type of audience and strategy required to reach them, informal and amateur-looking videos are now the norm. This has led to the notion that video marketing agencies are no longer necessary. This is far from true. While videos don’t have to be well-produced to be effective anymore, it doesn’t mean that there are no more aspects left in which hired professionals can help. These are the reasons why. It’s not just about production value. It’s about content. No matter how well-made (or not) a video is, if it doesn’t send the right message, it’s pointless. It doesn’t matter how “hip” or fun your video is. If it doesn’t put that desired thought into the customers’ minds, you’re better off not producing a video at all. Take heed that different types of consumers require different ways of convincing. It will require knowing the right language to use, the right type of subject matter to get your point across with, and most importantly, what kind of video to produce (an explainer video, office culture/entertainment video, etc.). Content is king, as they say, and to conceptualizing grabbing and engaging videos that’ll hit your target market right isn’t easy. It requires a lot of brain power and quite the bit of field experience ito get it right. It’s not just the video itself, but how you make use of it. This is where strategy plays a large role. Producing a great video won’t be of much use if your target audience doesn’t watch it. It’s easy to imagine that you’ll upload the video whenever and it’ll pop-up on their feeds later on when they’re online. But with the amount of videos posted on social media platforms today, your video will most likely end up getting buried under them. Posting your video on Facebook is the best option for making it go viral. Facebook is the most populated social media platform today and has hosted thousands upon thousands of videos that have gone viral. It's the best way to gain exposure, but it's not easy to achieve. ![]() Going viral has to do with content and timing. If you’ve got the former down, then releasing your video at the best time possible is the next step to take. Doing this requires extensive research, not to mention experience, on what posting times and days are most effective. There are technical aspects to consider. With the fast-paced lifestyle of majority of online users today, many of them are dependent on phones. It’s important to make sure that your videos are optimized for mobile display. Casually-produced videos may be the “in” thing, but that doesn’t excuse glitchiness. To make sure that your video loads well on all devices and has better chances of reaching that desired customer, it’s best to trust your videos to professionals. Incorporating videos into your marketing strategy is sure to pay off, especially if you’re going to advertise on Facebook. In order for them to be effective, however, certain strategies and content must be applied. It may too much for someone with a start-up to take in, let alone achieve with a non-professional team. Business owners can get this particular worry off of their minds thanks to digital marketing teams. With the right agency, the possibilities are endless when it comes to video marketing for your business. A website is a single unit with many different parts that work together to ensure that visitors get the best experience possible while visiting the site. For the uninitiated, web development is an umbrella term for all types of work involved when building a website. It spans from the back-end and front-end. There are the web developers, web designers, content producers and many others. The point is, there is a lot of work involved in creating a website. And while we cannot dive too deep into what makes a website successful, we will discuss one of the most crucial and controversial aspect of building one – creating content and design that actually complement each other. Design and (not versus) Copy The relationship of web designing and copywriting is a lot like creating your favourite Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. A great PB and J sandwich is one that allows both flavors to combine and create a tasty mix of smooth and sweet slightly tangy combination that makes the sandwich an absolute treat. In the case of creating a website, the combination of peanut butter and jelly is a lot like design and written content. Creating a good balance and combination of the two is necessary to make a great web site, or even just a web page even. As Jeffrey Zeldman put it, “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” Design should not overpower the copy and vice versa. After all, you wouldn’t want to just keep your audience looking at your website and absorb what they see. You have to put their mind to work too. That’s what makes their website viewing and navigating experience interesting. Essentially, you need a great design to spark the interest of your site audience. We’re visual beings, after all. Great design attracts our eyes after which usually comes the decision to process the idea that comes with the design, which is usually the written content. On the other hand, having ineffective written content also makes the design uninteresting. A great website, is not only about having a great combination of colors and shapes. Its purpose also has to be clear. A website should stand for something. And if you’re running a business, you wouldn’t be able to properly present what your brand is about and why your customers should buy your products with just great web design on your website. You’ll need text and it has to be clear, concise and compelling. Consistency Across Different Devices It’s no longer just the desktop era. We’re way past that. It’s now the era of tiny screens--mobile phones. It is the web developer’s job to ensure that the design and content has the same feel across different devices. Text should be readable and consistent with what folks on PCs see. There may be a few tweaks that need to be done for the mobile version. But as a whole, all major elements seen on PC should still be present