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As part of your social media marketing strategy, you should include paid social media, dark social media, and influencer marketing. Here’s why:

Paid Social Media Marketing 

Social media marketing has progressed to a point where sharing the odd post – no matter how well-crafted – with your followers and expecting them to do the rest is no longer effective.

To target your ideal customer, nurture their buyer journey, and ultimately get them to purchase from your website, you need to take advantage of the fact that all social networks now offer post promotion. Not only does paid social media put your message in front of far more users, not using this tool actually puts you on the back foot. According to a 2018 survey, 92% of small businesses are increasing their investment in social media.

Even though advertising on social media gives immediate visibility to your brand, don’t give in to the temptation to spend, spend, spend! From elementary user demographics to psychographics such as values and attitudes, interests and lifestyles, and personality, social media platforms have parameters to enhance your targeting.

But first, you need to determine whether Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Instagram is the best fit for your ideal client. It’s all about utilizing the appropriate platform to target the right audience with engaging content.

Facebook is by far the biggest of all the social networks with 2.41 billion monthly active users. An average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads per month. Their advertising costs vary depending on many factors like your industry, location, and objectives, but the average price for an advert decreased 4% in Q2 2019. Facebook is therefore a good place to start.

Dark Social Traffic 

Not to be confused with marketing on the dark web, dark social media refers to the sharing of your content without your knowledge. Although you cannot track the impact of dark social media with your regular analytics, more than 80% of sharing from marketing websites happens “invisibly”.

If you think of it as a digital word of mouth, it makes sense that this is even more powerful amid COVID-19 social distancing, working from home, and digital communities.

So how do you get in on this action? Make sure that you include buttons on all your output that encourages sharing through email, text message, or direct social messaging. Moreover, include a strong call to action to go to a landing page, read another post, or sign up to your email list.

Having a prominent, respected trendsetter in your niche share your content in this intimate way will drive mass traffic. That’s where the next category comes in.

Influencer Marketing 

As consumers are bombarded with ever more marketing messages, so they tend to filter out an increasing amount. One way to catch the attention of prospects is to leverage the power of humans in your digital marketing.

Marketing guru Seth Godin notes that “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.”

From published authors in serious fields to mainstream celebrities for younger audiences, influencer marketing uses the trust they have established with their large following to punt your product by supporting or endorsing your brand or co-creating content.

This is not an overnight strategy, as you need to build a relationship with influencers in your niche. Engage with them to the point where they value your expertise and enjoy your content. Slow and steady is the name of this game, but the results are well worth the wait.

If you are looking for a world-class social media marketing agency to keep you current and competitive, then you are in the right place. WSI New Media Marketings social media services can help you realize the true potential of social media for meaningful conversations and winning relationships. For more information about our digital marketing agency in Greensboro, contact us today.

The change in lifestyle brought about by COVID-19 has highlighted the need for SEO services more than ever. Even demographics who would previously not have been big e-commerce shoppers have been persuaded to go online as the pandemic has kept them indoors. This makes logical sense, and the stats prove it:

• Compared to the same period last year, U.S. e-commerce sales in July increased a whopping 55%.
• As a total of retail sales in the U.S., e-commerce more than doubled from Q1 2020 to Q2. “That’s over a decade of growth in the space of just a few months.”
• Year on year, Amazon sales rose by 40% for Q2 2020 to $88.9 billion.

SEO and PPC tips for e-commerce success

1. Create a strategy for SEO and PPC synergy

Google Shopping has reintroduced free listings that are generated by the Google Merchant Center. Maximize your holiday shopping campaign by aligning your organic search (SEO) and paid search (PPC).

Use your PPC spend to target high-value queries on channels where paid listings lead the results.

Seek out opportunities to use SEO to rank for searches that attract a high click-through rate.

2. Analyze Search Trends

Take note of the top search queries in your category. Utilize the results to keep SEO core to your strategy, influence your marketing messaging, and inspire your paid search.

3. Plug Fresh Content

Use SEO analysis as a guideline to create current, pandemic-related content that develops trust with your readers by showing your understanding and support.

