Since the beginning, fast-loading websites have been considered SEO-friendly. Apart from ranking high, faster loading pages lead to happier website visitors.

According to a study by Google and SOASTA, 40% of the visitors leave a web page if it loads in more than three seconds.

So, you have only three seconds to catch the attention of a user who clicked your ad or came through organic searches. If your page can't load in this time, your ad went in vain regardless of how attractive it was.

Page loading speed is considered a ranking signal. Google included many programs to help business owners improve their site speed. Accelerated Mobile Pages was an initiative taken by Google to help website owners increase their site speed by trimming many unnecessary features that take time to load.

Page loading speed is crucial to ranking because it's directly linked with User-experience. The load time is so critical for ranking that Google considers it a significant ranking signal. Nobody would like to visit a website that takes an eternity to load.

Initially, AMP created a considerable stir, and even the social networking sites like Twitter went ahead and implemented that. But soon, it faded away into obscurity, and in 2021, its symbol was entirely removed by Google from its search results without any announcement.

So, in this article, we will discuss everything about AMP, including what it is, how it functions, and whether it is still relevant in 2021:

What is AMP?

The open-source coding project offered by Google was designed to help business owners create websites that can quickly load on mobile devices.

AMP strips the web pages down to the essential elements and stores its cached version on Google servers, so Google flashes the result almost instantly.

The program filters ads, videos, and animations, so only the most relevant content and images are left on the web page. It's the most coveted feature for mobile users because they don't want to see many ads and videos on their screens while reading an article or a blog post. Heavy elements can prevent a web page from downloading instantly. Most of the information the mobile users consume is urgent, so any distraction or delay will result in a high bounce rate.

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Earlier, Google flashed a lightning bolt icon in front of AMP pages pulled up in the SERPs so that the user may differentiate fast-loading AMP pages from average websites. Google gave these sites an advantage to encourage users to click on them to have a good user experience.

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But, when Google discontinued the lightning icon to mark AMP websites, people had an impression that AMP would no longer exist as an SEO practice.

Why Was Amp Introduced?

The ultimate goal of AMP was to provide a swift user experience by delivering content with the speed of lightning, even on poor Internet connections. Google was so obsessed with the page load speed that it made it a crucial ranking factor. Google's prime objective of creating AMP pages was to compete with Facebook instant articles and Apple News.

How Does AMP Work?

According to Search English Land, AMP has a three-part structure:

1. AMP HTML: Equipped with some custom tags and properties, AMP HTML is a subset of HTML that you can easily use while adapting standard pages to AMP HTML with some custom tags and properties.

If you want to know the difference between AMP HTML and basic HTML, you can refer to the AMP Project's list of required markup.

2. AMP JS: This is a Javascript framework for mobile pages. It is used to manage resource handling and asynchronous loading. Developers should know that third-party Javascript is not allowed with AMP.

3. AMP CDN: This is an alternative Content Delivery Network, which makes your website super fast. It caches your AMP-enabled pages and optimizes them for performance.

Optimized HTML code is used to render AMP pages. It removes HTML code tag manager aspects to trim the page elements and make them load faster. Javascript is not generated for your AMP pages.

• A streamlined version of CSS is used with AMP
• The JavaScript library you can use is provided by AMP, which restricts you to a great extent, and the page speed may suffer
• Unless adequately validated, the AMP sites will not work
• Load custom fonts separately
• Declare height and width to prevent quirky-looking images
• You can use videos on your AMP page only with AMP-approved extensions

Many people will be surprised to know that every AMP page has a specific URL, but it is not its actual URL. Since these pages are hosted on Google servers, their URL may look like this: google.com/amp/s/www.dashclicks.com/

Google is committed to showing these sites faster, directing the user to its AMP version hosted on its servers. It not only reduces the page load time but also improves engagement, conversions, and revenue.

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How Will You AMP Your Site As a Beginner?

If you are a beginner, you must know that you need to maintain two versions of an article page while creating the AMP version of a website. It includes an original version for the users and its AMP version.

As explained above, AMP doesn't allow third-party JavaScript and additional elements such as form elements. So, you will not be able to replicate on-page comments, lead forms, and use several other elements which AMP strips down from a standard page.

Hack to use iframes: If you want to use iframes, there is a hack you can try:

To accommodate these restrictions, you might have to recreate your site template. For example, while creating the AMP version, all CSS must be in line and be less than 50KB.

It would help if you loaded custom fonts using a unique amp-font extension and handled multimedia separately.

To optimize images for AMP, you need to use the custom amp-img element and include an explicit width and height. Otherwise, you will have trouble downloading the image in the AMP version.

For animated GIFs, you can use an amp-anim extended component.

To embed locally hosted videos via HTML5, you can use a tag known as "amp-video."

However, for YouTube videos, you can use the component -- amp-youtube.

Here are some other components you can use:

Slideshows => amp-carousel

Image lightboxes => amp-image-lightbox

Social media embeds=> extended components

These extended components can easily be used with a bit of planning for your web design.

To help Google understand that you're using the AMP version of your article, you need to modify the original version a bit. Add the following tag, which acts as a canonical tag for AMP.

<link rel="amphtml" href="http://www.example.com/blog-post/amp/">

Sometimes, you need schema.org metadata to explain the content type being used on the page. The currently listed page types, according to GitHub, are:

• Recipe
• Article
• Review
• Video

Schema.org metadata is an essential requirement while making your content eligible to appear in the Google search news carousel. So, to pull traffic to your website from Google by implementing AMP, you should adequately implement your schema.

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Pros and Cons of AMP Pages

When Google first introduced AMP pages in February 2016, they had received a desk-thumping welcome from the industry. Experts went to the extent that it is the future, but the romance between Google and AMP soon ended, and it started losing steam. Now that Google has completely stopped using the AMP badges in 2021, its credibility in the market is already finished. Another study by Kinsta proved to be the last nail in the coffin for AMP, which said that AMP reduced 59% of the leads.