on mobile phones. Looking to create a website for yourself? Are you an entrepreneur planning to have one for your business? You can try contacting web development companies in the Philippines to help you out. There are firms in Davao City that can create visually pleasing and stable websites that run smoothly. If you already have a web developer and web designer in mind, you can search for companies with a copywriting service in Davao City. The city is full of talented and highly skilled individuals who are able to create competitive websites. What’s more is that they’re very affordable. You don’t have to worry about breaking the bank just to have the website you want. Good luck! In the olden days, companies used to rely on in-house staff for everything. In house employees were to do marketing, product development, and so forth. This left smaller companies with smaller budgets, aka companies without sufficient funding for expert assistance in such areas, to do everything on their own. This not only made the progress of their journey slower than it had to be. Fortunately, for today’s smaller companies, such expert input isn’t out of reach anymore. Come in outsourcing. So how exactly does outsourcing make business development easier for startups? More Efficient Operation Let’s face it, not all business owners are masters at marketing. While they may know their product and its potential well, they may not be the best at making sure this translates well to the public. They fail when it comes to ensuring quality marketing materials and such. Outsourcing allows business owners to pass these projects on over to experts in creating materials that sell. These folks also know how to handle the client's chosen market. This means there will be lesser need of trying out this and that, only to come out with not so satisfactory results. As everything else in life, business development requires quite a bit of trial and error to find out what works best. By outsourcing to more experienced people, you’ll have the advantage of their expertise, field experience, as well as tips on new techniques you could try. This will not only help your business stay in line with the competition, but also provide you with the edge you never thought you needed. No Need to Worry About Watching Over More Employees Acquiring more in-house staff means having to provide more space for them. This also means having to add to people you have to watch over. With outsourced professional assistance, meanwhile, all that isn’t necessary. Outsourced experts don’t require overlooking since their agencies are there to do that for you. All you need to monitor here now’s the point person from the agency for updates and regular meetings. Outsourcing helps you free up more time for other business matters. It also helps avoid the pitfalls of micromanagement, which could do more harm than good for your business, and is a lot more possible to occur when you’re working with an in-house team.
Flexible Capabilities More often than not, the staff you hire via outsourcing are able to do more than just one task. If you hire a virtual assistant, there’s a great chance that they’re well-equipped to handle things like customer service, too. If you outsource your web development needs, your outsourced staff will also be able to handle link-building and lead generation, tasks as well. Same goes for your outsourced marketing/content development teams. When you outsource, you’re not only paying for them to do a single line of work. You can hand out different tasks provided that they fit within the hours in your agreement. The possibilities that outsourcing provide smaller business has been very helpful in changing how businesses are able to progress – something invaluable to any business looking to be built successfully. It’s best to arrange your outsourcing needs with top virtual assistant companies. Not only do they offer the quality services that you need in order to reap the benefits of outsourcing, but they also ensure that your budget is maintained as well. Give outsourcing with a reliable agency today, and you’ll understand just why outsourcing is so popular today. Gone are the days of sitting around and waiting for someone to visit your site and buy from you. These days, there’s more control available for websites to increase their chances for conversion. This is all thanks to lead generation. The best part of it is this: not only are you making things easier on your end, but you’re also helping out customers too. A perfect match, right? So how exactly does everyone benefit from these leads, especially local business leads? Here’s how it improves some of the vital aspects of your business. Better Targeting So, you have information on customers who are seeking out your products or services. You will also now know how to better direct your marketing efforts. Lead generation provides you with specific data. This includes what products your potential customers are on the look-out for, how often they need it, and so on. With such information, you’d know what products to encourage customers with. Better yet, you know how to strategize on reaching out to them. It also allows you to target customers depending on geographical location. It tell your local market about your availability, which can be of great help to any business. Start-ups looking to gain a local following can definitely make use of it. Maximizes Cost-effectiveness The great benefits it brings makes one assume that it costs a lot. Lead generation can actually be adjusted to fit your budget while still assisting your marketing efforts. Many agencies provide options for clients such as
