Technology is rapidly influencing consumer behavior. With an increasingly complex business paradigm, agencies, too, are caught in a challenging situation. If you find yourself overwhelmed as an agency, it's time to slow down and reevaluate your approach.

The major issues faced by the agencies can be resolved by automation, delegation, and tweaking the process. Switching to more innovative ways of handling the day-to-day tasks may require some time, training, and discipline, but it will surely pay off in the long run. Five minutes of planning can save you dozens of hours.

For example, the standard sales process requires making about a hundred sales calls only to get one or two customers, while it can take as long as one month to convert them. Instead, you can offer them a professional-looking website created by an automated tool in just a few seconds.

Here are eight such innovative tactics that may save your agency from the daily grind:

1. Outsource or White Label

The market today offers numerous opportunities for entrepreneurs and agencies. Thanks to the availability of alternate platforms, tools, and a highly trained digital workforce, you can outsource almost anything.

If you are running an agency with limited resources, it's not always possible to hire a team of full-time employees. In that case, you can very well outsource business services from some of the most competitive organizations and platforms to run a successful agency.

Outsourcing has many benefits besides high-quality services and affordability. With the right outsourcing or white-label partner, running a digital agency becomes significantly easier.

Outsourcing also allows you to position yourself as a full-service agency. A popular alternative to outsourcing is white label services, which you can brand as your own and offer to your clients without making any changes.

Brain Dean of Backlinko, Harsha Kiran, the founder of Coupofy, Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, Mark Manson, Matthew Kepnes, Arianna O'Dell, and Rolf Potts are some of the well known digital nomads who are running successful businesses using outsourcing as their business model.

There are many business functions that you or your agency might not specialize in. Outsourcing or reselling white label services is the best modern-day solution to counter this limitation.

2. Establish a Morning and Closing Routine

It would help if you practiced some morning and closing rituals aimed at maximizing productivity, Make these three things a part of your routine:

A. Start your day with meditation, workout, and reading

Start your day with some exercises or meditation and reading a book for personal or professional growth. It is essential for your mental health, concentration, happiness, and maintaining a positive frame of mind.

B. Make a to-do list

Refer to your project management tools, client communication, and team productivity reports and prepare a to-do list for yourself and your team each day. A To-do list streamlines your tasks according to their priority level and helps you speed up your workflow. If you are a Jira user, you can integrate a Smart Checklist app to break down complex issues into actionable steps. Keep it short and flexible, leaving room for emergencies, meetings, and other interruptions.

C. Plan for the next day

Similar to the morning routine, you should also have a closing routine for the day. Jot down the top five things you need to do the next day and delegate them to your employees. Declutter your desk in the evening to start your next day on a fresh note. Identify the tasks that chew up a lot of your productive time, and streamline them for a better workflow. Identify the bottlenecks, brainstorm the solutions and try to fix them proactively.

3. Prioritize Your to-Do List and Plan Your Entire Week in Advance

Studies prove that you can save a lot of time and daily grind work if you plan your week. Reorganize your to-do list and ruthlessly prioritize your tasks.

Use Monday to plan, build your calendars, to-do lists, and notes and make a list of all those tasks in their order of priority. When you have your to-do list ready, list the people you need to collaborate with and the resources you will require to accomplish those tasks.

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Team Workload Management

Here is a template that will help you to manage team workload. It will also help you to monitor tasks and workflow closely. So, if there are any bottlenecks, you can proactively identify and fix them. This template works best for smaller teams that may have different hourly requirements.

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Why Using a Central Dashboard is the Best Option for User Management?

Do you struggle with having to juggle between tasks and platforms during a campaign?

Working with different data sets, tools, and platforms can be a nightmare for a marketer. It kills productivity and drains your energy.

A central dashboard is an effective solution for agencies as it provides an at-a-glance view of performance. It also offers the following additional benefits:

A. Supports sales and marketing by providing insights such as the number of leads.

B. Arranges all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in one place.

C. Allows easy access to relevant data.

D. Helps you save money and time by allowing for more efficient data retrieval.

E. Boosts your marketing by helping you run your campaigns more quickly and smoothly.

F. Helps you get real-time data to stay updated.

G. Frees you from the tedious process of manually collecting and processing data.

It is better than using templates as you need to make frequent manual changes in the templates while using them.

For example, consider the following white label dashboard. It offers a neat interface and allows you to manage users and their activities from a central location.

4. Streamline Project Management

You must find a way to deal with deadlines and provide your clients with the best results in the smallest time frame possible.

Quick Tips For Effective Prioritization

A long to-do list may often seem overwhelming, stress-inducing, and complicated, often leading to procrastination. You can follow these tips from Caitlin Bishop for effective prioritization.

A. Jot down every task: It is an excellent practice to make a to-do list of all your tasks, including personal and professional ones, in one place. It helps you to organize and prioritize your tasks.

Working from single dashboards can therefore be quite advantageous for you as a digital agency. It saves tons of time by helping you manage your users and prioritize your tasks.

B. Save time using all-in-one dashboards: A white label dashboard for the digital marketing agencies can help you in the following ways:

• Allows your clients to monitor and analyze data from one single location in real-time.
• It offers a beautiful interface which makes working on it an enjoyable experience.
• It is automatic and unbelievably simple.
• It helps you save time by automatically generating different kinds of reports.
• It automatically gathers all your client data into visually attractive reporting dashboards.
• It enables you to customize all your dashboards with your branding and logo.
• It automatically collects the essential information from your clients through its intelligent onboarding process.

Sharing limited access to the centralized dashboard with your clients is a good agency marketing strategy. They can use it for various purposes, including getting campaign updates.

• Define long-term goals: To manage your projects and campaigns in a better way, keep track of your long-term goals. Also, list the tasks you need to complete to achieve those goals.
• Break down larger goals: Split your bigger goals into weekly, monthly, and yearly targets for ease of execution.
• Set clear deadlines: Setting deadlines is one of the most effective strategies for productivity. If you don’t have clear deadlines, your project may stretch longer than you had planned earlier. Even if there’s no deadline for a task, you must set it to finish it in time.
• Keep a separate slot for urgent and vital tasks: If you split your high-priority tasks into urgent and most important, it will help you to finish these high-priority tasks in time. You should either delegate or strike off all the remaining tasks.
• Create a daily list of most important tasks: In the morning, you should write down the five most important tasks to be completed that day. It will help you to accomplish your goals faster.
• Avoid distractions: Steer clear of conflicting priorities and focus on the most urgent and essential tasks. It will help you to build momentum and finish your tasks in less time.
• Consider effort: Identify the tasks that require the least effort to complete and breeze through them quickly.

5. Look For Ways to Automate Your Tasks

As an agency owner, you might have to handle several tasks, which can be very time-consuming. Tasks like collecting and transferring data to a spreadsheet, generating reports, replying to FAQs, moving emails into a CRM, creating informational websites require a substantial investment of time and effort. If these tasks are not automated, they may take a heavy toll on your productivity. Here are some ways to automate your workflow for better efficiency:

A. Streamline Appointment Scheduling

A lot of back and forth happens while booking a meeting time with a client. It consumes a lot of your precious time, and it doesn't add any value to the project. We can cut it off through automation.

You can use tools like Calendly or other Calendly alternatives that allow you to share a link that lets invitees schedule meetings according to your availability and communicate with the channel for video conferencing. You can also use x.ai, which is an AI-powered instant meeting scheduling tool.

B. Systemize Proposals & Contracts

Proposal templates and customizing can be time-consuming. To solve this problem, you may use tools like PandaDoc that can streamline the process. Besides reducing your time to create a sales proposal, it allows you to collaborate with other parties using the templates developed by the tool. It sends you a notification when the recipient opens the proposal so you can follow up with them. The recipient can sign the contract using the same software.

It also allows you to integrate a payment gateway so that clients can pay you directly. The software can also manage HR documents for the new hires. The process of getting the legal approval for agency partnerships can be a hassle for you, but the tool can streamline it for you.

C. Generate Reports to Identify the Digital Blind Spots of a Prospective Client

Generating periodical reports for your digital marketing campaigns can be a time-consuming task. It can be overwhelming for your team members who may be preoccupied with other tasks.

Reports are an integral and essential part of digital marketing, but they require you to invest a lot of time and resources.

Now, you can generate professional-grade digital marketing reports using InstaReports with a single click.

The tool can also automate these reports to go out at a set frequency or time interval such as daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly.

The report will include everything from backlinks to paid campaigns and social media advertising. You can even give your clients access to a custom branded dashboard to eliminate reporting and allow them to monitor the campaign's progress.

What are the Features of InstaReports?

With this tool, you can create in-depth data-driven reports without wasting your time.Ā  It takes only a few seconds to generate such reports. It has the following features:

A. It's integrated with Google Maps.

B. It can retrieve data from different digital channels such as your website, Facebook, Mobile, and Online listings.

C. After gathering data from a diverse range of channels, the tool generates exhaustive reports indicating the exact areas that need immediate attention by the client and digital agency.

The tool highlights:

1. Overall Analysis
2. Listings Analysis
3. Social Analysis
4. Organic Competitor Analysis
5. Backlinks Analysis
6. Google Ads Analysis

When you enter the business name and the URL of a client, the tool displays the following page.

Find the overall score of a website, when you scroll down.

Analyze directory listings and find errors in them.

Using online review reports, you can perform ORM on your website.

Evaluate the performance of your social media pages vs. your competitors.

Get the report for mobile responsiveness and speed of your website.

Organic competitor analysis and organic keyword ranking reports.

Get the backlinks report.

Here is the Google Ads Competitor Analysis.

D. Save Time in Onboarding

With a robust client onboarding process, you can save a lot of time.

A client onboarding tool allows automatic client onboardings by gathering crucial information from your clients using an intelligent process.

To prevent any possible delays during the onboarding process, the tool sends automated email reminders so clients never forget to complete their onboarding.

E. Save Time in Creating Niche-Based Websites for Your Clients

Sometimes, you might have to create several niche-based websites for your clients. Creating professional websites can be a big hassle. The website creation process involves a lot of back and forth and delays from the developers, graphic designers, and writers.

There are many agency tools that offer website construction in a single click. Tools like InstaSites can make life easier for you. All you need is to enter your business details and choose the niche.