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Here are the pros and cons of AMP pages:

Pros of AMP:

1. Low website loading time
2. Easy to use on WordPress with a simple plugin
3. Improved Google rankings

Cons of AMP:

1. Reduced ad revenue because of fewer ads
2. Hard to implement without WordPress
3. Limited analytics prevents you from seeing the fluctuations in traffic
4. Limited elements in content and design mean minor features for branding and traffic diversion within the website
5. Limited lead capturing
6. Limited social sharing

So, AMP has more cons than pros. That might be the reason why Google has dropped it because site speed can be increased through various other methods.

Who is AMP Beneficial For?

Google has already decided to take it off because it has been found counterproductive for most websites. However, there are certain websites where you can still use AMP. Here are some of the examples:

1. If your website is still struggling with speed issues even after optimizing for speed.
2. If more than 70% of your traffic comes from smartphones.

AMP is probably not for you if your website is conversion rate optimized, already fast, and highly branded.

AMP Best Practices

If you still feel AMP can benefit you in some way, here are some of the things you should remember while implementing it.

• Implement AMP when it is inevitable and makes sense. Would you mind reading the previous section to know who it’s suitable for?
• In case you aren’t using WordPress, it’s better to hire a remote developer. Using the AMP WordPress plugin can be a bit complicated for you. Hiring a developer is the best option in both cases.
• Avoid implementing AMP on high converting or high traffic web pages as it eliminates essential elements like opt-in form and branding. So, it should not implement AMP on pages dedicated to generating leads or branding.
• The good news is you can try A/B testing on AMP. So check out how it impacts crucial metrics like conversion rate etc.

How Can You Get AMP on Your Website?

You can use the AMP plugin if the CMS you use is WordPress for your website. If you don't use WP, here is the alternative walkthrough. If you have never done coding yourself, it's better to call a developer.

Do You Still Need AMP Pages?

With radical changes in Google policy regarding AMP pages, they are not as valuable as they once seemed. Prominent sites and portals are ditching them, and Google has removed the AMP icon from the SERPs. It can be a bit useful if your site is a news site that publishes a huge volume of news.

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Conclusion

Businesses embraced AMP when it was first released amid much fanfare. It was considered a cure-all elixir, but soon people woke up to this crude reality: it has more cons than pros. Experts argued that it would work for temporary content pieces such as stories etc. But Google soon ditched it as a requirement for top stories and removed the AMP icon from the search results. So, it can't drive any additional traffic to your site. So, the website owners now should focus on improving site speed through other measures. Since more and more people are using mobile devices to search the web, the user experience on mobile should be seamless and user-friendly. It is the only way you can increase traffic and grow your business.

Can you recount the last time you selected a restaurant without going through its online reviews? Today, checking out online reviews before trying out a service or a product is not limited to dining or entertainment alone. In this day and age, buyers heavily depend on what people are saying online about all kinds of businesses.

If you look at the statistics, 91% of people in the 18-34 age group trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Considering this, you can easily tell one thing. If a person searches for or comes across your business on the web, your online reputation determines how they perceive your brand.

Therefore, it is important to know that the online reputation of your brand is “everything” today! Online reviewing is like digital word-of-mouth marketing. It can influence whether or not prospects purchase from your business.

Given that people consider a brand’s online reputation before making a purchase, it has become more important than ever to know about ORM. It is short for Online Reputation Management. ORM is all about creating a positive online narrative around your business. It proactively influences the kind of information individuals will find about your business online.

Simply put, ORM is an ongoing task that creates and maintains your brand name as well as its good standing.

Why Does Online Reputation Management Matter?

Always remember, individuals, are talking about you irrespective of the size of your business. These people can be your clients, customers, prospects, and friends. Even as we speak, they could be posting a comment on your blog, tweeting about your current product, posting on Facebook about their experience, and doing a lot more.

Keeping this in mind, you need to put in ORM efforts for the purpose of protecting or restoring your brand image. ORM manages content in search engines. Moreover, it encourages satisfied clients to provide more positive feedback.

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The Top Content Types Which Hurt Your Brand's ORM

Let's discuss the types of content that can hurt your business:

1. Negative Feedback on Social Media

You can get negative reviews on social media portals such as Instagram and Facebook. During this time, ensure you provide a speedy resolution. Negative reviews are inevitable and responding to and resolving customer complaints does not tarnish the reputation of your business permanently.

2. Online Reputation Bombs

Poor online reputation can impact your reputation and sales for an extremely long time. They are incredibly powerful because of their prominence in search engine results.

Some examples of defamatory content that can appear in Google’s search results about a company are:

• Negative Reviews: Review sites allow customers to express their opinion on a specific business. On these sites, they answer if they liked your product/service and will recommend it to others. Negative reviews on these websites can impact your sales.
• Negative Media Coverage: Unfavorable print, TV, and online media coverage negatively affect brands and companies.
• Hate Sites: People can also create an ad hoc website on which they express their opinions and even post illegal content it. These so-called “hate sites” sometimes attack public figures and companies with false information and insults. A search result such as “The truth about YOURCOMPANYNAME” for instance can make your prospects change their mind about purchasing from you.

The Key to ORM: Check What People Say About Your Business

As we mentioned above, people are constantly talking about your brand, products, and services online. You should make it a point to listen to these people to manage your online reputation. And for this, you can use social media monitoring tools.

For instance, you can do social media monitoring for your business via Google Alerts. It helps you monitor the web for mentions of your business. All you need to do is sign into your Google account, visit the Google Alerts page, and enter a phrase or a keyword in the search box.

You will get a notification on your email each time Google finds a result that holds relevance to your alert criteria. Also, you can easily set alerts for specific languages and regions.

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Online Reputation Management Tips

Given that we live in a digital era, nothing can protect your business from criticism. To help you remain on top of your reputation, there are some practical tips that you can follow. Apart from making efforts to become well-respected in your field, here are some useful tips you can implement:

A. Check Your Google Results

Always pay close attention to your Google results. If the words “rip off” and “scam” are linked with your business, then it is something that must concern you. Implementing a strong SEO strategy is your best answer to negative reviews, false reports, and negative press.

B. React Fast But Politely

Ensure you respond quickly but politely to a customer complaint. For instance, if a customer writes a complaint on Twitter, you can reply with a simple and prompt response, such as:

“Thanks for making us aware of the problem. We are working on it and will get back to you as soon as possible.” This is better than a late reply, even if you communicate more information in it.

C. Focus on Improving Yourself

Sometimes criticism can offer an opportunity to know more about your audience and create a better message for them the next time.

Best Practices for Online Reputation Management

To monitor and manage your brand reputation online, you can follow some best practices. Let's discuss some of these practices in detail:

1. Your Business Needs to Be Transparent

Today, brands are required to be completely transparent. When you share the good and the bad about your brand, this means you are transparent with your audience. The benefit you get out of it is simple - it helps build trust among your audience.

Now, you may wonder how to “be transparent.” Let’s discuss some of the ways in which you can do that:

• Requesting feedback
• Letting employees talk about services and products publicly
• Establishing a one-to-one communication channel
• Addressing criticism publicly

2. Update Your Digital Handles Regularly

Ensure that you make a complete profile of your business on professional and social media platforms. Moreover, make it a point to create a consistent and cohesive brand presence on landing pages, social pages, and other digital media handles. You must use the same colors, logo, and content tonality during this time.

3. Encourage Your Satisfied Customers to Write Reviews

You can always encourage your happy customers to write a testimonial or review for your business. This way, your prospects get to read positive and honest opinions about your brand. To help your customers leave a review, provide them with a link or send them an email.

Note: Make sure that you thank the customers who have left a positive review.

4. Respond to Negative Reviews

Make it a point to respond to negative reviews promptly. Try to think hard of a solution to reply back with. Providing a resolution helps curb the damage a negative review can cause. If you respond with an apology without a solution, then it just feels empty.

Tip: If the mistake is from the customer's side, ensure that you gently point it out. Refrain from using foul or sarcastic language.

All in all, when you publicly respond to negative reviews, it shows that you are a brand that acknowledges its mistakes and is more than willing to rectify them.

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Conclusion

The first step towards managing your online reputation is listening to what your audience has to say and searching for ways in which you can connect with them. Building an SEO strategy and responding to online criticism are other crucial steps that you need to follow.

If you haven't started to build your brand's online narrative yet, it is time you start now! Because believe it or not, people may be putting up reviews, vlogging, or talking online about your products as we speak.

Do you want to stand out in a crowded industry?

Does your business operate in a niche with a tiny audience?

If your answer is yes to one of these questions, then you should consider niche marketing.

You may be wondering, what exactly is niche marketing and how is it going to help you?

To help you understand niche marketing, let us first define a niche market – A niche market is a tiny, defined segment of a larger market.

Now, let’s talk about niche marketing. It is basically a marketing tactic that is aimed at attracting and converting a particular market segment.

This marketing is specifically beneficial for reaching customers who you can target based on specific characteristics. These characteristics include hobby, demographic, occupation, and commitment to political/social issues.

You can focus on the following categories of customers with this type of marketing:

• Young professionals
• Environmentalists
• Pet lovers
• New homeowners
• Couples who are planning a wedding

Advantages of Niche Marketing

When you use niche marketing to reach small audiences, it benefits you in many ways. Niche marketing not only improves relationships with your customers but also provides you the advantage of word-of-mouth marketing. Here’s a more detailed look at the benefits of niche marketing:

1. Makes Your Business Visible to Relevant Customers

Niche marketing makes you visible to the right audience. This is because you use strategies that are designed for the people who will most likely find your services and products interesting.

2. Competitive Advantage

A majority of brands aim their marketing at the larger market. However, niche marketing helps you market a service or product to a particular section of the market.

When you serve a specific or limited audience, you face lesser competition. This is because fewer competitors would be providing the same offering.

3. Builds Brand Loyalty

Another advantage of niche marketing is that it can help you build brand loyalty. When you engage with a smaller audience, you are able to focus more on providing quality customer service. You also get to develop and nurture a relationship with them. This helps develop loyalty for your brand. You start to become their trusted partner because you take care of their specific needs.

Strategies for Using Niche Marketing to Reach Tiny Audiences

Many niche marketing strategies are useful in reaching, attracting, and converting small audiences that are otherwise hard to reach. Read on to know more about these strategies in detail:

1. Conduct Extensive Audience Research

A challenge that you may face in niche marketing is how to understand the unique demands of your target audience. For this, you need to carry out extensive audience research to know how you can reach them in the best possible manner. Moreover, the research will help you understand their pain points. Here’s what you can do to conduct audience research for a niche market:

A. Create Buyer Personas

To better understand your ideal customers, develop their buyer personas. Buyer personas are research-based and describe your ideal customers. They talk about the challenges they face, how they make purchasing decisions, and what their days are like.

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B. Conduct Competitor Research

Carrying out competitor research is extremely important for your business. Analyze the kind of audience your competitors reach and the ways in which they engage with them.

2. Create Relationships With Your Audience

We already know that there are only a limited number of customers in a niche market. For success in a niche market, you should try to build relationships with your customers and audience. This is because, when you do so, you can get repeat customers.

Remember, it is always more convenient and cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquiring a new one.

3. Select The Platforms Carefully

When you want to reach a tiny target audience, you should choose the social media platforms they use regularly.

Research points that Gen-Zers prefer Snapchat. On the other hand, we recommend that you try to reach millennials on Facebook.

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To determine which social media platform to choose, ask yourself questions like:

• Where does your audience shop?
• What are their preferences when it comes to social media channels?
• How do they find products?

Doing so will help you select the right social media platform to establish communication with your target audience. Make sure you tailor your content according to those platforms.

4. Take Steps to Become an Authority in Your Niche

We all can agree on one thing – individuals will listen to those who know best! And for this, they go to the experts in their respective fields.

If you want to become a figure of expertise and authority, you need to be persuasive, well-informed, and creative. This is how people are going to listen to you.

Some ways in which you can become an authority in your niche include:

• Produce Valuable Resources: Resources such as case studies, white papers, and blog posts exhibit your expertise and help develop authority.
• Offer Free Advice: Give some free advice to your niche audience to communicate to them that you understand what they want. For doing so, you can have conversations with them on social media and niche forums.