PPC can then be used to attract some immediate traffic and fill in any gaps. The best part? Informational queries are generally cheaper per click – extending your budget.

4. Test with PPC

Paid search provides feedback on what type of message and imagery works best – almost immediately. Use PPC to test various new ideas and tweak your SEO accordingly.

5. Lengthen Your Marketing Funnel

The more familiar people are becoming with using search engines, the more diverse their reasons for doing so.

Take time to nurture prospects during the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey using an appropriate blend of SEO and PPC efforts.

6. Draw your audience a picture

As part of your search plan, make sure to include images and videos to keep up with the increasingly visual nature of Google. Keep your visual content consistent in SEO and PPC.

7. Leverage Ad Extensions

Take advantage of callouts, structured snippets, and other ad extensions – such as Google’s beta “Curbside pickup” badge – to share extra information about your products and services.

8. Add to Google

As Amazon and Walmart’s advertising improves, you may want to spread your e-commerce budget across all retailers and search engines – adjusting as their ROI becomes evident.

9. Avoid Google

Consider how you can optimize your PPC spend and SEO efforts with alternatives to Google. Specialist search engines are slightly less competitive as they already have built-in customer intent. Video search engines are increasingly gaining popularity – an exciting way to showcase what you have to offer.

10. Make the Most of Automation

Wouldn’t it be awesome to get real-time insights in the face of such an unsure time? Automated rules and AI smart bidding for PPC does just that with a flexible solution to boost your SEO and PPC strategy.

If you are looking for a holistic approach to increase online leads and sales, WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, North Carolina is the perfect fit. For more information on how to get your business in the spotlight with SEO services such as SEO optimization, link building services, and PPC, contact our digital marketing agency in Greensboro today.

Keeping your blog posts fresh and informative can be easier than you think. As with most areas of content marketing, blogging doesn’t necessarily require you to draw new ideas out of the ether. Blogging is a means of telling your customers the ongoing story of your company. This story develops naturally as you go about your business every day. 

Armed with this ever-developing story, creating engaging blogs is then a matter of fitting the content into pre-existing paradigms and formats. These have already proven themselves reliable vehicles for marketing content, and offer you inspiration and a structure to help you organise and present your information. They are frameworks and general outlines, into which the story of your business can be molded. There is a saying among musicians that there are only 12 notes but thousands of ways of playing them. The same goes for blogs: there are only so many kinds of blogs, and the key to their substance, variety and level of engagement is your content. Here are four of the most popular blog post concepts or formats into which any business can fit their stories.

1. A success story

There’s nothing wrong with taking a moment to brag a little – provided you do it with style, of course! A well-chosen success story allows you to demonstrate how your products or services work in a real-world scenario. Pick an example, describe the salient details and use the moment to show, rather than tell your readers why they should buy your products.

2. An ongoing series on a single topic

Sometimes a single blog, consisting of a few hundred words, is not enough to communicate the information you want to get across. You may want to explore the background of your industry, analyse complex market trends, or expound on the many uses and benefits of a particular product line. The best thing to do – both for your sake and your customers’ – is to break it up into shorter pieces that you can publish over several weeks or months. It would help if you didn’t let this run on for too long, however. Strike a balance between detail and sustained engagement. 

3. A guide to common mistakes in your field

This is a very popular choice for almost all industries. Listicles that expound on the various ‘what not to dos’ of your industry enable direct and honest engagement with your readership, as well as the chance to present your business as a solution provider. You draw readers in with questions of how they could be doing things better – and then you provide the answers.

4. A spotlight on the latest trends

This is one of the simplest options. All industries are constantly shifting and evolving. If you take the initiative and use a blog to highlight your industry’s condition at any given moment, you present yourself as a business that has its fingers on the pulse. You can use the opportunity to tell readers how your products and services exemplify, take advantage of, or provide solutions for the current trends. 