How to create niche-based websites for your clients:

1. Log in to Your DashClicks White Label Dashboard and Go to agency tools.

2. Click on InstaSites. You'll reach this page.

3. Choose a plan and go to Single InstaSites Builder and fill out the form.

4. Now select an InstaSites template from various niche-based templates such as plumbing, roofing, towing, locksmith, electrician, HVAC, etc.

5. Now you can go to the MyInstaSites tab. In less than a minute, the site would be ready and move from the Queued tab to the Prospects tab.

6. Now, you can check the results. A beautiful niche-based website with relevant content and graphics is waiting for you.

7. Check out its mobile version, as 80% of our traffic comes from mobile.

6. Invest in Training

As an agency, it is crucial to invest in your employees' training. You should invite the best mentors in your field for corporate training in different segments and services. It will help them stay abreast with the latest trends and practices, empower them, give them an edge over others, and increase organizational efficiency.

A. Arrange motivational and productivity workshops for your employees regularly

Motivation and productivity workshops are aimed at enhancing the morale of your employees. Through these workshops, your staffers will learn:

i. New ways of doing things

ii. Time management

iii. Productivity techniques

iv. How to stay away from negative emotions

v. How to prevent burnouts

vi. How to maintain work-life balance

vi. How to improve communication

vii. How to grow as a better professional

viii. How to cultivate leadership skills

ix. How to manage change and encourage innovation

x. How to stay happier

B. Arrange educational resources for your employees and train them to execute their tasks in a better manner

As an agency owner, it will always be beneficial for you to create and arrange educational resources for employees to execute their tasks more efficiently. You can create a section on your website for such educational resources. You can also conduct webinars and workshops to teach them a new skill. You can create an educational blog or video, or podcast channel to train your employees and your client's employees.

For example, let's have a look at this blog section. It contains the trending topics in the digital marketing domain.

Most of these topics are highly informative long-form articles.

Similarly, video blogs are also emerging as a popular medium of content delivery and consumption. Here is an educational video blog hosted by Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks.

C. Leverage internships

Hiring interns is a great way to cut costs and create loyal employees who are likely to stay with you for a longer time. Since hiring experts can be expensive, it is a sensible step to hire and train interns under an expert supervisor.

You can hire interns for a fraction of what you would pay to a full-time trained employee. Furthermore, these interns work very hard and deliver quality work because they are young and want to prove themselves.

7. Connecting with Customers/Users via Social Media/IoT

You can use social media to provide 24*7 customer support. It helps build trust and increase customer satisfaction. It also helps your agency grow as a responsible brand.

Provide 24*7 customer support through AI-based Chatbots:

AI-based Chatbots have emerged as the most popular medium to provide instant customer support globally. Connecting with customers on a 24*7 basis helps you establish your agency as a brand they can trust.

The way to provide excellent frontline support is to use AI-based chatbots. They can attend to customers' queries 24*7, register their complaints and handle inquiries.

8. Leverage Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnerships always help a startup or an agency. Since most agencies are not full-service agencies but specialize in just one or two fields, it's essential to collaborate with other agencies.

A. Partner with other agencies

Partnering with other agencies brings its rewards. Besides collaborating on the projects, you can also exchange leads as per your specialization.

B. Collaborate with influencers

Collaborating with influencers has become a global trend. It helps you cut your marketing expenditure as influencers share your marketing messages from their social accounts and endorse your products and services.

C. Explore alternative marketing channels

You can also tap other opportunities for marketing, such as partnering with local communities, clubs, and institutions. Apart from that, you can also try:

• Snapchat advertising
• Experiential marketing
• Pinterest advertising
• Content distribution networks such as Taboola and Outbrain
• Influencer marketing

Conclusion

These tactics will transform your agency business. While automation will save you a lot of time and operational costs, hiring practices such as leveraging internships and collaborating with influencers will save human resource costs. Practicing these tactics with proper planning will significantly elevate your agency’s efficiency and productivity to drive better results.

According to a CMI's 2018 B2C content marketing survey, 86% of B2C marketers think content marketing is a crucial strategy, and 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers. Still, the content marketing failure rate is relatively high in both B2C and B2B segments.

The core objectives of content marketing are to build trust, crush objections, and make the buyer's journey flow as frictionless as possible. Conversions will flood in if you can meet these objectives. You can use the following checklist to make those goals time-bound and measurable.

One of the chief reasons businesses fail in content marketing is that they aren't consistent with their content production and dissemination. They try something a few times and then quit. To ensure consistency and help businesses boost their content marketing engagement, we have compiled an 11-point content marketing checklist. Make sure you have it pinned near your desk.

Here is the checklist you can use to ensure success in your content marketing campaign:

1. Do You Know Your Target Audience?

You cannot succeed at content marketing unless you know your audience and their needs. To create valuable content for your audience, you must first understand their preferences, interests, habits, and needs. These insights will also let you know the kind of content they would like to consume.

According to HubSpot, 44% of the content marketing failure rate is linked to not creating content aligned to buyers' needs. But before that, you must conduct a survey or do some market research to know your target audience.

Tools You Can Use To Know Your Audience

You can use Google Analytics or other tools such as Moz Pro or Kissmetrics to know your audience.

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It will help you retrieve the following information about your customers' demographics.

Demographic details of your audience you may get through tools like Google Analytics:

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Job title
• Income
• Monthly spending pattern
• The kind of information they like to see
• Their pain points
• Their emotional triggers

Interest reports generated through Google Analytics

The Interests report will help you get an idea of the online habits of your audience. This report can further be divided into three reports:‍

A.  Affinity Category: This report highlights the general interests of your website visitors in terms of their hobbies and activities they enjoy. This is the top of the funnel, so you can use it for publishing informative content to increase brand awareness.

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B. In-Market Segment: This is the next stage in the sales funnel, which corresponds to the purchase intent and the consideration phase.

‍C. Other Categories: It groups users according to their browsing habits and what else they are surfing, so you can understand their inclinations.To get these reports. Go to the Audience section in Google analytics and click on Interests.These insights will help you understand:

• The type of content your audience likes and shares
• Communication channels they use
• Their buying habits and buying cycles

This information will act as the foundation of your content marketing strategy.Here are a few other ways to take the pulse of your audience:

A. Take a Survey

Take a survey using tools like SurveyMonkey and get the following details:

• Audience demographics
• Their desires, passions, lifetime objectives and goals, sources of motivations, and how much they are willing to pay to solve their problem
• Use both open-ended and closed-ended questions to know how your prospective customers think
• Ask questions that allow them to open up
• Know their biggest fears
• Questions about what would they do in case of an emergency

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B. Perform Competitor Analysis

Use competitor analysis tools such as SEMrush, or SpyFu to find the keywords your competitors are using. It would help if you also find the channels they are using to reach out to their audiences and distribute their content. Try to find out which social channels they are using and what kind of engagement and response they receive when they share their content, such as blog posts.

C. Visit Niche-Related Forums and Facebook Groups

The best way to know the views of your customers is to visit niche-based forums and social media channels such as Reddit, Facebook groups, and Quora.

You can also try LinkedIn forums. Use the search term "forums + (name the niche)" and enter it into the LinkedIn search field.

LinkedIn Forums

Facebook Groups

You'll find numerous forums and discussion boards associated with this niche. However, you should make sure that the particular forum is active with engaging content and people are actively responding to the comments. On LinkedIn, you may find that there are forums where there is no activity for a long time. It would be best if you did not waste your time on those forums.

How to Know Your Audience Using Alexa?

To understand the needs and expectations of your target audience, you need to know their buyer persona. You can easily do it through Alexa using the following steps:

A. Go to Alexa.com>>Type in your site URL>>Click the Goā  button.B. Scroll down the results page to check the audience demographics and other engagement metrics such as bounce rate, daily pageviews, and visitor insights.C. Here you can find the ratio of male and female visitors, information about their education, and the average daily time spent on the site.

It will help you to build buyer personas. You can create a content strategy for these personas.

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2. Do You Have a Predefined Content Strategy?

Make sure you have a robust content strategy aligned with your customers' expectations.

These are the crucial insights that you get from the surveys about the needs of your audiences. These insights will help you in creating your content strategy.

• Audience Statistics
• Age range
• Niche
• Competitors
• Engagement via (Social channels)
• Needs

The action steps you need to build a strategy:

A. Sign up for the Leading Blogs in Your Niche and Follow Them on Social Media

To save time, find out the keywords your competition is ranking for. It is essential to know the relevant long-tail keywords that drive meaningful traffic and are also responsible for conversion and top. The best way to do it is to sign up for the leading blogs in your niche and regularly monitor the keywords they are using. These can be both short-tail and long-tail keywords. You can also follow them on social media to see the terms, phrases, tone, and keywords they are using.

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B. Spy on Your Competitors for Blog Post Ideas

Explore more blog post ideas related to your niche using BuzzSumo and social monitoring and listing tools. Plan your content to attract, engage and build lifetime relationships with customers.

Here are some of the most popular content pieces that BuzzSumo returned for the search query home renovation ideas.

C. Constantly look for ways to attract traffic

Conduct research to know what businesses are doing to attract traffic and boost their brand authority. How are successful organizations engaging their customers using content marketing techniques?

How Orbit Media Uses Content Marketing to Attract 60k Visits per Month on Its Website?

Orbit Media is a web design and development agency with a killer content strategy. They attract nearly 60,000 visits per month, that too entirely from content marketing.

Here are the salient features of the content strategy:A. They use original research and write comprehensive and well-written guides.

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B. They send surveys to thousands to bloggers to conduct original research and get firsthand insights

C. They curate this data into statistics and generate reports

D. They transform this data into branded images, charts, and stories

E. The original research earns thousands of backlinks

Key Takeaway: Original research as a content strategy surprisingly boosts a brand's authority.

3. Is Your Content Data-Driven or Plain Storytelling?

Data-driven content helps in establishing your brand as an authority. It shows that the content you have created is not just a fancy piece of prose, but well-presented information that is backed by data received from authentic sources. So, it is something you can rely on, and it will help you grow your audience.

Another thing you can use is attention-grabbing and powerful headlines that compel people to read further.

A. Make Sure Your Content Is Engaging

Data-driven content with attention-grabbing headlines will not work if your content is not engaging. It will only increase the bounce rate on the page, which can be disastrous for your website's SEO and search engine rankings.

B. Make Sure Your Content Connects With Audiences

Make sure that your content connects with your audience. It's essential to make a lasting impact to boost conversion. Be careful not to be overly emotional.