When you become an authority in your niche, customers find you and recommend your products to their friends and family.

5. Build Brand Loyalty

If you focus on building brand loyalty, you can make your customers your very own brand ambassadors.

Here are some ways you can build brand loyalty:

• Engage With Your Customers: Whether it is email or social media, use every opportunity to engage with your audience. Make sure you add value whenever you engage with them.
• Create Unique and Outstanding Experiences: From your customer service to your products, make sure each interaction a customer has with your business is exceptional.
• Align with the Core Values of Your Target Audience: Aligning your brand with your customers’ core values helps develop brand loyalty.
• Predict Their Needs: Use customer behavior data and buyer personas to check what your customers may need and deliver it to them. It creates the impression that you value them and wish to make their lives more convenient.

6. Dive Deeper Into Your Competitor’s Strategy

When you talk about niche marketing, your best resources are your competitors. Remember, you always get to learn a lot from their marketing strategies.

When you dig deeper into your competitors marketing strategies, you gain a good understanding of:

• The market
• Your audience
• The weaknesses and strengths of your competitor

When you identify who your competitors are, the next steps to focus on are:

• The list of keywords that they target
• The ways in which they engage with their target audience
• The different content distribution platforms they use

When you follow this pointer, you are able to create more effective niche marketing strategies.

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Bottom Line

With an effective niche marketing strategy in place, you can:

• Gain a competitive edge
• Optimize your marketing budget
• Raise your conversion rates

Remember, your niche market is always searching for someone who understands them. When you understand them and know what they require, get out there and kickstart your selling.

While it is important to understand your niche audience, having an SEO-friendly website for your brand is equally important. This is because it helps generate organic traffic and enhances the customer experience. Since building a professional, SEO-friendly, and niche-based website takes several days, we recommend that you use DashClicks' agency website tool. With this tool, you can make an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in seconds. Pretty cool, isn't it?

Take a moment and think about what brings people to your business?

In a lot of cases, it begins with a question and they visit your site expecting a solution. At this stage, you need to understand that they are not just interested in your product, but also seek valuable information.

In many cases, content is what starts your relationship with the customer. Moreover, content remains with them through all the steps of the customer journey. Therefore, it is fair to say that content plays a significant role in how your audience interacts with your business.

The Importance of Content Marketing in 2021

In order to make the most of your content marketing, you need to create content that is detailed, unique, and useful. This is because content marketing is extremely helpful in:

• Bringing people to your site
• Engaging customers by providing value
• Generating leads
• Moving people through the customer journey
• Driving sales
• Giving post-sale care

However, simply knowing that content marketing can help your business isn't enough. You need to know how to create an effective content marketing strategy. As per the latest statistics, 64% of marketers wish to know how to create a better content strategy.

There are different tactics that make content marketing strategies effective. As there are many content marketing tactics out there, you have to decide which ones can help your business grow.

How to Select the Right Content Marketing Tactics For Your Business?

Before building your content marketing strategy, spend some time brainstorming. Understand your aim, what your business stands for, and how you want to represent your values. Armed with this knowledge, you will be more informed to pick suitable content marketing tactics for your business.

Here are 30 content marketing tactics to help you pick one that works for your business:-

1. Know Your Audience and Provide Them What They're Looking For

To create successful content, you need to know your audience. The first step you can take is to conduct keyword research to gain insights into your potential customers and their needs.

You can begin by using Google Trends to get a good idea about the current demand for a particular topic you have in mind. All you need to do is enter the main keyword in the search box to see the number of searches it has got within a defined time period.

For more detailed information, you can use Ubersuggest. Here's how you can use it to unlock a plethora of keyword opportunities:

1. Click on your browser and open Ubersuggest
2. Type in your domain
3. Tap on the keyword analyzer located on the left sidebar
4. Select keyword ideas
5. Enter a keyword
6. Get related keywords along with search volumes

2. Segment Audience To Improve Engagement

You should always remember that different people are at different phases of the buying cycle. That's why the content you produce can't suit everyone. For instance, if you produce content for the purpose of creating awareness among new customers, then it will not work for repeat customers.

Hence, you must segment customers according to their personas. A buyer persona is a profile that talks about one segment of your audience. Buyer personas are based on research and describe your ideal customers. It talks about how they arrive at a decision, the challenges they face, and other useful insights.

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3. Create Content Based On Your Core Values

Core values serve as the building blocks of any business. Dedicate time to articulate the core values of your business in your content. It will help you generate solid content for your audience.

You can also use Storytelling to create content based on your core values. It is always easy to tell stories based on what you believe and know. A marketing effort that appears effortless to your reader will appeal to them the most.

4. Get On The Local Platform

Let's explain this point with an example first. Let's suppose you are a local brick-and-mortar business in California, but your website gets thousands of visitors from Florida. This may not do you much good. 46% of Google searches are made for getting local information. A major chunk of location-based mobile searches leads to an offline purchase. So, it is important to get on the local platform if you haven't already.

For getting on the local platform, you must know about local SEO. It is a fantastic tool that helps people find your business, which can drive sales.

Local SEO is defined as an SEO strategy that helps your business become more visible in Google's local search results.

To drive your local SEO, ensure you produce valuable information for your audience in your target area. When creating this content, concentrate on local keywords.

To know local keyword opportunities, use Ubersuggest.

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5. Provide Your Audience A Behind-the-Scenes Experience

If you want to increase your site traffic and attract a loyal audience, pre-sell your product or content. Let's suppose you are going to publish a new post next week. Share details about its writing process to your readers.

6. Create An Editorial Calendar

Marketers use editorial calendars for the purpose of planning, organizing, and scheduling the content they are required to share. An editorial calendar helps in creating a winning content marketing strategy. This is because it offers a variety of benefits. Here's how:

1. It enables you to track content events
2. It helps you see the performance of your distributed content
3. It helps to establish expectations and deadlines

Tip: These three steps can make your editorial calendar effective:

1. Understand your audience and the type of content they have an interest in
2. Conduct thorough research for your topic
3. Produce content and measure its effectiveness

7. Reply to Twitter Mentions

Responding consistently and quickly to people's comments and concerns shows people that you care. It humanizes your brand and demonstrates a level of dedication. Hence, following this content marketing tactic creates a great impression on your followers.

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8. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-Generated Content refers to content in the public sphere in which the creators share their experiences with your services and products.

A lot of businesses encourage user-generated content. Doing so not only helps the businesses save money, but they are also able to distribute engaging content.

UGC comes in different forms such as-

• Images
• Blog Comments
• Audios
• Videos
• Online Ratings and Reviews
• Social Media Posts
• Testimonials

9. Educate Your Customers

Give yourself some time to think about questions like - Do people want to know how your products work? Do they want to know the complete process of how you created the product? A lot of times, people are actually interested in learning more about your product. This helps them gain knowledge on something new, and they are likely to inform their friends as well. So, you must focus on customer education, especially if you are on a low advertising budget.

Let us give you an example of the kind of content you can create to educate your customers about your products. For instance, you want to educate your audience about HVAC systems. You can tell them how they work, what their advantages are, and what to watch out for. Your customers are more than willing to learn about your product, especially if few people are educating them about something similar on the web.

10. Use Trending Topics

Something or the other is always trending online. What you can do is, search for a way in which you can connect your brand with a trending topic.

To know an easy way to figure out trending topics, go to Google Trends. On the homepage, you will find certain topics. These topics are the ones that are currently getting plenty of search traffic on Google.

Remember, at the time of selecting trending topics, always keep your brand image in mind. Ensure you are only selecting the right trends.

11. Use Video Content

Viewers retain 95% of a message they see in a video and 10% of it when they read it in a text. With these stats, you can very well gauge the power of video content.

To produce useful video content for your audience, you can always consider starting a Youtube Channel. With the help of video, you can capture the attention of people who want to learn visually or want to hear useful advice rather than reading it in lengthy guides.

If you decide to make videos, you have to do it the right way. Ensure you have high-quality software and a good camera. Brainstorm what types of topics you can explore in the video form. Brands create product demonstrations, webinars, and video tutorials to showcase their expertise.

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12. Evaluate Your Competitor's Content

You need to carefully assess what your competitors are putting out there. For this, make it a point to check the types of content your competitors are producing. Also, check the things that they might be doing better, know the keywords they are ranking for, and figure out a unique way of covering the subjects they have already covered.

13. Produce Engaging Visual Content

With the amount of content being put out there, you may find it difficult to break through the noise. Fortunately, visual content can help you do so. People can be really busy and engaging visual content can help you capture the attention of your target audience.

So, start now and create GIFs, infographics, imagery, or illustrations to publish on your social media profiles and site.

14. Repurpose Your Content

Different people consume content differently. So, you can always think of presenting the same information in different formats. This is called content repurposing. It provides you two main benefits:

1) You can cater to more people

2) It saves a lot of time

An example of content repurposing can be:

Choose one of your articles and transform it into a PDF report and provide it as an ebook.

Tip: Repurpose only high-quality content that gave significant results the first time.

15. Create Content According To Common Customer Queries

If you receive a lot of similar questions from your customers, you should create content that answers those questions. Here's how this will benefit you:

1. It saves a lot of time for your customer service team
2. Answering FAQs works well for your SEO
3. It offers you relevant content ideas that you may not find in your keyword research
4. It engages your customer even more

To receive as many customer queries as possible, offer a number of ways in which your audience can get in touch with you. Provide contact or email details. Inform them that you will be answering queries on social media. You can also answer queries via live chat.

In addition to doing this, inform your team to write down any frequently asked questions. You can then consider addressing those questions in the form of video tutorials, comprehensive guides, and more.

16. Try Out New Technologies

Your strategies should acknowledge the current trends in marketing technologies and you must adapt to them accordingly. Nowadays, content marketing has moved to AI, AR, VR, vlogs, and podcasts.

Using new technologies improves user experience and resolves concerns they may have regarding a new service or product. To consider new ways of adopting the latest technologies, assess your competitors to check what they are using. It will give you a fair idea of what you should do.

17. Turn Your Attention To Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging is fast becoming a notable aspect of content marketing. A lot of brands are now approaching experts, influencers, and writing professionals for tips, experiences, and advice in a specific field. Businesses are even asking their own marketers to guest blog on other websites.

18. Personalize Your Content Marketing

There is a high chance that individuals scrolling through their social media will find information about a new product launch uninteresting. This is because they are tired of being sold to. Now, you may think how are you supposed to sell your products and services? We have an answer to your predicament.

You must try to showcase how your product or service adds value to the lives of your customers. To achieve something like this, personalize the way people experience your marketing. Provide tricks, tips, DIY tutorials, and how-to guides that can help your audience. This will help build a connection between your business and your customers.

19. Create Evergreen Content

Make sure to produce evergreen content for your site. This type of content must contain information that will always hold relevance. When you have evergreen content, you give a reason to your potential customers to check your site all year round.

Some evergreen content ideas include:

• How-to-Choose Guide
• Beginner’s Guide
• Buying Guide
• How-to-Make Guide

20. Increase Engagement on LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides better opportunities for businesses to increase their organic reach than Facebook.

To make your content viral on LinkedIn, make sure it is informative and impactful. Also, instead of sharing your blog's link, repost your blog content as an article on LinkedIn.

21. Email Promotion

An effective distribution channel, email marketing is known to bring traffic and leads to a site. To use email marketing for the growth of your business, you can send a monthly or weekly newsletter to your subscribers. Put fresh content in it to engage the reader. Your newsletter should also follow a mobile-friendly format as a majority of people check their emails on their mobiles. Do not forget to write eye-catchy headlines and subject lines for your newsletter and use videos and images wherever applicable.

22. Concentrate on Your Headlines

Put a considerable amount of thought into creating your headlines. Your headlines can impact how well your content performs.

Let's discuss some tips that will help you write attractive headlines:

• Use digits
• Ask questions
• Write different versions and read them out loud to see which one works
• Include the problem or the product
• Choose the most important benefit and include it prominently

23. Create Data-Driven Content

The sales and marketing team have so much data available to them. Thanks to this data, you can produce data-driven content that will appeal to your target customer. Use customer data for planning content for each stage of your buyer journey.

