As a business owner, your natural instinct may be to expand your operations and scale your business. However, not all business owners put in the required efforts and dedication to attain this goal, making a difference. Regardless of the business size or the industry you operate in, you must invest adequate time and resources in the essential processes, market research being one of them.

Market research is a significant process that can make or break your small business. If done right, you may experience success like never before; otherwise, things can go downhill. The importance of market research is no mystery! Therefore, conducting productive market research can accelerate the growth of your small business.

Importance of Market Research for Your Small Business

Market research helps identify and analyze essential information that can guide your future business operations. You get an understanding of the target audience's needs, untapped markets, competitors and strategies, and the ideas that work and produce desired results.

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Some reasons to conduct market research include:

• Understand the Consumers’ Preferences and the Market
• Explore New Markets and Target Audiences
• Have a Thorough Understanding of the Competitors and Their Actions
• Identify New Opportunities to Increase Revenue
• Determine What Works and What Does Not
• Uncover Trends
• Brainstorm Ways to Generate Traffic
• Develop Effective Strategies
• Identify Prospects
• Develop an Effective and Efficient Business Model

Steps to Conduct Market Research for Your Small Business

Conducting small business market research using the secondary research method is ideal, as it is cost-effective, productive, and less time-consuming. Follow the below-mentioned steps when conducting market research for your business:

• Determine the primary objective of research and the ultimate goal.
• Shortlist all the resources you want to use, like industry data, reports, competitors’ information, etc.
• Gather the data
• Combine and mold all the data in the most useable format
• Analyze all the data and look for the solutions to the questions you defined at the beginning. If you cannot find them, look for other resources and restart the process.

The secondary research method is a pretty straightforward process that is most likely to bring success to your table. All you have to do is set questions and employ different techniques to find the answers to those questions. If you follow this process, you will ‌uncover all the growth opportunities.

How Frequently Should You Conduct Market Research?

Ideally, due to the dynamic market forces and frequent fluctuation in consumer behavior, conducting market research every two weeks is a feasible plan to get a competitive edge and for stable growth. Moreover, for in-depth analysis and reporting, utilizing research paper writer services can provide comprehensive insights and professionally crafted documents, enhancing the quality of your market research.

Otherwise, you will be vulnerable to threats and not likely to stay abreast with the trends. Regular market research will help you explore new opportunities faster than competitors.

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Small Business Market Research Tools You Can Use

Here's a list of some invaluable market research tools for your small business:

1. Online Surveys

Businesses can utilize various online survey tools that are easy to use, affordable, and help understand the customers and their preferences. You can share these online surveys through tools like Survey Monkey, Typeform, and DashClicks' Forms app, customer mailing lists, websites, or social media channels.

2. Dimensions.ai

It is an online library of academic research papers and publications. Through Dimensions.ai, You get access to various authoritative publications to help you make better decisions.

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3. Answer the Public

It is a free website that helps you determine the most commonly asked questions about a specific topic online. Answer the public can help you develop your content strategy, introduce new offerings, and modify your website content.

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4. BuzzSumo

Most content marketers use this tool for conducting market research for small businesses. BuzzSumo helps you understand the consumer needs and content they like the most and engage with. You can set up alerts for industry-relevant keywords, comments, or social mentions.

5. Digital Intelligence Software

You can use tools like the DashClicks' Analytics app to conduct market research for your small business. It can analyze any website's or app's performance and help you understand its performance in terms of traffic source, reach, and size.

6. Think With Google

It helps uncover and analyze the target audience's insights and characteristics.

Tips for Small Business Market Research

Below are some easy tips for doing small business market research!

1. Consider Your Direct and Indirect Competitors

You should know what your competitors are doing and act accordingly. While conducting market research for your small business, you might miss out on indirect competitors and overlook them. However, the fact that their target audience is similar to yours makes it imperative to perform their competitive analysis to avoid missing out on potential audiences.

2. Develop a Framework

While conducting market research for your small business, you gather a lot of information and data, which can be cumbersome to process. Therefore, develop a framework with a specific outline that will help you keep your information structured and organized in an easy-to-understand visual model.

