4 Unique Ways to Boost Website Traffic Using Video Marketing

One of the most common challenges businesses face in digital marketing is driving visitors to their web pages (Source: Hubspot). Traffic generation is the start of any successful inbound marketing campaign; the more quality visits you have, the more opportunities created for lead conversions and sales.

Video marketing has proven to increase website visitors, foster engagement, and elicit users to action. Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs). This is huge considering search is a top tool for consumers to locate brands and find solutions to problems.

If you’re seeking ways to drive more people to your web pages or want to amplify your video marketing, here are four unique tactics for boosting website traffic using video in your digital strategy.

 

#1 Leverage Video in Your Email Marketing

A video is the fastest way to communicate quickly with your audience. And since they increase engagement and conversions, it makes sense to use video in your email marketing campaigns to create optimal results.

Your email strategy is crucial to converting leads into customers and customers into raving fans of your brand. It’s a top channel for increasing revenue, therefore, using tools that improve list engagement is vital to your overall business goals.

Use the following tips to leverage video in your email marketing and promote traffic generation:

  • Reduce customer service cases by creating FAQ videos versus text. Add the video in your email message and mention the full-length website or blog post link for more detailed instructions
  • Repurpose a favorite blog content into a video series, using each subheading as a new video. Create an email campaign around this topic, sharing a video daily over a period. Include the blog link in each email for recipients to obtain the original article
  • Using the word “video” in your email subject line has been proven to increase open-rates
  • Share customer testimonials with your subscribers. It’s an excellent way to foster trust and get new leads to do business with you
  • Practice email segmentation to send personalized, tailored content to your recipients that speaks directly to their needs and interests. This is one of the best ways to increasing open-rates, clicks and shares

 

#2 Include a Video on Your Landing Pages

Videos are persuasive and authentic. It draws viewers into your message, quickly building trust and establishing common ground. This is why videos are ideal for your landing page content.

How does this relate to traffic generation? Wordstream notes that having a video on a landing page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of the SERP for your keyword. Many consumers are experiencing your brand for the first time on search. Introducing your business via video creates trust and ways for people to connect with you.

Do a split test of your landing pages, having a video on one and full text on the other. Measure your results to discover which is producing favorable outcomes concerning traffic and lead conversions. In the video, be sure to state a clear call-to-action that tells viewers to opt-in and what they can expect in return.

 

#3 Post How-To Videos on Social Media

Another way of boosting website traffic using video is through instructional content. How-to videos perform exceptionally well on social media. Typically, these videos need to be short (about 30 seconds long) to keep your followers engaged. Doing product demonstrations or illustrating how to achieve a specific result on your audience highlights your brand as an authority and go-to source in the industry.

Produce a series of how-to videos to edit for social media. The goal is not to sell your product but demonstrate its uses, so viewers understand the benefits and features. You want to boost your credibility and the value you bring to newsfeeds.

Additionally, address common problems in your niche. Show followers a better way of reaching a result by demonstrating the process on video.

 

#4 Optimize YouTube Videos for SEO

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, boasting 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users. With only 9% of U.S. small businesses using this medium to reach their audience, there is an excellent opportunity to separate your brand from competitors and get in front of your consumers. This is a unique channel to increase website traffic using video because viewers are more likely to follow instructions from video than other sources.

The key, however, is leveraging YouTube SEO tactics to boost visibility.

Here are a few pointers to optimizing your video content to rank on YouTube:

  • Optimize your title by including your longtail keyword. Make it descriptive by mentioning the benefit viewers will gain from the video. If feasible, try to have your keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible
  • Create a full description, naturally sprinkling your keyword throughout. Be sure to add your website or blog post link to access your content easily
  • Encourage engagement in your video. Ask viewers to subscribe,like, and click. These are key ingredients to improving your overall video SEO
  • Make your video awesome. Follow an outline, so you hit on your major key points and avoid rambling. It’s important to get to your topic quickly to keep people on your video...another factor for SEO
  • We can help you create amazing videos that get in front of your audience, captures attention, and entices viewers to take action. Reach out to us here to discover how we can help amplify your video campaigns.

 

Conclusion

Implement these tactics to being increasing website traffic using video marketing. Not only will you experience a surge in site visitors, but you’ll also notice a boost in engagement and conversions. The benefits (and results) are too compelling to ignore!


inbound marketing strategy

Key Elements to a Winning Inbound Marketing Strategy

inbound marketing strategyInbound marketing is the best way to promote your business online. Leveraging this strategy significantly increases brand exposure, boosts follower engagement, drives traffic to your blog and lead pages, and improves lead and sales conversions. If you want internet marketing success for your company, embracing the inbound methodology is the way to do it.