Note: When you dedicate time to analyze your collected data, you save a lot of time and become aware of what your buyers need. By doing so, you can create content that your audience will not overlook.

24. Share Your User's Story

Ever wondered who the best salespersons for your products are? They are the people who have used them. That's why we recommend that you put testimonials on your landing page. Doing so will help a majority of people feel confident about purchasing your product. They would know that people have tried your product and they have liked it.

25. Invest in Learning About Your Target Customer

Content marketing will continue to give high ROI if you put your time and effort into thoroughly understanding your target audience. For this, you need to consistently upgrade your skills and knowledge. Now, you may think how can you do that?

In this day and age, there are so many affordable and effective knowledge resources available. Use these resources to develop useful skills and gain valuable knowledge that will eventually help in the growth of your business.

26. Always Be Ready For A Change

As the content marketing and business world continue to evolve, your business should remain viable. For instance, you should be thoroughly aware of Google's algorithm updates, as doing so will help generate sufficient search traffic.

In case you notice that you are not getting satisfactory results, it is time for a change. Your goal is to satisfy your target audience and for that, you need to adjust and be flexible. The ideal way to stay competitive is to work with the most recent information.

Note: Look for ways in which you can keep up with the ever-changing nature of content marketing. Take a content marketing course or stay abreast of the current trends.

27. Target Gen Z and Millenials with Adaptive Content

If Gen Z and millennials comprise a considerable portion of your target audience, make sure you produce content keeping their needs in mind. Both of these groups have high expectations for how brands use technology. Also, they highly value the experience they have with a business.

A way to target both Gen Z and millennials is through adaptive content. This type of content supports meaningful interactions across every channel. It offers a personalized experience. For instance, you can suggest content based on their previous interactions with your business.

28. Offer Free Tools That Can Address Your Customer's Pain Points

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Are there any common problems your customer may have?
2. Is there a free tool you can provide them to help resolve them?

When you offer free tools that are relevant to your business, you can attract high-quality traffic to your website and gain more customers.

29. Make Your Product Shareworthy

If people tell their friends about your product, then more people are likely to buy it. So, think outside the box and look at ways to make your product more shareworthy. For example, take a look at Coca-Cola's Share a Coke campaign. They put people's names on Coke bottles to give a personalized experience to their target audience. The brand then encouraged individuals to share a Coke with their friends, take a picture, and post it with the hashtag #ShareaCoke.

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The campaign resulted in 235,000 tweets with the hashtag. They sold 150 million+ Coke bottles, too.

30. Support a Social Cause

A lot of brands avoid taking this route. Although, getting behind a social cause can reap significant results for businesses.

The two groups that are the most vocal on social media platforms are Generation Z and millennials. There is a high chance that they will align themselves with a business that supports a social cause. So, if you want to target younger generations, this is one of the most effective contents marketing tactics to try. With this tactic, you can create real change and also expand your customer base.

Conclusion

These 30 content marketing tactics will help you become more efficient in the way you produce content and help you reach more customers. Just concentrate on creating amazing content and use these content marketing tactics to grow your brand. Do make it a point to test these tactics to check which ones are successful in engaging your audience as not every tactic is going to suit your brand.

Quick Note: Trying different content marketing tactics is important for the growth of your business. However, it is equally important for your business to have an SEO-friendly website. Creating an SEO-friendly, professional niche-based website can take a lot of time. With the DashClicks' agency website tool, you can create an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.

There are 20,000 digital marketing agencies in the United States alone, as per a 2021 study by IBIS World, and millions are scattered worldwide. The market size of the agency business in the US is $19.8 billion, and it has an annual growth rate of 6.2%.

You have bleak chances of survival in case you are unable to differentiate your agency from others. Choosing a niche for your agency is a proven strategy to specialize in a particular segment, grow and scale your agency.

How Should Digital Agencies Choose a Niche?

The factors responsible for pushing the growth in the digital industry are a growing life cycle stage and consumer spending. It makes focusing on a niche market even more crucial when everyone else is offering generalized services.

If you are still caught in the specialist vs. generalist debate, here are some valuable insights from some of the most successful agencies on differentiating your agency by choosing a niche.

Mauricio Cardenal, the founder of Roofing Marketing Pros, a digital agency specializing in serving businesses that offer roofing services, has a unique business model. His agency provides qualified leads to roofing contractors with the help of a call center software and a digital marketing team.

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They generate leads using digital marketing tactics exclusively for a specific contractor and then nurture them with the help of a call center. When the lead is ripe, they send it to the roofing contractor to visit the site, provide them with the cost estimate, and close the deal.

So, a laser-focused approach provides you a five to ten times ROI. Unlike an agency that offers generalized services, specializing in a specific service involves using systems and processes that deliver results in very little time.

These processes help you aggressively bring a business in front of its audience and target them. In this case, the target audience is the people looking to get their roofs replaced or repaired.

Marketing Strategy to Target a Niche Market

Most roofing contractors wait for the stormy weather so that they can get new repair jobs. However, it can be highly frustrating for a business that depends on a single service to wait for their phone to ring for a new appointment in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, 90% of callers don't even qualify as serious customers. They call to check the prices, etc. So, such businesses need a sustainable business model to generate leads all around the year and not just during the stormy season.

Roofing Marketing Pros’ marketing strategy is also unique, just like his positioning. Instead of providing a rebuttal to the typical customer queries and objections such as “why should we hire you,” Mauricio Cardenal asks his prospect why he should partner with them.

He questions his customers, “are you genuinely committed to taking your business to the next level?” and “do you want to expand, change and hire more salespeople?“

Please have a look at a compelling and strong call to action on their landing page.

Tip: It's easy to target your audience as a specialist compared to a generalist because it reflects a high level of commitment and expertise.

1. Choose a Niche That You Are Familiar With

What prompted Cardenal to choose roofing contractors as a niche was his exposure to the business as a young intern that liberated him in adulthood. During his college days, he worked for a general contractor and learned the nuts and bolts of the construction business. He realized that PPC or Pay Per Click could be the best digital marketing strategy for a roofing company for short-term business goals, given the average ticket size for a roof. His experience and vision are paying off tremendously in terms of the success he has achieved for his clients.