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3. Formulate the Right Strategy

Post-pandemic, the number of small businesses has been rapidly increasing, making the entire business space competitive. However, formulating the right strategy for your small business enables you to invest your time and efforts in processes that will help you generate greater revenue. Choose strategies that will boost the traffic of your website and online shops. You can compare your traffic vs. your competitors in the industry.

4. Connect With the Audience

With so many small businesses, consumers have numerous options to choose from. Customer is the king, and you should treat them likewise only. You should mold your offerings to address their needs and offer value to them. It will help you connect and build a sustainable relationship with them.

5. Study Your Audience

Do a comprehensive analysis of your target audience to understand their needs, wants, shopping behavior, demographics, and other characteristics. You can use Similarweb to gain these valuable insights about your audience. Then, study the data you get and accordingly alter all your activities. For instance, if you find out that your audience prefers seamless customer service, invest in that. Make sure you deliver the best customer service to them. It will boost your small business's growth and success. You should have all the essential knowledge about your target audience in order to develop effective strategies.

6. Study Your Market

Market trends and forces are highly dynamic in nature and keep changing constantly. Therefore, it is imperative to look out for these changes and trends to help you overcome the threats and grab valuable opportunities. Always analyze the trends in your industry and keep a tab on all the top players. Determine where they get their maximum traffic from and keep track of the changes.

Market research will help you understand the impact of changes and act accordingly. For instance, lately, users want to engage with businesses through their apps. Therefore, you should also develop apps with an excellent user experience to succeed.

Note: You can also work with a white label company to make things easier and allow yourself the time to focus on other core competencies.

Conclusion

Market research is essential for the growth and success of every small business. It offers uncountable benefits in the short-run and small-run. Research produces a lot of reliable data, which can help you make informed decisions for the business to sustain. You can build your own data library and grow your business. Therefore, you should understand the importance of market research and invest your time and efforts into it.

SEO software can be the most deadly weapon in your arsenal if you run a digital marketing business. So before you sign up for a subscription, make sure that the software has everything you need to run your business processes and that it's compatible with your pre-existing technologies.

So what are the benefits of using an SEO software?

Digital agencies always struggle while offering quality SEO services. It begins with finding clients for your agency. It would help if you had qualified SEO leads that you could nurture, engage and convert to maintain a steady revenue stream.

Businesses need traffic, leads, and sales from the web. SEO can help you with that, but it's not a cakewalk, so you need a robust SEO software program to help you.

Later, you will need to monitor your clients' campaigns and ensure they also get qualified leads for their businesses.

So, the best SEO software will address your pain-points and help you manage your workflow.

How to Find the Right SEO Software for Your SEO Business?

An SEO tool is not just a piece of software but the extension of your team through which you can perform repetitive tasks and handle numerous activities in the agency environment.

It makes your teams more productive and efficient. If you are successful in selecting the right tool, your growth is almost assured. So, without further ado, go through this SEO Software Guide and learn how to find the right SEO software for your agency.

1. Identify Your Pain Points

Identifying your pain points before selecting an SEO software is essential. Sometimes, all an agency wants is to automate a process, but most agencies need tools to manage and organize the information received from different channels. Some of the pain points agencies face are as follows:

• Organizing contact information
• Measuring campaigns
• Nurturing leads
• Conversion
• Tracking keywords
• Automate processes

2. Enumerate Your Agency's Workflow

Mapping out your agency's workflow is essential before buying an SEO software tool. Having a fair idea of your business processes and pain-points always helps find the right solutions.

Write down your agency's daily routine, including its activities.

For SEO agencies, these activities can include managing communication, lead generation, following up on leads, tracking campaigns, generating reports, on-page, and off-page SEO, and more.

Once you successfully map your agency's workflow, identify where you need help to minimize the time and effort involved.

Pro Tip: Using DashClicks' white-label platform and fulfillment services, you can do all these things efficiently and even set reminders for your team to do a certain task.