If you are unsure how to tackle your blogging strategy, why not entrust it to the experts? WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro is a proud member of the global WSI digital marketing family. In addition to building brands through content marketing, website design, mobile marketing and SEO optimization, we are also one of North Carolina’s top social media marketing strategists. Contact us and see what we can do for your brand and blog content.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a potent digital marketing tool as long as you use it with clarity, intent, and to its fullest potential. However, this can be challenging at times because it is not an exact science. It can take a bit of trial and error to achieve a good return on investment. With some research and tinkering, you can reap excellent rewards – up to $2 in revenue for every $1 spent, according to Google. To fast-track this success, it is best to avoid these five common PPC mistakes.

1. Not paying attention to data

Before making any hard and fast decisions about how your campaign is doing, and which ads and keywords to target, carefully analyze all the available data. You may find that you are doing well overall, with plenty of clicks and conversions, and so you might decide to keep your current spread of ads as it is. However, parts of your campaign may be working well, while others are not working at all. One or two of your ads may be carrying your entire campaign. Analyzing the data allows you to shift your strategy and spending to maximize your results.

2. Not using negative keywords

Many marketers either forget, neglect, or choose to ignore negative keywords. This can be a big mistake. While it may seem counterintuitive to target keywords that are meant to keep people away from your website, it is actually one of the best ways to establish your niche and make sure that you attract only visitors who are most likely to become paying clients. You would be doing both yourself and internet users a favor by establishing these limits at the very beginning. Yes, negative keywords will lead to less traffic, but they will eliminate only the non-converting visitors and ensure that you get the right traffic.

3. Not using ad extensions

Ad extensions can increase your click-through-rate by 10-20% – and they don’t cost any extra – yet many people forget to include them in their campaigns. As extensions can increase your ad’s reach, they can provide better value for money, and they offer more ways to reach you while increasing your online visibility. They may include contact details, site links, invitations to download an app (if you have one) or testimonials from your customers, among other things. Be sure to include as many of them as you can.

4. Forgetting to bid on your own brand keywords

You should always run at least one campaign that is dedicated to your own brand keywords. The main advantages of doing so are that brand keywords are generally much cheaper, yield higher search scores and convert much better than generic keywords. By neglecting to set up brand keyword PPC campaigns, you miss out on opportunities to capture your market.

5. Targeting the wrong keywords 

Sub-optimum keyword selection is a mistake that many companies make in their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. It can be particularly costly when it comes to PPC, as choosing the wrong keywords can result in either no hits at all or hits that don’t convert to sales, but which you still have to pay for. One of the best ways to target your PPC ads is with long-tail keywords. The main characteristic that distinguishes long-tail keywords from short-tail ones is that they usually consist of two or more words that resemble detailed queries. In contrast, short-tail keywords generally consist of single words or phrases without context. Using long-tail keywords will narrow your traffic considerably and help ensure that your PPC costs are worthwhile.

For an effective, error-free PPC campaign that gives you the highest possible ROI, it’s best to engage the services of a professional search engine optimization company. WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, a proud member of the global WSI family, is a digital marketing company with considerable experience and success in strategies such as SEO marketing, PPC, content marketing and more. Contact us for more information.

Want to know what separates good website design companies from awful ones? The good ones understand what makes a user interface successful. The user interface (or UI) of a website is the most vital aspect of any website, and if it is poorly designed, users will not stick around for long. Here are some tips on improving the UI design for your next website project. 

Five tips from a website design company to create a fantastic user interface

1. Get to know your users 

Creating a stunning UI starts with understanding the people who will be using it. It should be the first step in designing a UI because if you get it wrong here, your UI will never provide users with a positive experience. 

Get ready to research your audience and figure who they are, what they need, common behaviors to expect from this group, how they use websites, and what they will expect from the interface. When you combine this knowledge with your target audience’s demographics, you will have the best shot at designing a UI that will impress them. 

2. At a glance 

Make navigation easy for your users by putting everything they need at a glance. If your users need to scroll endlessly or click through multiple pages to find what they are looking for, they’ll go looking for it somewhere else. This step is especially important if your audience does not consist of digital-natives. People who grew up without digital media may take a little longer to adapt to changes, and they might not have the same intuition for digital interfaces as a younger audience. By making everything accessible, you’re casting the widest net possible.  

3. Simplify as much as possible

There is beauty in simplicity, and it is convenient too. If you can make your interface simple, you’ll have fewer complaints and issues to deal with. Simplify your UI by using visual cues and elements to break up sections, use dark text on light backgrounds (and vice-versa) and implement white space to keep your designs from looking cluttered and becoming visually overwhelming. 

4. Be quick and responsive 

Nobody likes being left to guess what is going on, so be sure to design your UI to give feedback quickly and respond immediately. If your UI doesn’t indicate when it is busy processing something, or when input is needed, your users will wonder what is going on and either duck out of the process, or resubmit information. This could lead to higher bounce rates, and it could break parts of the process if the system is overloaded with submissions. 

5. Be consistent 

Consistency in your design will help your users to react more intuitively to your design. If you keep rearranging and changing elements, you will confuse even the most digital-savvy user. Consistency also extends to the fonts, logos, and general design aesthetic on your site and should be aligned with the overall brand identity of the website you are creating. 

If you’re looking for responsive website design companies and website design companies for small businesses, contact WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, North Carolina, for more information.

Your mobile marketing strategy can go a long way in boosting the conversions that you get from your eCommerce activities. Here are four techniques that you can incorporate to ensure that your eCommerce conversions grow along with your business strategy. 

4 Mobile marketing techniques to boost mobile eCommerce conversions

1. Optimize the mobile experience

Mobile-first design should be your priority when tackling your eCommerce strategy. You need to ensure that everything on your eCommerce site is designed to be consumed on mobile devices. This includes the layout, images, and checkout process. All of these aspects need to be optimized for mobile so that your customers have an amazing experience when purchasing from your store. If you neglect to understand how important mobile-first design is, you’re going to add barriers to your buying experience, and you’ll lose sales. Think about things that disrupt the process, such as unnecessary pop-ups, intrusive ads, design issues, and slow load times.

You also need to keep in mind that while customers may initiate the purchase process on a mobile device, many people may cross over to another device or platform to finalize the process. You need to ensure that the cross over is seamless and that the user won’t need to start over when they switch to a new device. 

The key to optimizing the mobile experience? Testing! You need to test every phase of the process to ensure that the mobile experience doesn’t suffer from breakdowns along the way. Remember that testing includes user experience, not just the actual process, so ensure that the process works, but also that it is a pleasant experience for your customers. 

2. Follow up 

Conversion doesn’t stop at optimization of the process. It continues to post-sales support and engagement with customers. If you’ve made one sale, you can target the customer with special offers, or you can include a follow-up communication to show the customer that their support is valued. A great strategy to implement is to contact customers who have abandoned their carts. It can be a simple message that prompts the customer to reclaim their cart, or you can offer a small discount to entice the customer to conclude the sale. 

Creating a successful follow-up strategy is not as simple as programming an automatic email. It needs to be thoughtfully constructed to be enticing and exciting, but not annoying and desperate. If the prompts are intrusive, this may hurt your brand image and deter customers from wanting to purchase from you in the future. 

3. Target potential leaks 

When was the last time you checked your conversion funnel for leaks? Now is a great time to use your analytics tool of choice to see what’s really happening during the sales process.  

If you see multiple leaks in your conversion funnels, you need to target those areas to ensure that you retain the customers who are already interested in purchasing. A lot of leaks can be plugged with minor changes, but you need to prepare to experiment and investigate the leaks, so you’re sure the fixes will improve conversion rates. 

An excellent place to start is your terms of sale/ delivery. If you’re not upfront about your delivery costs, taxes, and production times, people may abandon their purchase at the last step because they are taken by surprise. 

4. Use urgency

If you place a limit on an offer, you can convert customers who are on the fence to complete the purchase. If you can successfully establish urgency, you’ll see an improvement in your conversion rates. This is because most people (even if only on a subconscious level) don’t like to feel like they are missing out on something. If you want to use a positive nudge, you can always include a limited-time discount or special incentive to conclude a purchase. 

Do you want to learn more about mobile app marketing, mobile marketing services, and mobile content marketing? Visit our website for mobile marketing advice from WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, North Carolina.