2. Choose a Niche That Is in Demand

One more reason why Cardenal focused on roofing as a niche for his agency business was that it was an in-demand service.

With the commoditization of digital agency business and mushrooming digital marketing agencies across the globe (estimated to be more than one million), focusing on a specific niche is considered the best strategy for an agency. By doing so, agencies also push themselves to specialize in a particular niche.

So, they hire experts, improve their learning curve, conduct internal training and implement the best practices to improve quality and productivity. According to Mauricio Cardenal, high-quality work that offers value and standard processes in a niche-based agency allows you to charge higher prices, replicate the results and scale your agency. Specialization in a specific segment also enables you to build relationships with the top influencers in that segment.

But, it's crucial to make sure that this niche you choose is in demand and there is not much competition.

3. Find a Digitally Friendly Niche

If you choose a segment that avoids digital marketing, you'll be less likely to succeed as a digital marketing agency. For example, some local businesses that thrive on word of mouth or references may not be very digital-friendly.

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Some of the companies deliberately avoid digital marketing. You should avoid such niches.

4. Perform Competitive Analysis

To succeed in digital marketing, it's essential to know what your competitors are doing. This way, you can eliminate a lot of time wasted with trial and error. Research your biggest competitors and find out their killer marketing strategies and what they are offering. Conduct a SWOT analysis to know their strengths and weaknesses and discover the service gaps you can fill. However, it's important to note that you shouldn't tread a beaten track. Don't allow your competition to dictate what you should do. Craft your personal and brand identity to blaze a new trail and shout it out loud in your community.

5. Define Your Buyer Persona or Customer Avatar

Defining your ideal customer avatar and buyer persona refines your messaging. Try to know every little thing you can to understand their habits, routine, likes, dislikes, passion, and what drives them to take action. Give your avatar a name. The better you know your prospective customer, the easier it would be to connect with them.

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6. Assess the Financial Prowess of Your Audience

A company might not be financially sound to buy your premium services even if it's booming. It happens when we have low-profit margins. So, apart from the willingness and interest to buy, they must also have a good cash flow to afford your services. If they hire an agency, a business needs to spend 10-15% of its revenues on marketing initiatives. But, very few companies can afford that. So, don't waste your time on unqualified leads.

7. Evaluate the Niche Opportunity

It would help if you didn't choose a niche like a cryptocurrency, which is still in its nascent stages, or something like payday loans or credit cards which is almost saturated. When something is either too popular or nearly saturated, it will cost a fortune to achieve any results. You don't stand a chance even if there is the slightest opportunity as the giant agencies are already after them. Additionally, you may also avoid an almost obscure niche where your services are not at all required. So, choose a niche where you have ample opportunities to grow and make money.

8. Choose a Niche That Has Long-Term Growth Potential

Several niches are facing existential crises during the pandemic. Garments, textiles, and the warp knitting industry are the worst hit, and millions of people have lost their employment in these niches worldwide. Apart from the temporary turmoil, some industries are on the verge of collapse, and that's often irreversible. So, it would help if you always chose a niche that has long-term growth prospects.

9. Decide to Have a Passion and Deep-Seated Love for Your Niche

You should choose a niche that you love unconditionally and genuinely care for. If you have a real emotional connection with that industry, products, and people, it will help you a lot, especially during tough times. If you're doing it just because that specific niche is booming, chances are you might lose steam soon and don't find yourself giving your 100%.

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10. Hire a Mentor

In the end, it's crucial to have a mentor who can do some hand-holding when the going gets tough, and you find yourself fighting your battle alone. The best mentor is someone who has the experience of running a successful agency himself. Running an agency isn't for the faint-hearted. It can be the scariest and loneliest experience for an entrepreneur, but if you persevere, it will transform your personal and professional life.

Conclusion

As you visualize opportunities in a specific niche, so will others. So, even though you have a small number of competitors, the competition can be fierce. If you're a bit inexperienced in your field, choosing a niche can be counterproductive. If you don't have the expertise in a particular domain, hire a trained workforce to meet clients' expectations. So, the second most crucial thing after choosing a niche is working hard and acquiring specialization in that niche. If you select a business segment and can still not deliver results, your reputation will be at stake.

How to persuade someone to trust you enough to purchase your product? A long time ago, a marketer called Elias St. Elmo Lewis provided an excellent answer to this question. He talked about a “funnel” –  a number of steps that the customer follows, with each step bringing them closer to buying your product. With this funnel, a stranger can potentially become a raving customer of your business.

As per Lewis, people follow these 4 steps before they are ready to make a purchase:

• Awareness: You have to make people aware that your service or product exists.
• Interest: People must be strongly interested in visiting your website or reading your ad.
• Desire: You are required to get people to express curiosity about your product.
• Action: Whether adding a product to their cart or placing a call to your sales team, your audience needs to decide to take the next step.

Even though this concept first arose in 1898, professional copywriters still use it. Nowadays, companies have some kind of a funnel in marketing, with stages’ names modified according to the company/industry. For instance, you will see an ‘evaluation stage’ in B2B marketing. In this stage, a person puts in a lot of consideration before making the purchase.

Creating Your Social Media Sales Funnel

To build your social media sales funnel, we will take the concept discussed above and apply it to social media. We will expand it a bit more with these two additions:

1. The Evaluation Stage (as nowadays, it has become convenient to research and compare products online)
2. The Advocacy Stage (because the biggest power of social media is helping customers attract even more customers)

Whenever you create a social media strategy, make sure that your tactics cover every stage in the sales funnel. As mentioned below, every step has a particular question your marketing strategy must provide an answer for:

• Awareness: How will potential customers find you via social media?
• Evaluation: How will they use social media to compare similar products? How will they use it for comparison between you and your competitors?
• Acquisition: How will you get them to purchase or convert today?
• Engagement: How will you utilize social channels for staying in touch with your customers (to sell more things in the future)?
• Advocacy: What will you do to get them to suggest your product to their friends on social channels?