3. Does It Allow You to Conduct Competitor Analysis?

It's essential to dissect your competitors' SEO strategies and using that information, formulate a robust keyword and content strategy to achieve top rankings. It becomes even more crucial given the rise in shady marketing and SEO practices today.

Understanding Your Competitors' Backlink Profile

The right SEO software will also tell you about your competitors' backlink profiles and how their content is faring on different platforms. Your site authority largely depends on your backlinks. So, you can make a long-term plan to reach out to those websites with links pointing to your competitors' websites. It will save you both time and money in building quality backlinks.

4. How Good Is It for Website Auditing?

Website issues are akin to cracks in a new building. The sooner you fix them, the better it is for the website's health. Such in-depth SEO audits give you a host of facts and critical issues in your website. But, if you try to perform these audits manually, it will take ages to complete. Some SEO tools allow you to do audits of multiple websites simultaneously.

Some website issues that an audit can track are:

• Pages where users and search engines can’t reach, i.e., orphaned pages
• Missing page titles & meta descriptions
• Broken links
• Page depth, i.e., the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page
• Page server errors

Pro Tip: DashClicks' white label website audit tool, InstaReports, automates this process and generates a user-friendly report based on these issues. These reports provide a complete blueprint of what needs to be done to remove these errors from your website and make it more feasible for search engines to crawl.

5. Does It Allow You to Find High-Converting Keywords for Content Marketing?

The failure and success of a website depends on your ability to find the right keywords. So, in short, it's not easy. Most SEO managers list specific industry terms based on search volume and competition on search engines. The criteria for choosing the keywords is that they should have a high search volume and low competition.

But, it's simply not enough. There are other factors too that should be taken into consideration. You should also differentiate those keywords based on "search intent."

The keywords seeking "free information" aren't the same as the ones used to "buy a product."

So, ensure that your SEO tool provides you with a wide variety of high-converting keywords for content marketing.

Finding New Keyword Opportunities

You may soon hit a wall with your existing keywords and wonder what to do next. A white label SEO software program allows you to discover the existing and new keywords your competitors are ranking for. The SEO tool will also provide related keywords to expand to new markets. Some tools can generate hundreds of keyword ideas instantly.

With numerous relevant keywords, you'll never fall short of keywords for your content, especially blog posts.

6. The Features Your SEO Software Should Have

Here are a few features that your SEO software should have:

A. Lead Generation Tool

Lead generation is tedious, and your white-label SEO software should simplify it. DashClicks' Inbound lead management software streamlines all the lead data and helps you manage all your inbound leads across multiple third-party platforms and distribute them among your sales team for instant follow-ups. The added advantage is that it comes with the deals app that streamlines all your sales activity, making it easy for your team members to collaborate better.

B. SEO Audit Tool

You need to perform an SEO audit to understand your client's problems and get insights into their website's SEO. It's an integral part of SEO services. Doing it manually can be extremely tedious and time-consuming, so it should come with the SEO software you subscribe to. DashClicks, a white label SEO agency, offers a complete SEO audit as part of its white label fulfillment services.

C. Lead Nurturing and Closing Features

As explained above, both the Inbound and Deals apps help you view your leads in the funnel along with all the necessary information and actions pertaining to those. It helps you nurture and close these leads.

D. Customer Relationship Management Feature (CRM)

Without a CRM, you might be losing numerous sales opportunities. When you sign up for DashClicks' white label services, you get access to our Deals app, a sales pipeline management CRM software that considerably simplifies lead and deals management for your sales team.

E. Data Analytics Feature

Without analytics, all that you're doing is just shooting in the dark. That's why your SEO software should have an advanced analytics feature. When you sign up for DashClick's white label platform, you can access our advanced analytics software that tracks and reports on all your marketing campaigns in one place.

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F. Report Builder for Clients

Lastly, reporting is an immense pain for agency owners and their teams. It eats up a lot of productive time and is incredibly repetitive in nature. So, your SEO software should have an automated report builder. DashClicks' InstaReports comes as a relief. It automates report generation by generating professional-grade SEO reports with a single click.