There’s more to SEO marketing than choosing the right keywords. You should never underestimate the importance of meta descriptions. Those 150 characters are an essential part of optimizing your pages for Google. While the actual text in meta descriptions doesn’t factor into Google’s ranking algorithms, it’s still important because it helps to convince people to click on your search results. The more clicks you get in this way, the better your organic click-through-rate (CTR) will be – and this could lead to indirect improvements in your rankings.

So what is the secret to a good meta description? Here is a step-by-step guide. 

Be careful with the tone

The tone of the description must be straightforward and conversation while still being in line with your brand voice. This may seem like a delicate balancing act, but there’s no need to overthink it. The important thing is to encapsulate the essence of the page content in a simple and attractive way.

Include your primary keyword

This is a fun challenge for a copywriter: to include the primary keyword and a natural way that makes sense to the description. It’s vital to include the keyword in your description, as well as your meta title.

Include a call to action

Finish off your description with a tangible call to action for the reader. “Find out more…” or “Learn more here,” for example. A basic description of the content might be enough to attract a click but often, readers need that definite nudge.

Write in active voice

Passive voice has its place, but it should be a no-no in most marketing writing, especially in a meta-description, which is meant to be short, sharp and direct. So always stick to active voice.

Make sure the description matches the content

Don’t try to trick the reader into clicking with a description that doesn’t actually fit the content. Let your description be an accurate reflection of your page’s content. 

Remember that Google might cut you short

Although the maximum length for meta descriptions is 150 characters, only the first 120 characters usually get displayed in the search results. This means you need to be sure to get your main message across before that cut-off. 

Give each page a unique meta description

Don’t copy and paste one meta description across various pages. Each and every one of your pages must have its own meta description.

WSI New Media Marketing is a proud member of the global WSI digital marketing family. Contact us and see what we can do for your brand. As a leading digital marketing agency, we specialize in effective social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, mobile content marketing, and SEO marketing. Contact us for more information.

Securing the services of a top social media agency is one of the most important things you can do for your brand. People have probably told you a thousand times that you need a social media strategy to drive traffic to your website. However, do you know how it actually works? How do you convert Tweets and Facebook posts into website traffic? How can you make your social media posts count? Here’s what you have to do to increase traffic to your website by way of social media.

Start with your profile

Before you do any posting on Facebook and Twitter, make sure you have filled in your bio, company page, or About section correctly. This is where many people will first become acquainted with your brand, so you need to ensure that you make a good impression. Also, don’t forget to add a link to your website. As people read about you for the first time, they can click back to your website and get more information. Whether or not this person turns into a customer, they automatically one more visitor to your hit count.

Promote your blog

You may have a great blog with informative, entertaining and topical content, but it’s no good if nobody reads it. You can’t expect to maximize visits to your blog through SEO alone. Social media is the most essential and most effective way to draw eyes to your blog. 

Allow readers to share your content

Now that you’ve attracted readers from social media, let them help you reach even more new audience members by embedding a social sharing tool on your pages. This allows them to easily pass your content on with a single click.

Pay attention to your audience’s habits

It’s no good posting great content when your target audience isn’t even on social media. Find out the peak time of your audience – the time when they are most active – and schedule your posts to go out during those times. This requires a little trial and error and guesswork at first, but you will soon be able to see when your audience is most active. You can make use of free tools such as Followerwonk to help you with this research.

Focus on visual content

People would much rather watch a video or quickly scan a GIF or meme than read a lengthy article. So make sure you hold their attention by posting visually oriented content. It doesn’t have to be only pictures, but it’s best to cut back on the text and add in more visuals. Even if you do post links to articles and blogs, make sure they have a picture to attract attention.

WSI New Media Marketing is a proud member of the global WSI digital marketing family. In addition to building brands through PPC advertising, website design, mobile marketing and SEO optimization, we are also one of North Carolina’s top social media agencies. Contact us and see what we can do for your brand.

Facebook ads are a crucial part of any social media marketing strategy, and as a social media marketing agency, WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, North Carolina, has a lot of experience with Facebook advertising. With the complexities behind Facebook Ads, it is increasingly important to understand what you’d like to accomplish with your advertisements on Facebook and how to best achieve the goals you have set for yourself. 