Rather than paying for the service as a whole, you pay only for what you get. This can mean a world of difference for a business on a tight budget. For those looking to get in touch with their local market, it can be of great help in terms of budget. You get to focus on your area as opposed to having to include non-local customers, which isn’t even your business’s goal market in the first place. Makes Things More Convenient for Your Customers As much as you’re looking for customers who need your services/products, there are customers who are looking for them. So while you’re helping your business get more sales, you’re helping solve customers’ needs as well. This helps make things more convenient for them. This is a great thing, because convenience is a key in helping potential customers with decision making. As great as it sounds, know that a lot of work goes into successful lead generation. Getting qualified leads requires extensive research. With the unethical practices lead generation agencies have acquired throughout the years, going with an unreliable company may provide you with junk leads. You'd end up with no sales and no budget. A great part of successful local business lead generation is getting the right people to do it properly. Get in touch with a good agency today, and see how it could improve sales and customer relationships for you. Business development is a tricky game. There is no single business development model that can guarantee growth for all types of businesses. It’s all about finding the right strategy for your marketing efforts. It’s about engaging to your target market and showing that you have the commodity or service that’s worth every penny. Increasing conversion and retaining existing customers are crucial points, especially if you’re an entrepreneur working on growing your start-up company. This is why email and chat support services are very effective for new businesses looking to maintain good business-consumer relationships and increase their customer pool. Why Email and Chat Support? Why not? No, really. It has many benefits for both the business and the entrepreneur. When you’re just starting out, it is totally normal for your customers to wonder what your products and services can do, and because they’re not fully knowledgeable of them yet, there is huge room for confusion and oftentimes a lot of questions. Answer Questions from Customers This is where email and chat support aims to help businesses. Chat support specialists take over the job of answering questions from customers. Their goal is to create meaningful and goal-oriented conversations with the customers in order to settle queries and pave the way for well-built business-customer relationship with them. 24/7 Assistance Email and chat support allow you to be there for your customers no matter what time of the day. Your customer support representative will stay awake for you even as you enjoy your deep slumber. They can provide proper assistance and interaction to customers 24/7, which means no message from a customer is neglected and there will be no questions left unanswered. Provide Guidance Depending on what you’re selling, there will be times when your customers will need guidance in using your product or service. Your customer support team can handle those queries by providing the necessary step by step information or processes that your customers need to know. Retain Customers Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to give the clearest, most specific instructions, there will still be times when the customers’ anxiety and annoyance take over, making the idea of switching to other brands look more logical and convenient than ever. It is therefore the customer support specialist’s job to ensure that customers get the necessary information and guidance they need to keep them from switching brands. Conversation and Conversion By having an effective customer support team, you get a clear picture of what areas you need to improve on for your business. It serves as an effective platform for conversation with your customer, and at the same time, it allows you to make happy customers out of initially enraged consumers. Basically, chat and email support is perfect for ensuring that your customers get the proper attention and guidance they need and for you to understand how you can improve your products and services to better suit your target market. Long story short, it’s a platform to keep your customers happy. It’s a medium to make them see you care for them. It’s a consumer-centered strategy that can help you and your customers create a good business relationship. ![]() If you’ve ever tried your hand at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you’ve probably heard about link building. Experts deem this one of the most effective ways to rank higher in search engines. But will this work for your business too? Moz defines link building as: “the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own”. Like any other types of SEO processes, link building requires a strategy to ensure its effectiveness. It’s about acquiring more hyperlinks to your website, right? Does it also mean that having a lot of links is a good thing? Well...not really. Quantity vs Quality Ah, the million dollar question: should you prioritize quantity or quality when it comes to link building? If you chose one between the two, you’re not getting the million. It’s like picking which between salt or pepper should you put on your steak. Choosing just one can make your dish a little tastier than not at all. But it's definitely not as tasty compared to when you have both on your dinner. But enough about beef--let’s get down to business. What’s the role of quality and quantity in your link building campaign? Link Building and Search Engines Link building is about getting the trust of search engines. It’s proving the quality of your pages and website to increase their ranking in the search pages of search engines. When other websites provide links to yours, search engines interpret this as trust points indicating that you provide substantial and relevant content. You would think that the more links you acquire means an increase of trust points and a sure way to climb to the first page of search results. Years ago, this practice worked. But search engines have evolved since then. The best link building strategies nowadays are those that take both quantity of links and quality of websites that provide the hyperlink. What does this mean?