There are four essential actions in the inbound marketing strategy. Each element must be actively working to achieve the best outcomes in your marketing efforts. Here are the major components, with examples of techniques and tools, you can use to create a winning strategy:

#1 Attract Visitors

The first action is driving traffic to your site…but not just any traffic. The goal is targeted to quality visitors that are interested in your message. Having clarity of your target market is vital to creating content that solves their problems. Once you have established your buyer personas, you can align your entire content marketing strategy including social media, email messages, SEO, blogging content and videos to their interests.

#2 Convert

B2B Companies that blog only 1-2 times per month generate up to 70% more leads than those that don’t (Source: Hubspot). This stat illustrates the power behind the inbound strategy and how it dramatically impacts lead conversions. Convert website visitors into leads by using tools like landing pages, web forms, and lead offers. The key is ensuring your lead magnet is enticing and valuable enough for viewers to give their contact information in exchange.

#3 Close

The third element of an inbound marketing strategy that works is closing your leads into buying customers. It is in the nurturing process where you are grooming prospects to move them closer to a purchasing decision. Email marketing and marketing automation are excellent tools to fostering relationships with your leads that build trust. Thus, wanting to do business with you.

#4 Delight

You’ve earned a new customer…good work! But it doesn’t end there. This final step to inbound marketing is where you build loyal, raving fans who proudly promote you to their networks. How do you make this transition? By continuing to feed valuable content that resonates with your audience. Tools such as surveys and social monitoring are ways to gain feedback to improve your customer initiatives and create amazing experiences.

Ensuring that these four ingredients are working in your inbound strategy is imperative to achieving online marketing success. When executed correctly, you will maintain a steady flow of traffic, leads, sales and returning clients to your business.

For help on creating an inbound marketing strategy that increases your brand exposure and improves online conversions, contact us here for a schedule consultation. We are ready to help get you to your next level.


Active vs Passive Voice

Active vs Passive Voice Quiz

Like many writers using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, Active and Passive Voice was a new concept to me, and I didn't quite understand it at first.  Yoast was always giving me warnings that my posts had too much passive voice.  My short form articles with lots of bullet points and lists seemed to naturally trend towards the active voice. But what became especially annoying is that the better and longer I felt my writing was, the more passive my posts would become! That's why I started practicing using the Active vs Passive Voice Quiz, and finally made a break through in my understanding.

So what is the passive voice exactly?

In Passive Voice, the subject of the sentence is acted upon by the verb. Conversely, a sentence written in Active Voice has the subject perform the action stated by the verb directly.

 ActivePassive
 The builders remodeled the house to help it sell. The house was remodeled by the builders to help it sell.
The captain will give you orders.Orders will be given to you by the captain.
The biology class viewed the frog.The frog was viewed by the biology class.
Martin posted the funny cat video on Facebook.The funny cat video was posted on Facebook by Martin.
No one responded to my new sales ad.My new sales ad was not responded to by anyone.

Why does good copywriting avoid passive voice?

Articles that are well written and easy to read avoid using passive voice.  The problem with passive sentences is that it can be hard to determine who or what is acting. The result is very removed writing that also pulls the reader out of the story even if they understand what is going on.  You should avoid passive voice or anything that makes your articles hard to read whenever you possibly can.

Are there times when it makes sense to use passive voice?

There are going to be some times when using passive voice is unavoidable.  If you are writing a scientific manuscript or guide, it will be very hard to avoid using the passive voice.  There are also instances where you could easily avoid using the passive voice, but you go with passive because it sounds more like natural speech.

And using passive voice is also a technique that is commonly used to subtly avoid responsibility.  A child might say, "The dishes got dropped," when a more accurate active sentence would be, "I dropped the dishes."

How To Get Better At Writing in an Active Voice

Looking at lists of examples can be an effective way to start intuiting the pattern of active and passive voice.  It can also help to write using software like Grammarly to make your writing better.  But it didn't REALLY start clicking for me until I started practicing with quizzes based on those example lists.

Below is a quick quiz you can use to see if you have a good understanding of this concept or determine if you need a little practice like I did.