Final Words

Selecting the right SEO software is a crucial decision for an agency. The above tips will help you evaluate your options and choose the most suitable tool for your business. Your SEO software should be compatible with your workflow and meet your business needs. It should also save time and effort and help you deliver the best results to your clients.

TikTok is the new in-vogue social media platform that marketers can't help but adopt! With over a billion users worldwide, TikTok has evolved into the fastest-growing bandwagon and one of the world's most prominent social media apps. Thus, to monetize the platform's influence and expansion, TikTok has launched a 'global agency team' to develop and foster relationships with agencies that administer the majority of the world's advertising dollars.

Similarly, brands are exploring unique opportunities to incorporate TikTok advertising into their marketing campaigns to creatively publicize their business offerings to their desired audience.

However, compared to the other well-established social media platforms, TikTok Ads are a reasonably challenging addition to the marketing industry. So, suppose your business wants to connect with millennials or looking for strategies that work as a masterstroke. In that case, TikTok is an excellent platform to rapidly boost the audience engagement of your brand.

Read on to understand how to advertise on TikTok; from setting up your ad campaigns to reporting and showcasing your success metrics effectively to your client.

How to Advertise Content That Succeeds on TikTok?

Depending on the type of TikTok Ads you want for your business, bear in mind to consult a TikTok ads specialist to assist you in creating unbeatable advertising campaigns on the freshly minted social media platform.

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Here we have some practical tips to assist you in setting up and launching effective TikTok Ad campaigns for your brand -

1. Create TikToks, Not Just Ads!

TikTok is a visual platform that leverages the content graph in lieu of a social graph. Thus, the phrase "when in Rome do as the Romans do" suits perfectly when running highly successful campaigns on social media platforms. Hence, always make sure to create or select a marketing agency that is willing to develop indigenous content for TikTok Ads, which will allow your content to closely align with your targeted community.

2. Capture the Content in 720P Plus

Always make sure to create high-quality video content for your TikTok Ad campaign. As this is a visual social media platform, it is imperative to focus on producing videos with a resolution of 720p or higher to ensure its ranking among the top-performing content.

3. Focus on the Orientation

Remember to optimize your video's vertical orientation and ensure that it perfectly fits the screen when viewed vertically. Incorporating this single trick in your content creation will significantly lift your impressions, enabling you to create better engagement with your targeted audience.

4. Do Not Forget the Audio

Sound plays a remarkable role in engaging your targeted audience with your Tiktok Ads content. It equips you to deliver the information, boost the production value, and stimulate the emotional responses of your viewers. Thus, always talk or add some sound effects, music, or a voiceover to dramatically elevate your content.

5. Make It Crisp and Connected

Storytelling skills come in handy when creating content for TikTok advertising. However, developing brief, interesting, and engaging content is the ultimate key to connecting with the targeted audience. Thus, while designing the content for your brand, keep yourself updated about the latest trends and use different angles and transitions.

6. Make Use of Hashtags, Captions, and CTA Buttons

Incorporating persuasive hashtags relevant to your brand and the targeted audience will help accelerate your content's performance and engagement rate. Therefore, make sure to frame meaningful captions along with the content to strengthen the overall message of the Tiktok video.

What Are the Types of TikTok Ads?

Following are the five types of TikTok Ads that are easily accessible to marketing agencies:

1. In-Feed

The in-feed TikTok Ads appear when users tap their "For You" page in TikTok. These Ads automatically blend with TikTok's indigenous feed, leading your business to achieve relatively high visibility and engagement with your targeted audience.

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Remember - Add a CTA button that leads the audience to your campaign's landing page.

2. Brand Takeover

Brand takeover TikTok Ads pop up on your viewer's screen once they launch the app. You can include CTAs and add links to your brand's landing page to allow your targeted audience to dive deeper and connect with your business.

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3. TopView

Like Brand takeover, Top view TikTok ads auto-plays immediately after the user logs in to the app. However, these Ads capture the screen after 3 seconds of signing in and play automatically for 60 seconds. Thus, make sure to offer awe-inspiring video content to your targeted audience to reach your desired goals through these ads.