This means you’ll also have to look into the type of websites who provide your hyperlinks and assess the type of content they generate. Are they related to the topics on your website? How are they ranking on search engines? After all, link building is about trust. You have to make sure that the providers of hyperlinks are also trust-worthy. Search engines include the source when they determine whether or not your page should appear on the first page of their search engines. This is why quality is just as important as quantity. Quite a handful, right? Admittedly, link building can be time consuming and complex. You can work with an expert or hire an SEO virtual assistant who understands how to combine quantity and quality so you can reach your SEO goals faster. Of course, the quantity to quality ratio doesn’t have to be strictly 50:50. One could be more or less, depending on what really works for you. But when you strike the right balance, your website can become more visible much faster. Being in the business world, recently or not, you’ve probably already encountered the word “outsourcing” many times. You’ve most likely seen it in conjunction with words such as email support representative or Google AdWords program in different articles online. Some of you may already even be an expert on this topic, while others are still not quite familiar. Here, we are going to discuss outsourcing, reasons for outsourcing, and its benefits. What is Outsourcing? Outsourcing is a practice in which a business or individual assigns processes that could have been done in-house to people outside their company. There are many processes you can outsource such as web design, web development, content writing, or customer service. Usually you can outsource these processes to BPO companies in developing companies as they provide lower rates, making it a friendlier option for start-ups. Why Outsource? There are many benefits outsourcing could bring to a business, namely:
Insourcing and Outsourcing Inhousing is exactly what it sounds like; it is the opposite of outsourcing. You assign a business process to a division or person within your company. Whether your business should insource or outsource really depends on the situation, and one option isn’t necessarily more beneficial than the other all the time. It’s important to analyze your business marketing strategy before you choose between them. Outsourcing can truly give aid to businesses – both for startups and more established ones. It really helps when you are able to unload some of the burden to a reliable BPO company. For starters, try outsourcing an email support representative for your customer support today. Or maybe you’re planning to try work with a Google AdWords program? Outsource an SEO/SEM expert! The benefits starkly outweigh the risks in the long run, and the best way to see such benefits yourself is to give outsourcing a go. ![]() Email campaign marketing is an old but highly effective strategy for every business. However, in all honesty, it can be quite tedious and difficult. Starting one, you will be faced with a lot of challenges. Read this simple guide to make things easier for you: Plan your Goals As for every strategy, you should not be hasty with starting your email campaign marketing. You must first have a clear picture of what you want to achieve. Immediately going in head first would lead to poor and haphazard outputs. In addition to that, you wouldn’t know how to shape your campaign because you don’t have a direction to head to. Try looking back to your company’s vision and mission and align them with your campaign goals. There’s just so many things you can do with email campaign marketing that it would be confusing if you don’t focus on a single or specific goals. Craft an Email List After setting your email campaign marketing goals, you can now proceed to creating a contact list. This list will consist of contacts you are planning to send your emails to. One good tip is that if you already have existing customers and you have their email information, you can import them to your contact list. This way, you can also keep in touch with them and further developing trust. You can also build your contacts from scratch. Acquire email addresses you are planning to message, as you think they may be interested in your company. But before anything else, you must make sure that you have permission to send emails to these contacts. ![]() Decide your Type of Campaign Email campaigns come in different shapes and sizes. Here are just some of them:
Create your First Campaign You’re all set! You can now start your email campaign. You already have an audience in mind, the type of campaign you’re going to send, and the goals you plan to achieve. Always remember to structure your campaign in a way that will easily be read by your customers. They wouldn’t want to waste their time analyzing the content of your email. Be direct. Looking at these steps to creating an email campaign marketing strategy, you may feel intimidated, especially as a startup business. You may get a business outsourcing company to help you out. They have the expertise and knowledge on email campaigns more than inhouse would. |