A mistake that many amateur marketers often commit is to invest in only some stages of the funnel. For instance, a small business has a great website with product videos, sales content, and case studies. However, they don’t have a strategy to bring people on their website. For instance, Facebook videos or Instagram influencer accounts.

Now, a quick note before we start..

Your social media sales funnel must answer the five questions that we have mentioned above. If you don’t consider a particular stage of the funnel, you will weaken your marketing. For every stage of the funnel, choose two tactics at the most. And when you master these tactics, you can go ahead and add new ones.

1. Awareness: How will potential customers find you?

There are many ways to capture the attention of your potential customers. Select one from this list:

I. Organic tactics

A. Social media contests

Let’s save you some time when it comes to planning social media contests. Here are the top two contests that we recommend:

• Comment or/and like to win

The “comment or/and like to win” contest is held on almost all social platforms to create engagement. For launching this contest, create a post with an informative caption, an entry deadline, and guidelines. While writing your post, do mention something like this – “like and comment for a chance to win…”

To let more people know about the contest, use Instagram or Facebook stories. Using hashtags will also increase the contest’s reach.

• Photo caption contest

An exciting way to encourage followers to comment on your picture and engage with your business is a “caption this” post.

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B. Use Youtube and SEO to gain new subscribers

If you have a YouTube channel for your business, here are some ways to promote it:

• Strike a balance between trending content and evergreen videos

Upload a few videos which will always hold relevance. When you do this, your subscribers keep returning to you again and again. Famous evergreen content includes tools and resources lists, how-to guides, tip roundups, and more. This kind of timeless content can rank well for years to come, boosting both traffic and SEO. Use social media plugins to share content and build connections with your audience.

• Stay active in the community

Subscribe to channels that have a similar audience as yours. Like and share their content and mention them in your videos or thoughtfully comment on their channels. Doing so helps you know your competitors and gain new viewers.

II. Paid tactics

A. Instagram Ads: Some of the advertising formats on Instagram include:

• Image ads: Image ads help businesses advertise their products and services using a single image. They can add text to the image as well.

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• Video ads: These ads allow businesses to give a closer look at their products and services. Although in-feed video ads can be a maximum of 60 minutes, shorter videos prove more impactful.

B. Facebook Ads: If you don't want to go with Instagram ads, you can opt for Facebook ads. The types of Facebook ads include:

• Image ads: You can create an image ad with a few clicks. All you need to do is boost one of your existing posts with an image taken from your Facebook page.
• Poll ads: A poll ad is a mobile-only Facebook ad format. For creating a poll ad, you can incorporate a two-option poll to a video/image ad. You can then add separate links for the two poll choices.

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2. Evaluation: How will they make a comparison with your competitors or similar products?

Getting attention will alone not suffice. You need to ensure you have the required reviews, credible information, and case studies to convince customers.

I. Organic tactics

1. Show glimpses into your business via Instagram.
2. Gain positive reviews on your Facebook page.
3. Make video testimonials from your customers and post them on your Facebook page.
4. Create YouTube videos that have your products’ demo.
5. Have a support team that answers questions on Twitter.
6. Put catalogs and product shots on Pinterest and Instagram.

3. Acquisition: How will you get them to purchase or convert today?

Sometimes you need to nudge your potential customer to buy. The tactics that we mention below help in this regard:

I. Organic tactics

Social traffic is the traffic coming to your mobile site or your website from social media platforms and social channels. Use this traffic for email sign-ups. Then, send offers as a next step.

Note: A mobile and SEO-friendly website is crucial for the growth of your business. Creating a professional niche-based website that is both mobile- and SEO-friendly can take several days. But, if you use DashClicks' agency website tool, you can create a custom branded agency website (which is both mobile- and SEO-friendly) in just a few seconds. A fantastic way of impressing your prospects, isn't it?

II. Paid tactics

• Facebook Messenger ads: Let's start with some social media statistics Facebook ranks 3rd in the list of most-visited sites in the world. Hence, you must use it to persuade your potential customers to buy from your business. Facebook Messenger ads enable you to reach more customers in no time. They are known to increase conversion rates.

A type of Facebook Messenger ad is a Facebook Click-to-Messenger ad that helps you reach new audiences. These ads are engaging and mobile-friendly. With the help of these ads, you get the contact info of the interested person and can message them on Facebook Messenger. A great way to increase conversions, isn't it?

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• Facebook offers ads: These are mobile-only, customizable ads that attract your audience to make a purchase.

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4. Engagement: How will you stay in touch with a customer?

We all know that a lot of work goes into finding customers. Staying in touch with them opens up more sales opportunities in the future.

I. Organic tactics

A. Host regular Twitter Chats: A type of public conversation, a Twitter chat is organized around a particular topic.

Tip: Here are some tips to help you host a successful Twitter chat:

• A hashtag creates a digital space where people can connect. Use a hashtag that is memorable, different, and relevant.
• Pick an engaging, valuable, and relevant topic (it can be broad or super-niche).
• Set a date and time and remind your followers about the schedule in advance.
• Assign a moderator who will keep things moving during the chat by asking questions and monitoring the chat.
• As there will be plenty of participants in your Twitter chat, organize questions in the form of Q1, Q2, and so on. Encourage the participants to answer the same way (A1, A2, and so on).

B. Reply to questions from customers in a weekly Facebook live series.

II. Paid tactics

1. Make a private Facebook Group for your customers so that they can connect and discuss your products.

5. Advocacy: How will you get them to suggest your product to their friends?

Provide an easy way to your customers to talk about their experience so far. Provide them an outlet where they share their love for your products. This builds your credibility and attracts fresh prospects.

I. Organic tactics

1. Create a private Facebook Groups for existing customers
2. Create customer communities on Instagram. For instance, create a hashtag that attracts posts from customers. This way, you not only engage existing customers but showcase the amazing features of your products to new prospects.

Wrapping it up

The ultimate goal of a social media sales funnel is to get your customer to buy your products and services and recommend them to others. So, it is necessary to build one and focus on every stage.

Ensure that your marketing strategy provides an answer to the above-mentioned questions, and you are all set! Once you achieve success with the tactics you use for every stage, you can go ahead and add new ones.