It's not necessary to write your own story either. You can use your client's story but write it in such a compelling manner that it connects with people and encourages them to take the desired action, which is the whole purpose of content marketing.

Google Using Data-Driven Content Marketing

Google is a market leader when it comes to producing branded data-driven content. As the dominating global search engine, Google has a vast amount of increasing data every day. Google uses this data-driven content for different buyer personas in various formats.

Here is how Google uses real-time data-driven creatives to serve ads that seamlessly link external data to Google solutions.

How do Real-time data-driven creatives work?

A. Google collects indexed data on fast-changing external factors (such as meteorological data)

B. This data is collected on the Google Cloud Platform

C. It is then linked with Google's ad serving systems through Google Marketing Platform‍

D. The ad platform serves variable ad creatives

E. The ads are considered the most suitable according to the data on the consumer's environment

Image Source: Think with Google

Spotify

Spotify, the music streaming and broadcasting app, is a master at customization and data-driven content marketing. They use data to send customized content and emails to their customers.

They use their customers' account details and their data on breakout artists to determine whether these users were early listeners of a now-popular band or artist.

They use data from millions of streams to target users who are in the top 1 to 15% bracket in terms of usage. These data-driven content marketing techniques pay off in huge ways for Spotify.Here is how Spotify uses bug data to create custom content for its users.

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4. Do You Have a Time Management Strategy?

Most agencies waste a lot of time while creating and distributing content is repetitive processes. If you have a time management strategy in place, you will first make a plan for ideation, production, and distribution of content and then allocate tasks to your best-fit staffers. It will save a lot of time in back and forth and unnecessary delays because of chaos and confusion negatively influencing the workflow.

To effectively manage your time and workflow, follow these tips:

A. Allocate Tasks

Streamline your processes and allocate tasks to your team members for a smooth workflow. If you don't do this, a lot of time is wasted because of confusion, vague description of tasks, and resulting chaos.

B. Assign Time for Each Task

If you assign time to each task, it prevents unnecessary delays as work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

C. Have Pre-Written Scripts

If you have pre-written scripts for routine communications, it will save a lot of your time. So, before you launch your content marketing campaign, make sure that you have all the weapons in your arsenal to execute repetitive tasks and achieve a flexible workflow. You should have clearly defined tasks so that you can allocate them to your team members. It will help you measure their performance and monitor the entire workflow.

5. Do You Create Content For Different Stages in a Buyer's Journey?

Your content strategy needs to be tied to a broader goal. However, if you are unable to figure out that goal, it's challenging to identify your target audiences and measure the success of your content marketing campaign.

Components of a Sales Funnel

To understand those goals, you must be familiar with the buyer's journey or the sales funnel. It has been defined in the following steps:

At each stage of the buyer's journey, you should serve your target audience the right content that specifically talks about their needs. These needs severely differ and evolve at each stage.

So, if you have a defined content marketing strategy, you'll achieve the results, but if you are publishing one-off articles without a plan and a target audience, you're unlikely to get any closer to your goals.

Let's have a look at how you can figure out the needs of your target audience to formulate a content strategy.

A. Audience Statistics: Conduct a survey and try to know as many things as you can about your target audiences

B. Age Range: The age range/group of your target audience

C. Niche: The industry they belong to (especially in the case of B2B clients)

D. Competitors: Who are their competitors

E. Engagement Via: List the social channels you can use to engage them

F. Needs: What are they looking for? What are their pain points? Use social listening to know more about your prospective customers.

6. Have You Addressed Customers' Queries in Your Content?

The chief objective of content marketing is to address customer queries and concerns. To include customers' questions, especially the FAQs, is also one of the most effective SEO practices.

To avoid the perils of being friend-zoned by your website visitors, you should be ready with the rebuttals to their objections and arguments. To handle this situation, you should compile FAQs and other possible customer queries you think your customers "should ask" and answer them on your website.

It will reduce your time converting the visitors and help you push the customers further down the sales funnel. So, when your sales team interacts with them, it will have to answer fewer questions.

7. Have You Added Visual Elements and Appealing Graphics?

Images dominate 63% of social media, and the trend will continue to rise in the future. According to the Visual Teaching Alliance, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, which has the power to see images that last for just 13 milliseconds. So, visual content is far more potent than text-based content for grabbing your attention and retention. You can use various websites to find free and paid stock photos. You can edit these pics to use in your blog or social media posts.

8. Are You Creating Shareable Content?

You can write excellent content, but you can't make sure that it will go viral. But there are a few tried and tested methods that will help you create shareable content.

• Use appealing visuals to grab the attention of your audience
• Use storytelling and personalized content to engage your readers
• Write well-researched, long-form content with data to support your facts
• Evoke emotions with your content
• Research your audience and write what your audience wants
• Collaborate with your influencers to make your content go viral
• Use unique research results and use stunning insights information

How to Write Better Headlines?

Moz conducted a study to write better headlines, and they shared the following tips:

• Use numbers and be specific in your headlines. 36% of customers prefer headlines with specific numbers. For example, "Boost conversion by 50% instantly: Hacks you can implement right now."
• Address the reader in your headline. Ways you can multiply traffic by 250%."
• Write "how-to" articles. For example, "How to write 5,000 words per hour."

Questions and regular headlines were the least preferred by the users.

To know the trending topics in your niche, you can use tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs. You can also pick insights for your next blog topic from the latest book titles on Amazon.com. You can also read customer reviews for these new titles and gather a lot of information from user-generated content about what your audience is looking for.

9. Do Your Openings Grab Attention?

After an attention-grabbing headline, the second most important thing is your article's opening. Even if you use an attention-grabbing headline, your reader will not likely read your post if the opening is dull and boring. You can use the following tricks to make your introduction enjoyable.

• Start with a story. You can mention a quote in the beginning that reflects the theme or the message of the story.
• Use a teaser and use it to indicate what to expect from the post.
• Use confessions and “before and after” facts in your openings.
• Don’t use a misleading opening.
• Use Data-Driven Content

Modern-day journalists take data from a scenario and use visualization and storytelling to convert it into engaging and meaningful content. Such content becomes popular as it has the trust factor associated with it, so people take it seriously.

You can gather data for your posts, filter your data and use it to articulate your point credibly. Make sure that you tell an exciting story that hooks the readers. To get lots of such data, you can sign up for Google Alerts, and you can also use influencers to mine such data.

10. Have You Optimized Your Post for SEO?

On-page and off-page SEO are essential for a blog because even if you don't rank high on those keywords, they will help you get found by users and drive relevant traffic. If you use a good keyword tool and make it a strategy to use long-tail keywords in your blog posts consistently, soon enough, you will start ranking on search engines. Tag your post with appropriate meta descriptions that will help you get discovered by Google bots. It would help if you also tried to create backlinks through guest posts and other tactics.

However, while doing on-page SEO, try and avoid keyword stuffing as it might attract the search engine penalty. Experiment with conversational writing, and you'll be surprised to know that you can create content within a few minutes. Here are a few standard tips to optimize your post for SEO.

If you find it difficult to optimize a vast amount of content with the best keywords that boost conversion, try white label SEO services. These services are cheaper, reliable, audience particular, and executed by trained professionals.

11. Have You Created an Editorial Calendar?

Content marketing is the process of creating content for every stage in the buyer's journey for different buyer personas. Therefore, to avoid deviating from the content grid, we must have a content calendar. Most bloggers and publishers use a content calendar to not fall behind the schedule and consistently publish on different topics that might be interesting and informative for their audiences. You can create a monthly, quarterly, or even early content calendar and religiously follow it to create content that will help you to increase conversion and engagement on your blog.

A content calendar might include the following information on a spreadsheet:

• Blog title
• Keywords to be included
• Publishing platform
• Targeted date for publishing (Start date, writing completion, quality evaluation, graphics creation, approval, and publishing.)
• Targeted Buyer persona
• Targeted stage in the buyer’s journey
• People the post is assigned to (SEO, writing, Quality Analysis, and proofreading, graphics, and publishing)

Conclusion

It takes a long time to attract an audience who’ll trust you and be loyal to your brand. The key to success in startup marketing is to have a robust content strategy and stick with it. You’ll need to learn and adapt your strategy continually. Content marketing offers tremendous benefits as great content attracts people’s attention, compelling them to take the desired action. The above checklist will make sure that you engage your audience and generate leads. So, make sure you answer customers’ questions, talk about their problems, offer solutions to win their hearts through content marketing.

Coronavirus is not a regular pandemic. It has affected the world on an enormous scale. It has impacted almost every aspect of our lives regardless of our age, gender and location.

It has impacted our economy so severely that almost every industry is affected somehow or the other. It is time for the brands and businesses to work together. Many small and large companies have filed for bankruptcy, and some have permanently closed their shutters. Hundreds of firms have permanently closed in the US alone since the epidemic first broke out in March 2020.

According to a survey of 130+ agencies across the globe by Uplers, 66% of agencies experienced a decrease in overall revenue. The majority, 32% of agencies that the pandemic impacted, saw a drop of up to 30% in revenue.

And last but not least, 80% of the agencies indicated that they would either explore, continue or increase outsourcing to survive and stay profitable.

We, too, believe that outsourcing can be a life-saver for many struggling agencies worldwide.

Relation Between Economic Downturn and Progressive Spending

Due to the COVID-19 related disruption, many businesses have lost their search engine visibility and online traffic overnight. They cannot sustain in this way for a long time. Businesses now need to be more aggressive since they've already lost most of the foot traffic and now depend on digital marketing to keep things afloat.

In the 20th century, businesses that transformed their strategy and restructured their spending with a progressive outlook during the downturn outpaced their competitors who hadn't. So, the companies which restricted themselves took a safe route and refrained from any progressive changes either went out of business or suffered losses.

In an interesting study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, it was found that the strategies adopted by the businesses during an economic slowdown decided their future after the recession was over. Many business leaders used such opportunities to ensure long-term gains and refocused their spending rather than cutting it severely.

11 Tips to Market Your Digital Agency in the Middle of a Pandemic

Here are some of the measures you can take to market your digital agency during the pandemic.

1. Be Sensitive to Your Customers Needs and Situation- Help, Contribute, Offer Tips

Regardless of whether you have tested positive or not, our lives have been severely affected by the novel coronavirus outbreak at both the macro and micro levels. Now, our movements are restricted, which means we cannot meet our relatives and friends too often. Neither can we visit our favorite eating joints and restaurants or go out on weekends to the movies.

Many people are struggling emotionally, psychologically, and financially. It is time to show empathy and offer help and support during these challenging times as a business.

Tip 1: It would help if you were sensitive to your customers' situation without sound too salesy'. If you can win their hearts, sales will pour in eventually.

Tip 2: You can start by providing the essential tips and encourage more active involvement, such as contributing to the local food banks or assisting people with their medical supplies.

Tip 3: Direct, prompt, helpful, empathetic, and informative communication can do magic for your digital agency regarding client retention during an economic downturn.All your sincere and honest efforts would be paid back with gratitude by the social media audiences, and you will likely reap its benefits afterward. We never forget people or brands that helped us and stood by us during the crisis.

2. Use Social Media to Communicate With Your Customers

If you choose to be an optimist, this is the time when you can go from goodā  to "great." The good news is most people can be found online as they are stuck at home.

In a world that has suddenly become an isolated place, people love to spend time on social media to stay connected with their friends and family.

Tip: Since most people are spending time online, leverage social media to communicate with them.

Always be available for your customers. Go out of your way to help them and use this time to remind them that you are always there for them. And there is no better medium than social media to do this.

3. Increase Your Website's Online Visibility To Add New Clients

As most people can be found online these days, search traffic has boosted even during the daytime. While most people stay at home, they keep looking for updates within their community and avenues for entertainment online. Gaming, searching for information and online shopping are among the other most popular activities.

Anything online these days is consumable. Therefore, it's high time for businesses to strive for top slots on Google's SERPs using SEO tactics. It is the only way people can find your business. Keeping yourself invisible on the web can be disastrous for your business as people like to order from the comfort of their homes.

Here are the top 10 ways to increase your website's visibility:

1. Target your website pages for popular keywords: Every page on your website should target a specific topic. So, first, conduct keyword research to find high-volume, intent-based and relevant keywords. Use those keywords sparingly on your web page and meta tags.

2. Make your web pages easy to crawl by Google bots: First, perform an SEO audit of your site to ensure there are no indexing errors in it. Add keywords related to your targeted topic in the meta title, URL, meta description, and image tags of your page and your web pages.

3. Create more pages: Create more blog posts and offer value addition through them. Choose popular topics and create unique, engaging content.

4. Create your profile on online directories: Increase your online footprint and create listings on online directories such as Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Manta, Local.com, and Yellow Pages, beginning with Google My Business.

5. Collaborate with influencers: Influencers and bloggers can boost your online visibility by bringing your website in front of their audiences, so leverage them aggressively.

6. Create quality content: Create quality content with compelling topics to rank higher on SERPs. Use trending topics.

7. Use Google Ads: Invest in Google ads. It will bring traffic, increase visibility for your website and help you with conversions.

8. Provide outstanding customer service: Extraordinary customer support differentiate you from the competition. It results in positive reviews by your customers, which will again boost your SEO and online visibility.

9. Post to social media: Social media channels are mighty and effective when spreading your word. So, create your social profiles on the popular channels in your niche and post frequently using social media posting tools.

10. Be shareable: Provide value addition, use compelling captions and images, and target the followers of your social media followers subscribers.

For further information on how to boost your SEO and online visibility, you can refer to these posts:

A. Best SEO Practices to Rank Your Website in 2021‍

B. 9 Powerful Tips to Optimize a Blog Post for SEO‍

C. SEO for Mobile vs. Desktop

‍D. All About On-Page SEO Ranking Factors‍

E. Top 20 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2021 and Beyond

Tip 1: Increase your online visibility so more and more people can find you. The more extensive your portfolio, the more stable your agency would be.

Tip 2: Automate your routine tasks that consume your maximum time. For example, in the agency business, generating weekly, fortnightly, and monthly online marketing reports consumes a big chunk of your productive time. Your most productive employees waste hours and hours on these repetitive tasks. You can use tools like InstaReports and InstaSites, which will save you tons of time generating professional-grade reports and building niche-based websites within a few seconds. You can utilize this time to establish better communication with your clients.

4. Try Paid Advertising

Since most people spend their maximum time online, it is imperative to use PPC marketing to connect with these audiences and gain an early advantage, mainly because the cost per click is decreased across many industries.

However, it doesn't mean that every industry will perform better with Google ads during the pandemic. Specific industries such as non-profits and charities, health and medical, business management, finance, beauty and personal care, on-demand media, flowers, and gifts saw tremendous growth and an increase in conversion rate.

According to another survey, these were the top four industries that saw the highest growth during the pandemic:

• Technology
• eCommerce
• Healthcare
• Retail

However, the benchmark study released by WordStream reported mixed results in PPC performance for sectors such as real estate, home improvement, home furniture, automotive and retail jobs, and education.

The industries that were hit hard include:

• Travel and tourism
• Bars and restaurants
• Live entertainment
• Conferences
• Sports and fitness
• Building and construction
• Industrial and manufacturing sectors

With decreased cost per click, PPC advertising has become an attractive alternative for advertising and promotion. You can utilize this opportunity to reclaim your share of the market you lost to your competition.

According to Uplers' survey, 47% of agencies experienced a decrease in leads, while  27% saw an increase in leads during the COVID-19 pandemic. 90% of the agencies that experienced an increase in leads were proactively spending on marketing, including paid advertising.

5. Focus on Organic Rankings of your Website

If you want to score over your competition, nothing can be better than grabbing the top slots on Google SERPs. The optimization process should continue for the website and the content as a long-term strategy.

If you don't do that, the likely drop in rankings could cost your business thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Pausing your SEO campaign during the downturn is not a solution, as it becomes even more critical during tough times to strengthen your organic rankings. Make sure that you continue to rank on popular keywords. If you lose rankings during the recession, your revenue will suffer later on. If hiring SEO professionals turn out to be a costly affair, try white label SEO services and see the difference.

6. Offer Discounts, Coupons, and Build Relationships

Never stop the momentum you build during good times, as you will be able to reap the rewards once the market starts rising again. In other words, you should utilize unique circumstances to create a loyal customer base. You can use tough times as an opportunity to show your concern for your clients by offering special discounts. It will act as a goodwill gesture from your brand and keep your revenue flowing.

As emphasized earlier, many people are online these days browsing for products and looking for discounts to save money during these uncertain times. It's the best time to engage with your customers and offer them discounts. So, instead of going for a conservative approach and keeping a low profile during uncertain times, offering discounts can ensure a steady flow of revenue to keep you in business. It will also help you bounce back faster when the market rebounds.

You can use paid advertising tactics such as pay-per-click and social media to announce these discounts and offers.

7. Pay Attention to Local SEO and Online Reviews

Since we are mostly confined to our homes, we look for supplies and services nearby. Local SEO becomes highly crucial as it helps you optimize your website for "near me" searches.

People will turn to you if you are prominently visible in local searches. People need more convenience during these challenging times, so if you can help your customers with prompt services or home delivery, they'll be happy to buy from you.

The best way to appear in local searches is to set up a Google My Business profile for your business. Google My Business is more than just a free business profile, as it allows you to increase your visibility in local searches and helps you connect with your customers across Google search and Maps. It also boosts your online reputation through positive customer reviews.

Positive reviews boost your local SEO tremendously as they help your prospective customers make a quick decision. Online reputation management will pay off many times over as it helps you to build trust around your brand, especially during these chaotic times when people prefer to read reviews before contacting a business. Providing excellent services and quality products during these times will naturally attract genuine positive reviews. A proactive approach will bring its natural rewards.

8. Be as Flexible As Possible

Flexibility and agility are the two most desired characteristics of a modern business. During an economic crisis, it becomes a decisive advantage for most small agencies and startups.

Tip: Being flexible with pricing for a limited time is a sensible step during tough times as it helps with client retention. All you need to do is to be proactive and reevaluate your contract. It helps communicate to your customers that you know the situation and value your relationship with your customers.

9. Recognize What Your Customers Expect

There are two critical things to consider while doing digital marketing for a business- first, your customer should be able to access your information in a single click. Your clients should also get basic information about the opening hours, happy hours, and your approach to safety during the pandemic.

Are you doing anything special for your customers during the tough times? It can be disastrous for your business to be absent from social channels or unavailable through online phone or chat support. You should be able to answer people's queries quickly and clearly.

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Tip: For frequently asked questions, you can use pinned posts on your social media pages. Make sure you answer your DMs quickly. If someone is not available to respond, you can use chatbots to acknowledge that you have received the message and will address the query soon.

What is an AI chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program used to interact with website visitors, take their contact information, and refer them to the sales team. It imitates human conversation and can speak, write, or do both. So, when you open a website, a dialogue box that usually appears on the button right and looks like a human representative is trying to talk to you can be a chatbot. It's designed to assist the visitors with their basic queries about the particular business or the website.Some of the best chatbots are Lobster by EBI.AI, Chatfuel, MobileMonkey, and Aivo.

10. Add Value Wherever You Can for your Clients

Identifying areas where you can add more value to your customers can boost your prospects in difficult times. So, apart from their existing service portfolio, identify the additional services that you can offer. Indeed, it's not always possible, but if you make it a part of your mission statement, you'll soon find many avenues where you can offer value addition.

For example, if you are offering digital marketing services, you can add conversion rate optimization, reputation management, or video editing as additional services, and your clients will appreciate that.

You can occasionally offer discounts, promotions, and bundle offers to engage your customers and boost sales. Focus on increasing customer expectations while creating value-added services.

The bottom line is to make your customer happy by saving their money, helping them achieve their business goals, or making life easier for them by providing exclusive services.

11. Consider a New Niche and a Variety of Clients

While providing more value to your existing clients, you may also want to consider new niches you hadn't considered before. For example, you may have a specific lower limit for your projects in terms of revenue. Also, you may not have accepted certain business types as your clients during good times because they were either low-ticket clients or dropped off frequently. It is high time that you should start targeting those business types to maintain your cash flow and keep your agency operational.

Apart from that, you can target a new niche altogether. For example, let's suppose your client is a digital marketing agency. In that case, you can offer email marketing solutions, Web design, website development, content marketing, and social media marketing apart from the existing services you provide, such as PPC or SEO.

You can select a particular niche to target, such as:

• Real Estate
• Retail
• Restaurants
• Bars
• Fashion
• eCommerce
• Financial Service

It will help you position yourself as an agency specializing in one or more of these domains. This way, you'll be able to achieve a better conversion rate than if you had positioned yourself as a me tooā  agency.

Conclusion

It is vital to have a plan during tough times. Use it as a survival kit when your major clients are either leaving or downsizing their contracts with you. Focus on maintaining cash flow even if it calls for doing what you never did before and focus on industries and clients you never considered before. Try to cut costs wherever possible and keep your agency lean, adaptable, and flexible. Your goal should be to survive the economic slowdown when the timelines are uncertain. Remember, even during a slowdown, there are businesses that are doing exceptionally well. You need to refocus your strategy and change your gears. As highlighted above, our white label platform can act as a lifesaver for digital agencies.

SEO is a growing field both in terms of demand and the business opportunities it offers. It is projected to reach $1.6 billion in valuation by 2027. SEO has been emerging as a significant revenue channel ever since its earliest versions as a siloed service. What makes it even more exciting, but also somewhat confusing, is its integration with content marketing.

SEO tactics are constantly evolving with advancements in search engine algorithms and changes in online consumer behavior. As a result, it has become more difficult than ever to stay on top of SERPs. Post-failure recovery can be challenging, painful, and time-consuming.

We have compiled a list of most common SEO mistakes that people frequently make and tips to avoid them. We can divide these mistakes into five major categories.

A. Keywords and Search Intent Related Mistakes
B. On-Page or Technical Mistakes
C. Strategy Related Mistakes
D. Content Related Mistakes
E. UX/UI Related Issues

A. Keywords and Search Intent Related Mistakes

Here are some of the mistakes website owners make when it comes to search intent and keywords:

Mistake #1: Not Knowing What Your Audience is Searching For

Most SEO professionals will agree that finding the right keywords can be tricky. It's part science and part intuition. Good keywords reflect what your audience is searching for. But now, Google offers several tools to help you decode your audience's online behavior.

SEO tools such as SEMrush provide a lot of data about what keywords are being used and how often.

This search query data is precious for an online marketing professional since it reflects how people engage with your website and what kind of terms and keywords they are using to find your products and services. At DashClicks, our dashboard offers numerous functionalities which only some expensive SEO tools offer, so you don't have to buy these tools separately.

Mistake #2: Not Researching User Queries

There are specific queries and questions people use in the search engines to look for products and services that are similar to yours. These questions trigger the related keywords that are used in your industry or niche. Your SEO campaign is incomplete without addressing these questions. Google flashes "People Also Ask" and "Related Searches" in search results to enrich the search experience of an individual. You can also use tools like "Answer the Public" to find such questions.

Mistake #3: Lack Of Natural Keywords Targeting

You should include natural keywords on your page to match the content with the customer queries. These keywords can be added to the URL, content, and title of the page. Adding such questions or queries to your content can be the best way to help people find your website. If you create and align your content with popular queries, you can achieve top rankings and traffic easily.

DashClicks' white label SEO services can help you with keyword optimization of your site including the crucial on-page optimization where you add keywords in strategic locations such as URL, content and page title, and meta-description. When you use our white label services, you don't need to hire SEO experts, which can be expensive for a small agency.

B. On-Page or Technical Mistakes

Here are some of the on-page and technical SEO mistakes people frequently make:

Mistake #4: Not Optimizing for location-based searches

Google My Business is considered the starting point of your brand's SEO trajectory. Since many businesses want high visibility on local search, you need to claim your location to feature highly in all "near me" searches. Provide all the information about your business and make sure you answer users' queries.

Mistake #5: Not fixing page titles and meta descriptions

It's pretty basic practice, but most website owners tend to ignore it. It is not uncommon to find "Home" as their page title. If we invest a little time writing informative meta descriptions and meta titles, it will give your on-site SEO a big boost.

The good news is that most of the CMS, such as WordPress, fix it by default. But, if a business owner is a novice and is designing their website independently, it can easily be overlooked. It's important that you know on-page ranking factors as they can be the game-changer for your website's rankings and traffic.

On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

Mistake #6: Retaining old URL structures while revamping your site

Many business owners start rebuilding their websites without changing the old URL structures. The best way to fix such issues is to redirect the old URL to the new page. If you don't do it, Google has no way to find out where they should redirect the traffic, and you may lose all such traffic as a result.

Mistake #7: Placing informative text in images

Sometimes, web designers add important text to the image. Google can't read the text hidden in an image, so such content loses its SEO value by default. It is imperative to use informative text outside the images so that Google bots can read it and use it for indexing.

Mistake #8: Not following latest trends

The problem with startups is that they don't invest in SEO as a top priority. Furthermore, they practice old-school SEO and don't follow the most recent trends. If you don't follow the latest trends and SEO best practices such as voice search and rich snippets, you may lose traffic and rankings. Here are some hot SEO trends in 2021:

1. Schema:

Schema.org is used to mark up web pages using HTML so search engines can understand the nature of the content on those pages. The Schema vocabulary is used along with the Microdata to add information to your web content.

2. Structured Data:

Structured data provides explicit clues about the content of a page to Google. For example, on a recipe page, adding structured data will help Google understand the ingredients, temperature, cooking time, calories, etc.

3. SERP Optimization:

It includes various factors search engines use to provide a unique search experience to the user.

4. Knowledge Graphs & Entities:

Recently introduced by Google, knowledge graphs take the search experience to a new level. These are a collection of interlinked descriptions of entities ā€“ objects, events, or concepts.

5. Core Web Vitals:

It's a Google initiative to provide quality signals about the search results to deliver a better user experience.

6. Mobile SEO:

Mobile responsiveness is an important ranking factor since the number of mobile users is growing rapidly. Therefore, your website must be optimized for mobile and tablets.

7. Marketing Automation:

There are many repetitive marketing activities that can be automated using marketing automation software. Such activities include social media publishing, email marketing, and running ad campaigns.

C. Strategy Related Mistakes

Strategy-related SEO mistakes can also cost you dearly. Using analytics to your advantage, conducting website audits to detect major issues, and avoiding black hat tactics are some of the crucial strategy-related factors you should consider. We're listing some of them below:

Mistake #9: Paying Little Attention to Your Website

Some business owners get their websites designed by inexperienced people, which can lead to disastrous results. Such websites may lack various SEO factors considered crucial for ranking such as quality content, meta-descriptions, page names, and title descriptions. If your website is not professionally designed, it can suffer from severe navigation issues which can be counterproductive from an SEO perspective.

DashClicks brings to you an affordable option to create professional-looking and SEO-optimized sites with their advanced tool InstaSites. InstaSites transforms your prospecting methods into action-packed value within seconds. With the help of this amazing tool, you can create a professional in seconds using niche-specific templates.

Mistake #10: Not Using Analytics to Gauge Conversion Rates

In a mad rush for traffic, people forget that conversion is an even more critical metric than traffic. Yet, they waste precious hours in team meetings that provide very few answers. Most of the time, these keywords are highly competitive, and it isn't easy to rank on them regardless of the tactics you use.

But, if you examine the analytics, you might be in for a surprise. The truth is: most keywords don't help you with conversions. However, specific lower-traffic phrases will convert much better based on the search intent. These keywords are more specific, and if you get first page rankings for any of these terms, they may even drive a few random sales.

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Set up conversion tracking in your analytics framework and constantly track it for the search terms you are targeting. These insights will help you optimize your site for better results.

Mistake #11: Conducting Website Audits at Irregular Intervals

Regular website audits are a must to assess your website's performance both from the client's perspective and for the search engines. Some of the performance issues can have damaging consequences, such as poor user experience. When critical information is difficult to find, it is most likely a red flag. The speed of your website's mobile version is also a critical factor. You will be able to detect any performance issues in your website after a careful evaluation. These issues may be related to SEO, site speed, navigation, checkout process, and content quality.

Mistake #12: Buying Backlinks

The old-school SEO professionals sometimes think of backlinks as a quick fix to clear the path for a newly constructed website. However, this can be counterproductive because most of these backlinks can be from spammy sites, already spammed by Google. You will not drive any SEO value from those backlinks. On the flip side, Google may also penalize your website. The actual link value is extracted from high-authority websites through natural methods such as guest posting and earned links.

Mistake #13: Focusing Only on Onsite SEO

Digital marketing agencies are often tempted to think that their job is done once they are through with the on-site SEO. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. Onsite SEO is an integral part of your website's SEO, and it contributes substantially towards tracking, but on its own, it's often not enough. It would help if you also focused on off-site SEO, such as getting backlinks from some popular directories and publishing guest posts. If you have good-quality content pieces published on third-party websites which point to your website, you will achieve your SEO goals faster.

Mistake #14: Taking SEO As a One-Time Activity

Many people think technical SEO practices can help them accomplish all their marketing goals. In reality, however, it is a routine activity that needs continued investment. There is no such thing as permanent SEO friendliness. To keep yourself updated, you need to continually add high-quality content about your products and services and optimize it with the right keywords.

Mistake #15: Not Having Clear and Predefined SEO Goals

Having predefined and clear goals helps you to steer clear from focusing on pointless vanity metrics. These metrics can be confusing and misleading and may not always help you achieve your core business objectives. SEO professionals think that if you increase traffic, conversions will automatically increase, too. However, data suggest that a website that attracted the traffic of 10000 unique monthly visitors was able to convert only one percent of it into sales. It means that even though your website includes popular keywords to attract traffic, its design is not conducive to increasing revenue.Ā  Whatever may be the case, you can always audit your website to figure out the reasons you are falling short of receiving targeted traffic and conversions.

Mistake #16: Not Having Knowledge about Google Ranking Factors & Algorithm Updates

It's essential to keep yourself updated about Google ranking factors & algorithm updates, so you don't make the avoidable mistakes many SEO professionals make.

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Here are the major ranking factors Google employs that every SEO professional or agency should be familiar with:

• Domain Factors: These factors include domain age, features, and keywords in the top-level domain.
• Page-Level Factors: It includes keywords in the title tag, description tag, table of contents, LSI keywords, keyword density, and content length.
• Site-Level Factors: Content that offers value, insights, contact us page, site architecture, and mobile-optimized site.
• Backlink Factors: It includes linking domain age, number of referring domains, the total number of linking pages, backlink anchor text, and links from .edu or .gov domains.
• User Interaction: It includes RankBrain, which is Google's AI algorithm. Google uses it to know how users interact with the search results and it ranks the results accordingly. Google also considers a higher CTR as a ranking factor.
• Special Google Algorithm Rules: Google may consider content freshness, add diversity to the SERPs, and use featured snippets, etc.
• Brand Signals: It includes the brand name, anchor texts, and brand searches.

At DashClicks, our white label SEO services are designed to provide standard solutions where we keep track of all these ranking factors and algorithm updates. Our teams are trained in providing white-label SEO solutions as per the latest changes in Google algorithms, so you can resell these services without worrying about fluctuations in rankings.

D. Content Related Mistakes

Here are some of the content-related mistakes that SEO professionals frequently commit to. You must be familiar with these mistakes to attain high rankings.

Mistake #17: Not Following the E-A-T and YMYL Factor

Google's ranking policies are often considered mysterious as they aren't that vocal about it. In 2015, Google released the complete version of Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in response to a leaked version that was making the rounds on the web. These guidelines emphasized the three golden rules to remember when creating web pages. They also explained how Google differentiates high-quality content from the rest. These guidelines are a goldmine for online marketers and SEO professionals. For your convenience, we present them to you:

1. Beneficial Purpose:

Google explains it in the following manner:

"Websites and pages should be created to help users." Specifically, a web page should fulfill its intended purpose, but it should also be user-centered. Websites and pages that are created to harm the users, deceive them or make money off them with no attempt to help them, receive the lowest page quality ratings from Google.

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2. YMYL (Your Money or Your Life):

According to Google, "Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content is the type of information that, if presented inaccurately, could directly impact the reader's satisfaction, health, safety, or financial well-being." A YMYL page with potentially harmful advice could affect people's lives and livelihood. As a general rule, only experts should write YMYL content. This particularly includes news, current events, legal or financial information, health, safety, fitness, nutrition, shopping, civic and communal matters.

3. E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness):

Expertise generally refers to the creator of the main content (MC) on the page. They should be subject-matter experts and must possess the necessary credentials. Authoritativeness refers to the lead content creator, his creation, and the website on which it appears. It's associated with a generally recognized authority such as a certified professional or an influencer so that readers can trust it as a reliable source of information.

Mistake #18: Not Paying Attention to Content

You must always have fresh and high-quality content on your website. But most of the webmasters make the mistake of not paying enough attention to the content of their blog section. As a result, their blog either dies with little to no activity, or they have sub-standard topics that add no value. Paying attention to the content is the key to success in content marketing and SEO. Make sure you have loads of high-quality content on your website, and that you are regularly adding fresh content that is valuable to your audience.

Mistake #19: Creating Content Only For Robots

Google algorithms are constantly evolving, but that doesn't mean that you should create your content strategy around those algorithms alone. Instead, the standard approach should be to have a content strategy that offers the big picture. Your content must strictly be written for your audience. It should address their pain points, solve their queries, and highlight your competitive advantage. Your content should also boost your branding. It should be engaging and full of insights so that it can attract and retain audiences. Such content will give you a competitive advantage and attract desirable traffic to your website.

E. UX/UI Related Issues

Mistake #20: Ignoring UI & UX of your Website Pages

Not paying attention to UI and UX can be a grave SEO mistake. Here are a few UI/UX factors you should consider for the best SEO results and user experience on your website:

A. Focus on usability

Many business owners emphasize creativity, but they forget an essential factor ā€”Ā  usability. If your website doesn't offer usability, creative efforts are of no use. It's the reason most websites resemble each other. It helps, as most users are familiar with this structure, and they know where they can find the information they are looking for. If a site doesn't offer a good user experience, users will likely bounce off and never return.

B. Don't follow design trends blindly

You should be careful not to follow design trends blindly. Choose a design that offers reliable utility. Design helps, but you shouldn't use it at the cost of functionality.

C. Avoid too much animation

It's best to avoid too much animation. If it helps to make the content feel natural and easy to understand, it's probably in good use. But, be careful to avoid too many popups that may ruin the UX on your website.

D. Use visuals to support text

When appropriate, use visuals rather than text to communicate things effectively.

E. Offer better readability and insert valuable content when necessary

Don't use poor contrast if it offers a bad reading experience. The most important thing is that a good design should accompany useful content. When it is missing from any section of your website, it's as good as having no content at all.

F. Create mobile responsive websites

Make sure that your website design is adaptable. It should fit different screens without distorting the content and its intent.

G. Don't stuff keywords into your content

Gone are the days when there was no way to rank your web presence other than stuffing SEO keywords into your content. Thanks to constantly changing Google algorithms, Google can now differentiate between high-quality content that addresses the needs of the end-user and poor content that is loaded with keywords but offers little value. Quality content must be thoughtful and informative, and not written to dupe the search engines.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is an integral part of content marketing, and we know that businesses rely heavily on content marketing as the only reliable long-term strategy for digital marketing. But, even the most competent people can make mistakes, and it becomes even more prevalent in the case of SEO. It's best, therefore, to learn from other people's mistakes and avoid them at all costs.

The world is changing drastically and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the problems for businesses worldwide.

With agencies facing new challenges, the same set of techniques and business practices that helped them previously are now becoming ineffective. There is no option but to ride this wave of change and adapt to the “new normal.”

Traditionally, agencies were doing it all themselves until the market disruptions such as the global financial crisis happened in 2008. With increased economic uncertainties, agencies preferred to stick to the lean business model.

According to new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh, 75% of all start-ups fail. The “lean start-up” has emerged as the less risky model as it can survive in the toughest conditions.

Many agencies are now switching to white label reselling which allows them to scale without actually increasing their team size.

What are Significant Challenges Faced by a Marketing Agency in 2021?

As a marketing agency, you come across many challenges: some of them are listed below:

1. Getting more customers

Marketing a digital agency can be tough because of stiff competition. Differentiation is the second biggest issue. If you position yourself as a jack of all trades, you have only marginal chances to succeed as an agency. You must find a specific “niche” and prove your worth, so that people may notice you.

2. Finding and keeping talented people

To build a successful agency, you need dynamic leadership, a core competence area, the right people, and an affordable price. However, it’s quite expensive to hire and retain the best talent. Most of the best folks are working at high paychecks and head-hunting may not be as easy as it sounds.

3. Facing difficulty in increasing the basket size

You want to expand your basket size from your current customers but may feel thwarted by an inadequate workforce. It limits your operational capabilities and makes you vulnerable to sudden business fluctuations.

4. When your customers ask for something you don’t specialize in

You can be an agency specializing in PPC, but your customers may ask for social media marketing, websites, or SEO-related services. It often puts you in a fix as it’s difficult to recruit trained professionals at short notice.

5. Your agency stopped growing because of the limited services you offer

Your agency has stagnated as you’re primarily offering one stock service, whereas your competitors are succeeding by successfully positioning themselves as full-service agencies. As a result, when an opportunity knocks on your door, you’re not ready to grab it.

6. You’re struggling with a lack of resources and infrastructure

You want to scale your operations when needed, but you’re working with a lack of resources and infrastructure. It means that you’re not in a position to say “yes” to many of your customers.

7. You face difficulties pitching to more prominent clients

You have a hard time pitching to bigger clients because of a poor track record and weak branding. If you utilize white label services in time, this situation may turn in your favor as you’ll have a more extensive portfolio and high-ticket clients under your belt.

8. Day-to-day operations keep you busy

You want to focus on your core competence business development, but repetitive and unproductive tasks keep you busy all through the day.

If any of these sounds relatable, it’s high time you consider white label reselling as your go-to strategy.

What is White Label Reselling?

White labeling is no longer a new concept. These days, businesses don’t shy away from deploying the products and services delivered by another company under their own brand name. It offers many benefits, the most obvious one being that you don’t have to design solutions from scratch.

You can see it happening everywhere. At grocery stores, you may see foodstuff and cereals being sold under their brand name. These stores aren’t usually in the production business. All they do is source this stuff from another company, rebrand them and offer it to their customers as their product.

Move over tangible products, a significant share of global white-labeling business comprises online services such as digital marketing, web designing, and content marketing. We also term it as white label marketing.

According to the 2015 Marketing Technology Strategy survey, the businesses’ top four marketing technologies were email marketing, social media marketing, marketing analysis, and sales automation, respectively.

White label marketing is not limited to SEO, PPC, social, inbound, and email marketing. It also includes several other services such as web development and design, mobile app development, videography, video marketing, professional photography, social media creatives, and print advertising.

White Label Reselling vs. Doing It All Yourself

Here is a brief comparison between white label reselling vs. doing it all yourself.

Why Should You Use White Label Marketing Services?

According to the 2016 Marketing Maturity Benchmark Report issued by LeadMD, the top three concerns of the business owners were as follows:

1. Qualified Lead Pipeline (92%)
2. Customer Retention (81%)
3. Lead Pipeline Velocity (66%)

In the spooked business environment marred with day-to-day emergencies, white-label marketing comes as a breeze of fresh air creating a win-win solution for both you and the reseller agency. The white label agency saves all the heavy spending on branding, marketing, and finding clients. It allows them to focus only on the service development while keeping the costs low.

On the flip side, your brand can focus on your core business expertise and business development, while the agency will give you ready-made solutions that you can sell to your clients.

Here are some more reasons why you should use white label marketing:

1. To Leverage the Latest Innovations, Research, And Updates

If you wish to sell a premium product to your client, such as automation software, you might have to reinvent the whole wheel, developing the solution from scratch. On the flip side, if you use a white label service, you can outsource it from people who have been doing it for years and have the right expertise. They have access to the right people and technologies to design software and services using innovative methods.

Disadvantages of doing it yourself: First of all, being an agency, your core focus should be to market your solutions and deliver the best customer support. White labeling these services allow you to get direct access to expensive new tools as they are launched. Agencies keep themselves up-to-date and take care of all the latest development in the products and services they offer.

2. To Take Advantage of the Growing Market

The market for digital marketing solutions is rapidly expanding, and there is a huge demand for services like boosting web traffic, growing online presence, and maximizing conversions. As a trend, more and more companies are opting for marketing automation.

According to Forrester’s Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, in 2023, spending on marketing automation tools is estimated to reach $25.1 billion. If you are not able to tap into this tremendous opportunity, you are already losing a potential fortune. If you are in the business but cannot handle demand, you may be losing out on revenue. Your clients may be interested in market automation solutions and other premium services. If you want to grab your share of this booming market, you should try outsourcing white label marketing automation services.

3. To Save Time and Effort

With such fierce competition in the marketplace, it’s essential to get your processes right. Market analysis and development of products and marketing solutions are time-consuming tasks, and you need to devote a lot of time and effort to accomplish this. White labeling will free you from such time-consuming processes. So, you can focus on developing offerings for your customers.

4. To Cut Human Resource and Infrastructure Cost

When you try to deliver Digital Marketing Services as an agency, you need to hire several skilled professionals. The recruitment, onboarding, and training costs can be overwhelming for a startup, not to mention the infrastructure cost such as office space, furniture, and workstations. White labeling frees you from all such worries, so you can focus primarily on business development and leave the rest to your white label partner.

5. To Tap into Other Marketing Services

Sometimes digital marketing agencies offer limited services such as SEO and PPC, but the changing market dynamic requires you to be agile as an agency. You wouldn’t want to lose clients if they want additional services such as video marketing, influencer marketing, or Facebook marketing. In such a scenario, white labeling can be a panacea for you. It will allow you to expand your business without getting involved in daily tedious and repetitive tasks.

6. To Amplify Your Profits

The most significant advantage of white label reselling is that it increases your profits without any significant investment, and helps you develop extensive portfolios with a large number of clients.

Reselling Allows You To Add to Your Spectrum of Products

The most significant advantage of reselling is that it allows you to add to the spectrum of products and services you offer. So, if you provide web design services, you can add SEO, social marketing, and reputation marketing to your kitty without hiring an entire team of professionals. Since reselling services already have trained in-house teams, they allow you to accommodate additional clients at any point. So, you can deliver a powerful package of services with limited personnel and infrastructure.

White Label Vs. Co-branded Products Or Services

There is a difference between white label and co-branded products and services — they are mutually exclusive. In a co-branded service, the product has the branding of both the supplier and the reseller. In white label products, only a single brand appears on the end product.

Private Label vs. White Label: What’s the Difference?

Although both these terms can be used interchangeably, private and white labels are entirely different things. A private-label service is custom-designed to meet the client’s particular needs, whereas a white label service is more generic — so you can resell it “as is.”

What To Look For in A White-label Partner?

Here are a few things you must look for in your white label partner to make the best out of your collaboration:

1. Similar goals and vision

Your white label partner should echo similar goals and vision to deliver solutions that are in line with your business ethos and culture. As your strategic business partner, both of you must be on the same page.

2. Your white label partner must have a solid reputation

Values such as honesty, transparency, and proactiveness can’t be discounted. That’s probably the reason why a good industry reputation is so vital for your white label partners. So, before you sign a contract, do a little homework to know how long they have been in the business and whether they are considered an expert in their domain.

3. They must have experience as a result-oriented white label company

White labeling is not just about adding a logo to an existing product and reselling it to your clients. It has to be a more involved process where you can frequently communicate about strategic steps and quality results. White labeling will not work if it’s not result-oriented.

4. Should be able to generate exhaustive reports that are full of insights

Reporting and analytics are essential indicators of the professional services offered by a white label agency. For example, DashClicks uses software known as InstaReports to generate reports that are loaded with data and insights. Such reports can be a delight for your clients as they can use them for strategic decision-making.

5. They should have clear contract terms

They should have written terms of the contract, so there is no ambiguity. Transparency guards you against many possible events which can come as a surprise. For example, if there is a minimum lock-in period, they should be upfront about it. Ask questions before you sign a contract.

Conclusion

While reselling white label services can be one of the best strategic steps to scale your agency, it doesn't mean you would lose your brand's identity in the process. You can maintain your brand value by sticking to the basics ā your company vision and goals. Offer something different that adds value and provides top-notch customer service to differentiate your agency from the competition.

To make it look even more authentic and unique, add some original content and inputs to help your clients. Reselling white label services comes with tremendous value for your agency, and it's often more advantageous than doing it all yourself.

1. Introduction
2. What is a Startup?
3. What is Startup Marketing?
4. What are the Challenges for a Startup in 2021?
5. Marketing Terms You Need to Know About as a Beginner
6. Resources for a Digital Marketing Startup Agency
7. How Can a Startup Agency do Their Marketing?
8. Types of Marketing for a Startup: Paid Vs. Organic
9. 5 Factors to Help You Choose Between Paid and Organic Marketing
10. Budget
11. Time
12. Cost-Effectiveness
13. Consumer Trust
14. Your Niche
15. How to Choose an Ideal Strategy for a Startup?
16. How Can a Startup Find New Clients?
17. Find Your Primary Channel
18. Growth Hacking
19. Conversion Rate Optimization
20. Facebook Advertising
21. Taking Customer Feedback
22. What Are the Types of Paid Media Advertising for Startups?
23. Facebook Advertising
24. Google Ads
25. Google Ads (Display)
26. Google Remarketing
27. Facebook Exchange
28. Content Discovery Platforms
29. LinkedIn Advertising
30. Video Pre-roll Advertising
31. How to Fast-Track Your Agency’s Growth?
32. Start Affiliate Marketing
33. Highlight Your Startup By Doing Something Remarkable
34. Build Useful resources
35. Leverage Influencer marketing
36. Apply SEO Practices on Your Agency Website
37. Build a blog
38. Use Email Marketing
39. Create Interesting Videos and Do YouTube Marketing
40. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
41. Conclusion

Most startups are based on an innovative idea or set of services that are uniquely positioned and marketed. These budding companies are usually very close to their founders’ hearts as they see it as a living manifestation of their dreams. However, the road to success is not always easy. According to Investopedia, 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, 30% in the second year, and 50% in the fifth year.

It is crucial to focus on marketing and growth to ensure a startup’s survival. This post will discuss every aspect of startup marketing, both paid and organic. We will also discuss how we can leverage free tactics such as building a blog, perform content marketing, email marketing, and YouTube marketing. Read on to know when you need to go for paid advertising and when to combine it with organic marketing and SEO.

You’ll also find links to some helpful digital marketing resources from DashClicks for information on agencies you can use for learning and training. Here are some of the best strategies to grow your startup and actualize your entrepreneurial dream.

What is a Startup?

A startup is a newly launched business venture by one or more entrepreneurs to introduce a product or service to the market. According to Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, “A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” One common feature of all startups is that despite the environment of uncertainty, their primary focus is always on growth. Startups are usually based on an idea or value proposition. Some of the most iconic companies, like Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon began their journeys as startups. The common goal of all startups is to grow by leveraging technology and innovative ideas.

What is Startup Marketing?

Marketing is often referred to as a series of actions to attract an audience to buy a company’s products or services. It usually involves customer segmentation and targeting using laser-focused messaging to achieve the desired outcomes. Effective marketing aims to offer value to its prospects by offering engaging content, highlighting a product’s value, encouraging brand loyalty, and increasing sales.

What are the Challenges for a Startup in 2021?

Some of the issues startups face include adapting to constantly changing market dynamics, customer needs, and operating conditions.

1. Digital Adoption: Modern businesses can’t attain global scalability without adopting a digital strategy, as consumers worldwide are adopting digital habits at an unprecedented rate.
2. Planning: With a weak plan, you can’t handle the risks associated with uncertainty due to changes in consumer preferences, market dynamics, and the economy.
3. Time management: When you’re running a startup, there are often a thousand deadline-bound tasks on your to-do list. You must, therefore, be ready to make hard choices.
4. Automation of Business Processes: It’s essential to learn how to automate your business processes to avoid wasting time on manually repeating operations.
5. Marketing Expertise: You must possess the required marketing expertise to produce the desired results for your clients. Failing to do so may jeopardize your reputation.

Marketing Terms You Need to Know As a Beginner

As a business owner and founder of a startup, you may stumble across several marketing terms. Some of these words are shown below:

Resources for a Digital Marketing Startup Agency

Here are some valuable resources to help you build the right expertise for running a digital marketing startup:

1. Digital Marketing Blog
2. Video Blog
3. Digital Marketing Podcast
4. Webinars
5. Marketers Mindset

How Can a Startup Agency Do Their Marketing?

The marketing of a startup comprises many channels. Apart from offline methods such as community outreach and participating in local and industry-specific events, they should try SEO, paid advertising, digital PR, email marketing, and social media marketing.

Here is a three-step process to run your marketing campaigns:

Step #1 Build your strategic framework

Based on your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threat) analysis, it's imperative to build a sound strategy for growth and development. The presence of a strategic framework saves you from many surprises in the future and helps you secure steady growth. As an easier but just as effective option, you can incorporate white label services as part of your operational strategy.

Step #2: Target your audience

Identify your target audience and reach out to them using paid ads, outbound sales, and digital PR. It is especially helpful for agencies that want to market themselves as specialists in a particular segment, such as real estate services or business services.

Step #3: Use Analytics to measure the success of your campaigns

Nothing remarkable can ever be achieved if you don't measure your campaign performance to gauge where things might be going wrong. Using analytics is the key to success in digital marketing.

Types of Marketing for a Startup

When introducing your startup to your target online audiences, you need to pay attention to the two major types of marketing ā€” Organic and Paid. The reach and impact of organic marketing (SEO) are undisputed as it diverts target traffic to your website without investing a single penny. However, in the short term, nothing can beat paid marketing. It attracts qualified leads when you don't have a significant online presence or brand awareness.

5 Factors to Help You Choose Between Paid and Organic Marketing

Startups need a mix of both paid vs. organic marketing. However, if you are confused between the two, the following five factors can help you decide:

1. Budget

Budget is often an essential consideration in marketing. To run advertising campaigns, you must have surplus funds, as it may be a while until you start getting results from the paid campaigns. Paid advertising is usually faster than organic marketing, but you can't anticipate the results right away.

Paid ads run on a definite pattern. It involves a lot of testing and tweaking before you find the right audiences, messaging, and ad practices. You may end up losing hundreds of ad dollars in ad spending before you finally start seeing an ROI. Therefore, before you initiate paid ads, make sure you have sufficient funds for the testing phase.

2. Time

Time is a crucial factor, especially when you are evaluating various options for promotion. Organic traffic comes from organic search engine rankings, but it might take three to twelve months and sometimes even longer to attain organic rankings. The paid route is faster, but it will take at least one month to deliver an ROI. With lots of content competing for the rankings, it's becoming increasingly challenging to consistently rank on top. Previously, black hat practices like keyword stuffing and spamming were successful. Today, however, Google will ban you from using these methods. Social media takes time as you slowly grow your audience with engaging posts that offer value.

3. Cost-effectiveness

Organic marketing is much more cost-effective than its paid counterpart, especially in the long run, but diverting traffic from your blog is no small feat. Google loves fresh content. Even if you can produce quality content and rank it high, there is no certainty that the blog will continue to send quality traffic to your website. It's probable that several other blogs will be competing with yours for coveted attention.

