Syeda Ferdush

Having worked on a number of campaigns, I'm always asked by business owners and marketing managers (and rightly so) how much of an increase will they see in sales if they invest budget into a marketing campaign?

It wouldn’t be a revelation if I was to say that more and more marketers are implementing videos as part of their marketing mix. We’re in 2017 and videos have been utilised to promote business offerings for years. So, with the video marketing space getting a bit ‘cluttered’, what can businesses add to their videos to make sure they go viral?

So you’ve got a website for your business - great! However, have you got a decent level of traffic? Whatever your answer, I’m sure you’d like more. Very rarely (if at all), have I come across any businesses saying ‘no’ to having more traffic. After all, traffic translates to potential business.

Unfortunately, driving traffic to your website doesn’t always result in conversions. In fact, in many industries, the standard target conversion rate tends to be around just 2% of the website traffic. This demonstrates that while driving traffic to a website can be hard work it is even harder to convert it.

So, the title may sound a little dramatic, but I felt it was important for me to delve into the subject of users when it comes to the internet. The reason being, digital marketers too often become engrossed and, dare I say, obsessed, when it comes to the technical side, such as schema markup and canonical tags. While the technical aspects are extremely important, all too often we forget about our main audience — the users. In fact, research shows that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. This emphasises the fact that, no matter how technically sound your website design may be, if your users are not happy you’ll struggle to maintain a successful website. In addition, usability is also a search engine ranking factor, so if anything you’re optimising your search engine performance by considering your users. It’s a win-win situation.

Pay-per-click (PPC), compared to other strategies such as search engine optimisation (SEO), is a quick way to drive traffic to your website. However, a lot of businesses instantly associate PPC with Google Ads, and who can blame them? After all, Google makes up over 90% of the global search market. However, research shows that other search engines, and in particular Bing, are slowly but surely increasing their share of the market. According to Search Engine Journal, Bing’s share of the search market is growing faster than Google’s. With this in mind, in this post I will outline 7 reasons why you must invest in Bing ads and make it part of your online marketing mix.

Whatever content management system (CMS) you use, as long as you’re familiar with the functions, creating a web page should be easy. However, creating an effective web page requires some thought behind it.

Conversion tracking is vital for every form of marketing that you conduct - and Google Ads is no different.

One of the great thing about Google AdWords is its ingenuity and the speed in which it rolls out updates for a tool of its size. In keeping with it’s originality, AdWords released their Message Extension back in October. You can find out more here. What are message extension? Just like all the other ad extensions, such as review and sitelink, a message extension appears alongside an advertiser’s ads on the search engine results pages (SERPS), making them bigger, more eye-catching and more feature-rich with the aim of increasing engagement. Here’s what it looks like on Google’s results page: As you can see, message extensions give users the opportunity to click to text a business straight from the ad. Having clicked on the extension, advertisers can include an initial pre-written text message. This is very helpful, especially for those consumers who are in a rush as they can easily send the text message. You should keep the pre-written text as generic as possible so it’s relevant to all users regardless of what their needs may be. Then, once the need of the user has been established, a more tailored response can be sent to them. Take this as an example: Advertisers are charged the same fee when a user clicks on a message extension as if they had clicked on the ad’s headline or another ad extension. How to implement message extensions Just like the other extensions that AdWords offer, the message extension is really easy to implement. Here’s a step by step guide: 1) From your AdWords account, locate the ‘Ad extensions’ tab: