4 Shopify Best Practices to Implement

by Jack Smith | Jul 24, 2021 | blog, Blog Post, Digital Marketing, Digital Publishing, Marketing

Are you using Shopify? It’s one of the simplest and most popular e-commerce platforms available, and it has plenty of features to help you boost awareness and sales. But to take full advantage of Shopify, make sure you understand how to optimize your use of the platform.

Here’s what to know, including helpful tips you can put to work right away:

Let’s start with the basics…

Shopify is a subscription-based e-commerce platform that allows any business to set up a virtual store and sell their products online. Some of its key features include the ability to showcase products, manage inventory and facilitate payments — all while making stronger and more impactful connections with your customers.

And optimize with best practices.

Selling your products online gives you a bigger customer base, but it’s still up to you to grab people’s attention (and meet your revenue goals). Make sure you’re implementing a few best practices:

Copy: All of your products should be accompanied by descriptive, well-written copy. Keep it short but impactful, and always include a CTA.
Navigation: Break down bigger menus into smaller, more digestible sections so that your customers can easily see what’s available. And put an organized tagging system in place so shoppers can easily search and filter products.
Collections: Create curated collections to provide targeted recommendations and increase the scope of individual sales.
Design and Imagery: High-quality design and images make your products more attractive and let customers know what they’ll get.

Need help with your marketing? Get in touch anytime.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

by Jack Smith | Jul 13, 2021 | blog, Blog Post, Digital Marketing, Digital Publishing, Marketing

Are you familiar with omnichannel marketing?

While it’s easy to get confused with multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing is a distinct approach with its own best practices — and its own big benefits for your brand.

Here’s what to know, including the basics of what omnichannel marketing is and some simple tips on how you can start adapting it into your strategy.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is an integrated, sales-focused marketing strategy that aims to provide customers with a cohesive shopping experience across all platforms, places and devices.

At its core, omnichannel marketing is about putting the customer experience first. The goal is to ensure that regardless of how your customers like to shop — on their phone, through social media, in-store, etc. — the messaging and interactions they have will remain consistent.

Omnichannel Marketing vs. Multichannel Marketing
Both omnichannel and multichannel marketing are diverse strategies intended to capture an audience in various places and in various ways.

Where they differ is in intent: While multichannel marketing is focused on simply building a brand presence on as many platforms as possible, omnichannel marketing is about bringing cohesion to that practice in order to boost sales.

Make the Switch to an Omnichannel Approach
Creating an integrated sales experience isn’t just better for your customers — it’s better for you, too. Here are some tips to get you started:

Know your customers. Build well-researched customer personas to understand how and where your audience prefers to shop.
Work on segmentation. Different customers have different needs at different times. Segment them into groups (for example, new customers and existing customers in need of re-engagement) so you can offer an optimized experience.
Focus on cohesion. You want to make sure your customers have the same experience regardless of where they are. Double-check your story, your message and your branding are consistent from channel to channel.

Need more advice? Get in touch and we can help.

Marketing to Gen Z: A Quick Guide

by Jack Smith | Jun 21, 2021 | Blog Post, Digital Marketing, Digital Publishing, Marketing

Are you in touch with Gen Z?

The nation’s next big generation of spenders grew up in an era of connectivity and social influence, both in terms of how they relate to each other and how they relate to brands. To get their attention, you’re going to have to know what’s important to them. Here’s a quick explainer to get you started.

What is Gen Z?
Generation Z refers to young adults born in the years 1996 to 2015. And they’re about to surpass Millennials as the most populous generation on the planet.

How Gen Z Feels About…
As the most racially and ethnically diverse generation of Americans to date, it’s difficult to generalize about Gen Z’s opinions. What we do know though: Members of Gen Z have lived their whole lives online, and that’s affected how and where they’re spending their money — and their feelings about the market in general.

Brands: Authenticity is the name of the game when appealing to Gen Z, with 82% saying they trust companies more if they use real people in advertisements.
Capitalism: Only 20% of Gen Z has “very positive” views about capitalism, which is fewer than any preceding generation.
Social Media Marketing: Gen Z isn’t just completely tuned in to social media marketing they’re also redefining it. So while they’re happy to engage with brands, it’s increasingly on their own terms.

What It All Means
Gen Z has high digital expectations for brands. Looking ahead, you’ll need to invest in new platforms and the authenticity of your image.

This generation is spending big, but you have to earn it. If you need more guidance on how to do it, get in touch.

How to Write a Great Email Signature

by Jack Smith | Jun 7, 2021 | Blog Post, Digital Marketing, Digital Publishing, Email, Email Marketing, Marketing

How to Write a Great Email Signature

Is your email signature sending the right message?

While it might seem like a small detail, your email signature reflects on both you and your brand — and it’s important to get it right. Doing so lends more authority to your outreach, and it can also have a major effect on your email response rates.

Here’s what you need to know about acing your sign-off, including some essential do’s and don’ts.

Why Your Email Signature Matters
There are a number of benefits to hitting the sweet spot with your email signature:

It tells recipients exactly who you are.
It further establishes brand identity.
It provides recipients with necessary contact information.
It provides your email with more authority.

From cold prospecting emails to brand newsletters, including a well thought-out signature is key to contact recognition, as well as to creating emails that convert.

Email Signature Do’s and Don’ts
Take the guesswork out of a great signature by following these do’s and don’ts.

Do link to your website. This gives recipients an easy way to connect your name to your brand.
Don’t forget the basics. Even the fanciest of signatures still need to include your name, job title, and a way to get in touch. A headshot can be a great addition too.
Do include links to social. Give your recipients a fast way to follow up — or give you a follow — on your social media pages.
Don’t use emojis (in most cases). An emoji may come off a bit too unprofessional, especially in certain industries.

Design and Topography Ideas
You’ve got lots of options when it comes to design. Here are some great examples to get you inspired:

Why Your Brand Should Publish on Medium

by Jack Smith | May 17, 2021 | Blog Post, Digital Marketing, Digital Publishing

Have you considered using Medium as part of your company’s content strategy?

Medium is a social publishing platform that allows anyone to post original blog content. And there are some big benefits to doing so — including boosting brand awareness among Medium’s large reader base (236.65 million monthly visitors and counting).

Here’s what to know about adding Medium to your content marketing strategy (plus a few best practices):

How Medium Can Help Your Content Marketing Strategy
The more ways that you can connect, the better. While Medium shouldn’t replace your company blog, you can use it as a supplementary tool to reach more people, establish thought leadership and increase brand engagement — all of which make it worth a bit of added effort.

Ways to Use Medium
There are various ways to use Medium for your brand’s benefit, especially when it comes to building more authority in your industry.

Original content: Write and share new content on topics relevant to your niche and audience.
Re-publishing: Repurpose and cross-post existing blog content onto Medium to expand your reach.
Engage: Follow people who like your posts, respond to comments and use your content to drive engagement to your social pages and website.
Network: Partner with other brands or notable writers to tap into a deeper audience pool.

Best Practices
Success on Medium isn’t a guarantee, but there are some things you can do to increase your chances.

Be original. Make sure you’re adding to the conversation instead of just repeating what others are saying.
Keep it clean. Your headline and copy should be typo-free and grammatically correct, and you should take just as much care with your content as you would posting on your own site.
Avoid overt CTAs. Let engagement happen organically instead of trying to force it with a direct CTA.

Set your ideas in motion with Medium – click here to learn more

Need help with your company’s marketing? Get in contact with Smith Marketing today.

SEO Strategies For Small Business Owners

by Jack Smith | Apr 12, 2021 | Blog Post, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media

In this digital age, we know that SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not a new concept in business. Small business owners know that it’s an important strategy that can help boost their business’ online presence.

For example, a survey said that 46% of searches made on Google were people who were looking for local information. This data alone shows that SEO plays a big role in getting local shops to gain more exposure online.

However, not all are capable to properly execute SEO strategies even if they have the budget and resources to run an SEO campaign. So here are a couple of tips that can help you understand how to use SEO for business.

1. Create An Optimized Website

Most business owners only care about how their websites look without thinking about the functionality and features of the website. Sure, your website looks good visually but if it’s slow, not mobile-friendly or if the elements are not properly placed, you can lose a lot of potential customers in the long run.

For example, if your website does not have a solid structure that search engines can crawl properly, you will lose a significant amount of traffic that can hurt your sales.

2. Prioritize Keywords

Knowing the right keywords to use is one of the most important things that business owners need to do. The goal is to determine the keywords that people often look for in search engines and then use those keywords for your website. The better keywords you use, the better chances of being ranked high!

But why is it important to be on the first page of search engines? Well, the higher you rank, the more people will discover your website’s business. It’s that simple.

You need to remember not to overdo keyword placement in your website. Don’t just stuff keywords into your blogs, landing pages or any other content in your website. Make it sound organic whenever you use a keyword.

3. Optimize Website Page Metadata

Once you’ve started with the initial stages of SEO, your next task is to make sure that all pages must contain your keywords. You need to optimize your work by putting the keywords in the titles, meta description, and content body. This will make it easier for the search engines to crawl your website’s content.

Apart from that, you also need to make sure to always include an alt tag for your images. Google reads words when it crawls the internet so it needs text information to be able to determine your content.

4. Create A Content Calendar

Search engine optimization will not work if you don’t have content to share. Imagine having an optimized website that does not have blogs, photos, videos or other types of content in it. Content is the value that a business offers to its customers so make sure to create a content calendar so you can plan in advance what content to create and when they will go out.

But apart from that, there also needs to be consistency! Don’t create a blog one time then create the next one after 6 months. When you create content on a regular basis that has the right keywords, you are showing Google that your business has authority within your industry.

Just make sure to also avoid duplicating content. Keep your URLs unique and never use the same description for some pages in your website.

5. Build Website Authority Through Backlinking

Just like the name implies, backlinks are links from other websites that link back to your website. Sometimes, it can also be a link from your website that links to another part of your website.

Typically, backlinks come in the form of blogs where one blog cites another blog for resource purposes. The purpose of backlinking is to give search engines a signal that other websites consider your content as resource material. This means that you have authority within the industry so there’s better chances of ranking high.

6. Use Google My Business Page

Google My Business should be a requirement for every business. GMB has so many features that can help boost businesses’ social proof and searchability on the internet. It has a review feature that allows users to leave positive feedback to businesses. You can also upload videos or photos to your GMB account so potential customers can see what you have in store for them.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is a must-have for every business. It’s essential because it makes your website more visible on search engines like Google, which will mean more traffic and more opportunities for your business to convert prospects into new customers.

If you’re ready to invest in SEO for your company’s website, Smith Marketing offers a free initial SEO site review that will help assess your current website’s status. Our free assessment will determine your specific needs and anticipated budget at the same time.

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4 Shopify Best Practices to Implement

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Are you familiar with omnichannel marketing?

Marketing to Gen Z: A Quick Guide

Are you in touch with Gen Z?

How to Write a Great Email Signature

How to Write a Great Email Signature

Why Your Brand Should Publish on Medium

Have you considered using Medium as part of your company’s content strategy?

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