4. Consumer Trust

It's easy to build trust and long-term relationships with organic rankings, as opposed to paid ads, which can sometimes invite an element of suspicion. People trust social posts and blogs that are popularly shared, and have lots of comments and likes. It helps build trust, which means that people will be more likely to consume your content.

5. Your Niche

Your niche plays a significant role in deciding the right promotion mix. If you're in a highly competitive niche, it will take a lot of time to attain organic rankings. In that case, you should focus on paid strategies until you start receiving noticeable results from your SEO efforts. However, if you are in a small and unique niche with little or no competition, you'll start ranking on Google in just two to three months. Similarly, if you are in an industry where your income depends on a few high-value clients, then paid tactics are often your best option.

How to Choose an Ideal Strategy for a Startup?

Paid and organic marketing are not mutually exclusive, and the ideal strategy should be a combination of both. If you create high-quality blog content, you can use it for your paid advertising campaigns. Some businesses focus more on advertising, using their blog to establish credibility and create brand awareness. On the other hand, some businesses focus on organic ranking because it brings them consistent traffic. Such companies may use paid advertising selectively to drive traffic to their landing pages.

How Can a Startup Find New Clients?

Finding clients as a startup can be a challenge as you are often competing against established brands. However, here are some proven methods you can try:

1. Find Your Primary Channel

Not all channels are suitable for startup marketing. Depending on the type of business and its marketing needs, some are more effective than others. You should focus your efforts and attention on the core channel that is most likely to get you the best results.

2. Growth Hacking

Eventbrite, Snapchat, and Dropbox are some of the companies that have capitalized on viral marketing to grow at a rapid pace.

The key takeaway from their success stories is that building a product or service that people love to recommend is one of the most effective growth strategies. If every user spreads the word to at least two new users, you will see unexpected growth. The second tactic is to align your growth strategy with the channel you are focusing on.

According to Brian Halligan of HubSpot, your marketing strategy should align with the way people learn about and shop for your products. It holds true especially in the context of the marketing channel being used. For example, if most of your customers come from reading your white papers and case studies, you should not invest too much in Facebook marketing. Instead, you should focus on producing high-quality content for your white papers and case studies.

3. Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization comes into the picture when your conversion rate falls below expectations. It involves improving your messaging and value proposition. It is also a good practice to engage with potential customers to find out the reason they are not purchasing your products and services. You can speak to your website visitors directly using a tool called "Intercom."

You can also conduct a survey using applications like SurveyMonkey or SurveyMonkey alternatives. Start by fixing your landing page, crafting better headlines, and formulating effective calls to action. If you want an efficient lead capture form, you can use a tool known as "Leadformly." You should also pay closer attention to your website to correct any user experience or navigation issues.

4. Facebook Advertising

Facebook allows you a laser-sharp focus when running adverts for different demographics and psychographic segmentation. Its conversion tracking feature helps you determine which demographics are most responding to your ads. You can leverage its tools to efficiently identify your target audiences and the cost per acquisition for these groups.

5. Taking Customer Feedback

As a startup, you should be agile and alert when it comes to receiving and responding to customer feedback. You can offer incentives in return for honest inputs and suggestions. You can use this consumer behavior data to understand why people are falling off in your sales funnel.

What Are the Types of Paid Media Advertising for Startups?

Contrary to popular wisdom, most often, startups require a tremendous marketing investment. You should continue investing in marketing until you achieve positive results. If your paid media channels can drive qualified traffic to your website, there is no reason to ignore them.

Below, we will explore some of the popular paid channels:

1. Facebook Advertising

Along with being a highly effective advertising platform, Facebook also allows you to acquire new users. You can promote your posts in the news feed and narrow them down to your target audience to generate highĀ  CTRs.

Feel free to experiment with offbeat, unique, and bright-colored ads for better results. Qwaya is a great alternative to Facebook Ads Manager for your ad creation needs.

This smart tool allows you to split your ad campaigns into hundreds of variations, each targeting a different segment. As a result, you will be able to clearly decipher which ad segments are performing better than others, so you can tweak your budget and advertising strategy accordingly.

2. Google Ads

If your product or service aims to solve a common pain point that people frequently search for, Google Ads can be the right acquisition channel for you. For Example, if you are looking for "Houston Astros Tickets," Google will return results such as MLB tickets to allow you to buy tickets for the event.

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3. Google Ads (Display)

Google also allows you to purchase banner adverts through their display network. You can choose which websites you want your banner ads to display on. To run more targeted ads, you can select the websites related to specific keywords and bid on those sites.

4. Google Remarketing

Google remarketing takes paid advertising to a different level. When someone visits your website, your remarketing tool places a cookie on their computer, which traces their internet behavior, and also reminds them to revisit your website. You can get creative with your remarking and use customized ads for the different stages of your buyer's journey. For Example, if someone visited the product page but didn't buy your product, you can show them the product image and description with a special promotion. Google remarketing works effectively because the visitors are already aware of your product.

5. Facebook Exchange

Facebook Exchange is Facebook's version of Google remarketing. In other words, when someone visits your website and doesn't return, you can reach out to them through theirĀ  Facebook feed, reminding them to revisit your website.

6. Content Discovery Platforms

Content Discovery Platforms promote your content alongside popular articles on major news sites, such as Buzzfeed, New York Times, and The Guardian. Outbrain and Taboola are two such content discovery platforms. Although somewhat expensive, these platforms are tremendously powerful in driving backlinks and traffic to your website.

7. LinkedIn Advertising

Not all startups should advertise on LinkedIn, although some can derive truly positive results from it, especially those in the education or the financial service industry. They can achieve extraordinary results by running targeted ads for people based on their job title and industry.

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8. Video Pre-Roll Advertising

If you have invested in creating a compelling promo video for your brand or products, pre-roll advertising may be a good advertising option. With tools like Tubemogul or MediaMath TerminalOne Marketing OSā„¢, you can pay for your video to appear as an advert before video content on sites such as YouTube and 4od.

It can be a cost-effective option since you do not have to pay if your ad is skipped within the first five seconds.

How to Fast-Track Your Agency's Growth?

Here are some highly potent methods to dramatically improve the prospects of your startup:

1. Start Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is quite powerful, but it works only for high-margin products with a reasonable conversion rate. You can use affiliate networks such as Clickbank or Affiliate Window to offer an affiliate program. Although not as effective at the beginning of a startup journey, affiliate marketing can help you reach newer heights when your brand is somewhat established.

2. Highlight Your Startup By Doing Something Remarkable

You can try something remarkable to create buzz and get the press and social media to talk about you. It shouldn't be an expensive event it should just be different. For example, you can run an awareness campaign for the ordinary folks, arrange a training workshop for your prospects, arrange a doctors' meet for your community, and guide them on different aspects of health and safety, especially during situations like the current pandemic. You can also establish yourself as a leader by organizing a conference of experts in your niche.

3. Build Useful Resources

Moz has created a weather report tool MozCast, which receives lots of love from the SEO industry, generating free publicity for the company. You can create similar resources that might be helpful for your current and prospective customers. Make sure that the resources you build add value and solve users' problems.

4. Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is hot, as it can contribute greatly to promoting your startup. However, you should be selective about the influencers and collaborate with only those who have a sizable niche-based audience with lots of engagement on their channel.

5. Apply SEO Practices on Your Agency Website

With over 3.5 billion searches every day, Google virtually dominates the search engine industry. SEO is something you can't ignore when promoting your startup. If you have a product that offers a utility that people are searching for, these latest SEO practices can help you in a big way.

When you run ads on social media, your aim is to pull people onto your site. With SEO, however, you are simply helping them find what they are already looking for. You should be aware that organic rankings don't have a quick fix; they usually take time, and with constantly changing algorithms, there is no guarantee of definite results.

With a planned approach, you can gradually rank on some of your targeted keywords over a minimum period of three to nine months. However, it is still very little time to expect something substantial, especially a top-slot ranking.

6. Build a blog

Startups can significantly benefit from creating a signature blog. It's free to set up and is one of the best ways to add visitors to your site. If you have an active blog that offers value, you will create a loyal audience, many of whom can potentially convert into customers.

However, it is important to publish content that interests your readers. Instead of bragging about your products and services, your blog should engage your visitors by addressing their core needs and providing them useful information. If you think an article on positive self-image can help your audience, publish it even if it has nothing to do with your existing products and services.

Generally speaking, once you have published at least a hundred quality articles on your blog, it will start generating new traffic, backlinks, and sign-ups every day.

7. Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is no longer about building your mailing list and sending cold emails and newsletters. These days businesses use marketing automation and send visitors personalized messages based on their online activities. For Example, if someone signs up for a free trial on your website and doesn't use the product within a specified period, you can send an automated email inviting them to check out your product. Make sure that you are sending professional emails with a good subject line and a beautiful HTML template.

8. Create Interesting Videos and Do YouTube Marketing

With 50 million searches every day, YouTube is one of the best traffic sources for businesses and organizations. Short, three-minute videos attract a high number of views, ranging from 50000 to 1 million. Another advantage with YouTube is that it’s less competitive than Google. YouTube videos also feature in Google’s search results.

9. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing has become an essential element of digital marketing, as it is challenging to grab users’ attention without quality content. Content marketing is both a science and an art. Content-based online PR is highly effective, and many marketers are quickly shifting their focus to this burgeoning new field.

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Content marketing can be your go-to strategy to build loyal audiences for your startup. For Example, in terms of social shares and the number of backlinks, infographics win hands-on with roughly 198% more social shares and backlinks than any other content format. The key is to create premium quality long-form content, which is difficult to replicate.

Social media marketing builds your presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks to drive potential customers to your website. However, you can’t use these channels indiscriminately to broadcast your marketing messages. When you are on a social network as a startup, you should focus on building relationships and getting feedback. Once you earn the trust of your audiences and establish brand authority, you will start seeing the results of your content marketing efforts.

Conclusion

When it comes to marketing, you cannot just count on the tried and tested methods. Since it is a rapidly evolving ecosystem, it is best to test, evaluate and tweak your strategy for the best results. If something that worked in the past isn’t working anymore, you should find new ways to make it relevant and interesting. The end goal is to build credibility and generate revenue by offering value through your products and services. When people see value in what you offer and appreciate your commitment to service, you are on the right track to success.