5 Best Practices for Your Facebook Ads from a Social Media Marketing Agency 

1. Set the correct goals to drive value 

With so many different advertising objectives available to your business, it can become difficult to pick the correct goals to aim for in Facebook advertising. The best plan is to determine which goals will produce the most value for your business, and aim for those objectives. Value-driving objectives no longer just include likes on your page or clicks to your website but should include conversions and brand awareness. Being popular on Facebook may help your business to reach more audience members, but if those views don’t convert into sales, they are not worth the advertising budget. 

2. Make use of Facebook’s Placement Optimization 

Placement options on Facebook include Facebook and Instagram feeds, the Audience Network, and Facebook Messenger. If you choose to activate all the placement options available to you, the Facebook Ad platform will learn which placements are the best at achieving your objectives in a cost-effective manner, enhancing your campaign performances without all the research effort from your side.

3. Choose the Campaign Budget Optimization option 

Similar to the Placement Optimization process, the Campaign Budget Optimization lets the Facebook Ad platform find opportunities to achieve your set goals across your ad sets and give priority in the budget allocation to the ads that are performing well. This option takes away some of the control you have over your ads but can help you to spend your budget more effectively across your Facebook Ads. 

4. Understand when broader targeting might be better 

For a long time, Facebook Ads that targeted small, niche groups performed better than broader target groups. Due to the increase in targeting and competition, it may cost more to target a smaller group with your Facebook Ad. This aspect of the Facebook Ad platform makes it crucial to understand when targeting a broader audience may be more cost-effective. If you’re trying to make your budget go further, set your audience broader so Facebook Ads can reach different people at a lower cost. 

5. Create for mobile, always 

The statistics for mobile use of social media platforms alone should indicate that mobile-first creation is key to achieving success in social media marketing. If your advertisement doesn’t load correctly on a mobile device, it won’t go down well with social media users. 

If you need assistance with your social media marketing, SEO optimization, and Facebook Ads, contact WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, North Carolina, your local SEO company and marketing agency today. 

Your favorite social media marketing agency, WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, North Carolina, has great tips to help you find your social media target market. Because social media has become an incredible platform for businesses and brands to create awareness, everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. To ensure that your content doesn’t get lost, you’ll need to find your target market and show them how you can be valuable to them. Here’s how:

Tips from a Social Media Marketing Agency: Defining Your Target Market for Social Media Marketing

Study your customers: 

If you’re making use of a social media marketing agency, you probably already have a few customers who you can study to find out more about how audiences will react to your social media marketing strategy. Use your existing client base to understand the demographics of your audience, including information like age, location, income and spending power, preferred language of communication, and interests. These insights will help you to narrow your target market down to a more manageable group, giving you the power to personalize your content and cater to your specific niche.

Engage in social listening: 

Social listening is one of the most effective ways to define your target market and gain deep insights into what makes your audience tick. With social listening, you’ll monitor direct feedback and relevant discussions on your social media channels. This will help you to compile lists of topics your target market might be interested in, learn about competitors in your industry, and gain insights on essential opportunities you might want to take advantage of. By engaging in social listening, you’ll form a better understanding of who your audience really is, and who you should not be targeting with your social media marketing efforts. 

Experiment with different approaches:

When you’ve gathered information and insights through studying your customers and social listening, you’ll need to experiment with different approaches to your social media marketing strategy. Write copy in different voices, post content on various social media platforms, and create ways for your audience to engage with you through competitions, polls, and lead magnets. Through experiments, you’ll find which approaches, styles, and topics attract the attention of your audience, and you’ll be able to define your target market by matching what you can produce with what audiences want to consume. 

Study your analytics:

From website traffic to social media interactions, you need to get comfortable with analyzing your customer interactions to better define who you want to reach. As each social media platform has its own analytics tools, you’ll need to do some research to understand what their metrics mean and how you can leverage the information you have available to reach your ideal audience. 

Looking for a social media marketing agency to help you to understand and target your ideal audience? Contact WSI New Media Marketing in Greensboro, North Carolina, for more information.