Active vs Passive Voice Quiz

 



Inbound Marketing & Why It’s Essential In Your Strategy

Wouldn’t you agree that it is better to attract qualified, ideal prospects to your sales funnel rather than attempt to promote your business to everyone, creating “hit and miss” results? Alternatively, that it is advantageous to embrace an inbound marketing strategy that connects with, engages your audience, and builds long-term customer relationships versus just focusing on getting the sale?

Absolutely! You see, there is an entire methodology that not only brings potential customers to you but keeps them coming back for more! This approach has resolved multiple issues for businesses like time wasted on unqualified leads, little website traffic, and low lead conversions. The more efficient way to promoting your business is through inbound marketing!

This strategy has shown to be the best way to do business online. 3 out of 4 marketers across the globe prioritize an inbound approach to marketing (Source: Hubspot). Studies consistently reveal that inbound marketing successfully increases traffic, lead generation, sales and repeat business for brands who leverage this tactic.

What Exactly is Inbound Marketing?

The inbound marketing concept centers around creating and sharing valuable content that solves problems and answers questions for your ideal customer (or buyer persona). It naturally draws prospects in through education. Because of this noninvasive, selfless approach, prospects are instantly attracted to your brand and see you as the expert in your niche.

There are four key components to a powerful inbound marketing strategy. It includes:

  • Attract: Driving quality traffic to your content via blog posts, social media, SEO strategies, video marketing, etc.
  • Convert: Turning website visitors into leads through your lead offers; you giving visitors something valuable in exchange for their contact information
  • Close: Transforming leads into customers by using closing tools like email marketing and marketing automation to help seal the deal
  • Delight: Creating happy customers and loyal, raving fans of your brand, converting into repeat business. The major benefit to inbound marketing is the process of nurturing a “stranger” into an eventual promoter of your business.

Why It is Essential in Your Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing, when done right, positions your business for long-term success. Consumers are fed up with overwhelming advertisements, yet they are always online seeking solutions to their problems. Search is the #1 source for content traffic generation, and it is the preferred choice for looking up information. Inbound marketing positions you to be found by your target audience when they are searching for you, making it essential for your business in 2016!

If your business is ready to start leveraging inbound marketing tactics to begin attracting qualified prospects into your sales funnel, contact us to request a free consultation. We are certified to help!

3 steps to creating great marketing content


The Anatomy of a Landing Page

Traffic acquisition is only half of the marketing equation.  In addition to bringing visitors to your website, you need to keep them there. Not only that, you need to transform them from interested prospects into customers. Your marketing needs to move that relationship forward at each touch point.  Conversion optimization is the process of transforming new website visitors into paying customers — and first-time customers into repeat buyers. A landing page is a single web page that appears after a user clicks on an advertisement. These can be used to capture leads, communicate information, or generate website sign-ups.

Here are 9 aspects of the anatomy of a landing page:

landing_page_anatomy

  • A consistent message between ad headline and landing page headline. For example, if someone searched for “Marketing Tools,” your landing page has a far better chance of converting if the headline mentions “Marketing Tools.”
  • The secondary headline leads to the content. This section needs to compel the user to continue reading. Short, sweet and to-the-point, it should give a clear reason that speaks to the user’s pain point.
  • Perfect grammar. This goes without saying.
  • Trust signals. Testimonials, security seals and other badges that show that the user will have a secure, satisfactory shopping experience
  • Strong call-to-action. Download, Free, Get, Create and other options have been shown to perform better than weaker words like “Try.” Stronger language and active verbs compel people to take action
  • Buttons that stand out. The button needs to be able to catch the user’s eye, so make it distinctively different than the rest of the color scheme on your page.
  • A lack of links. Keeping users on the landing page and moving them through to the call-to-action should be your primary goal. Linking out to other sites or other pages of your own site that aren’t tied into the landing page can distract the user from taking the action you want them to take.
  • Images and video that relate to the content. Adding images and video that give customers a quick understanding of the product/service or explain the basics can all bolster the message.
  • Fit the message within the first third of the page. This is known as “above the fold” and greatly increases the chance that visitors will take action since they don’t have to scroll.

Clear, concise information drives users to take action is the take-home message here.  A single call-to-action on landing pages allow you to gather information or generate conversions with the highest impact across all of you digital outlets.


Why Inbound Marketing

This blog will walk you through you to the culture of inbound, and provide you with a big picture view of everything you need for a successful inbound strategy. So what of the first question that you may be asking yourself is why INBOUND?

To put things into perspective let’s look at traditional marketing and what it offers for a business:

In traditional marketing, companies focus on finding customers: Generally, they use techniques that are interruptive. These techniques could be anything from cold-calling, print advertising, TV commercials, and junk mail.

Technology is making these techniques less effective, impossible to track conversion,  and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, DVR makes TV advertising less effective, and spam filters block mass emails. It's still possible to get a message out using these channels, but it costs a lot more. So, Traditional marketing is interruptive and marketer-centric. The traditional way of doing things is convenient for the marketer because they can push content in people’s faces whenever they want, and even when those potential customers don’t want it. But it’s not an ideal experience for the user – the potential customer. Inbound marketing is the mirror version that. How? Keep on reading.

Traditional vs Inbound

Inbound is a fundamental shift in the way we do marketing. An inbound methodology is not an interruption- based message where the marketer or salesperson had all the control, instead it’s about EMPOWERING potential customers.  

The way it works:

  • Instead of interrupting people day with television ads, they might create videos that potential customers want to see.  Remember that one time you were looking for a quick solution to a problem like how to remove a stain from a brand new silk shirt? Or how to replace the battery in your mac yourself? Well, the inbound strategy will help you get placed on top search based on those queries.
  • Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they could create a business blog that people would look forward to reading.
  • instead of cold calling, they create useful content so that prospects can contact them when they want more information.

Inbound marketing focuses on placing you as the expert in your field, where the customer can find you when they need advice or information.  It’s like having an expert by your side and you call them when you need them.


25_tips_for_seo

25 Tips for SEO

Earlier this year, John Rampton put together an excellent article for Forbes capturing advice from 25 top professionals in the search engine optimization field. Some of these authors include Joost de Valk, CEO of Yoast, and Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz - a solid lineup of knowledgeable individuals.

Many of these tips point to information that we often share with our clients - content is king. There are many things you can do to on the technical side make your site visible and available to Google, which tell search engines that the site is technically proficient, provides a smooth user experience, and is mobile-friendly. If you are not adding value to your user's day, you are only interrupting it

After that, it is about providing value to users. If you are not adding value to your user's day, you are only interrupting it (this should be a mantra for all sales people in this day and age). Interrupting a person's day without providing something valuable in exchange means that you are going to be unfollowed, unsubscribed, or hung up on if you are making a traditional sales call.

How do you provide value on your website and at the same time optimize for search?

The answer: by creating content that entertains and solves users’ problems.
The truth is that many search engine optimization “professionals” have attempted to create a mystique around the practices supposedly required to optimize a site. It is true that some technical requirements are beyond the scope of most marketers and they involve coding and design that streamlines the flow of information, but beyond that SEO is about content that is valuable to your visitors and is easily shared.
There is a great deal of wrong information on SEO that has been shared on the Internet featuring tips that may have worked a few years ago but will now get your site penalized by search engines due to unethical link building or other areas that create a bad user experience.

Here are some questions you should be asking yourself: 

  1. Which problems are your customers and future customers hoping to solve? For instance, are they looking for entertainment or to find reviews on the latest tech gadgets? Do they need to find a solution for an engineering issue in their plant?
  2. How can you provide information to solve these problems?
  3. What phrases might they be using to search for those answers?
  4. What is the best medium to provide this information?

By answering these questions before ever writing a word of content, you are better able to cater to your users’ unique needs. Define the problems that your prospects are hoping to solve and which terms they are using to find this answer. By building your content (in a way that makes sense without forcing it) around those search terms, you are more likely to provide value and useful information that Google will prioritize.

But what about the medium?

Remember that consumers will reach you in a variety of different ways from both mobile and PC. Visitors are going to consume information in the way that makes the most sense to them at the time. For example, one user may prefer to read a blog post while at work because she is unable to watch a video at the office, but that same user prefers to watch a video over reading articles while on her iPad at home.

People are finding you on mobile, which accounts for over 60% of website traffic on average, will most certainly prefer to watch a video rather than reading a long blog post on their phone. Google and Facebook are giving more weight to video because it adds tremendous value to user experience. On Google, you are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results if you feature different video on your site. On Facebook, you will see as much as 80% higher engagement with your content that features video.

By utilizing written, graphical, and video content, you can capture a wider breadth of a user while providing a deeper user experience. Google sees this and rewards the sites that are willing to make the investment in creating quality content for their users.

It can get confusing with all of the information that is available on the Internet about this topic. Feel free to reach out to us directly if you have any questions regarding SEO as part of your larger strategy.