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4. Hashtag Challenge

Hashtags allow users to tap and reach the landing pages of TikTok and visit the collection of other TikTok videos participating in the same hashtag challenge. This type of TikTok advertising uplifts the user-generated content, leading you to enjoy the perks of extensive brand awareness amongst your targeted audience.

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5. Brand Effects

When creating content for TikTok Advertising, always make sure to add customized brand filters and other special effects in your video to garner accelerated engagement. Consider taking the assistance of an experienced TikTok marketing expert to help you create compelling content for your brand by combining the top-performing ad formats.

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How to Establish a TikTok Ad Campaign for Your Brand?

Once you are done with the signing-in and approval of your TikTok Business page, follow the below-mentioned steps to launch your first TikTok Ad campaign:

Step 1: Create a Campaign

Step 2: Select the Most Appropriate Objectives

Step 3: Give a Name to Your Ad Campaign and Set Your Budget

Step 4: Build a TikTok Ad Group

Step 5: Create Remarkable Ad Content

How to Measure Performance in TikTok Ads — Marketing Reports?

Tracking the performance of your brand’s TikTok Ads campaign is indispensable to ensure your marketing campaign’s efficacy. So, once you have successfully launched your brand’s ad on TikTok, it’s time to navigate your performance reports, check whether your ad campaigns are working desirably, and determine the areas for improvement.

Here are a few in-house tools ‌you can use to check out the data and insights of your TikTok Ad campaign:

1. Obtain a Complete Picture on the Dashboard

Head over to your TikTok Ads dashboard to have an overview of how your ad campaigns are performing. This will allow you to determine:

• Your current ad cost.
• The status of your ad campaigns, including ad groups.
• Performance metrics, including CPM, CTA, CPC, CTR, and other relevant parameters like gender, operating system, and location.

2. Acquire In-Depth Insights From the Campaign Page

The campaign page will offer an in-depth analysis of how your ads perform individually. For instance, it will provide you with a breakdown of several marketing metrics, including audience analysis, clicks, views, reach, engagement rate, and conversion cost.

Conclusion

While TikTok advertising is pretty new in the industry, it offers you immense opportunities to boost your brand and expand your business before the platform gets flooded with competition. Thus, it is recommended to consult a professional, whether you are here to understand ‘how to advertise on TikTok’ to run a campaign on your own or looking for ways to improve your established TikTok advertising campaign. Hiring the experts will ensure that you’re able to create captivating content to enhance your brand’s visibility amongst your targeted audience. However, remember not to settle for the first ad that brings results. Take time, embrace the trends, experiment, use variations, add creativity, and make the best “magic potion” out of your available resources.

Happy TikTok advertising!

We are moving towards a more data-driven world. Nowadays, data is at the core of everything, and it’s not only limited to engineering and technology.

Businesses can’t survive without access to marketing and consumer data. In a data-driven organization, you need to infuse insights into applications.

If you can integrate a stunning and user-friendly dashboard into your app and brand it as your own, your app may become highly popular without investing much time in development.

As an agency, you’ll be at a significant advantage if you can harness the power of world-class analytics reports.

Here are some ‌benefits of white-labeling and infusing dashboards into your products:

• Adds value to your app
• Provides actionable insights
• Improves user experience
• Elevates brand recognition and loyalty
• Allows you to take advantage of third-party developer expertise
• Allows you to take advantage of the best-in-class available tools
• Makes customization easier

Organizations love white-labeling also because their reports and dashboards have a magical effect on users’ psyche. White-label platforms have incredible reporting power combined with brilliant presentations. Furthermore, it allows you to offer digital services under your branding.

What Are White Labeled Reports?

When you use a white-label digital service, the service provider’s analytics platform integrates with your data source. It extracts data from your database to produce stunning reports and dashboard data projections.

The right white-label platform gives you complete control over your dashboard’s widgets and data visualizations. You can display visual elements the way you want and highlight the most valuable insights through a user-friendly UI editor.

The most exciting thing about white-labeling is that it allows your cross-functional teams to use your logo, brand colors, and styles to make your reports and dashboards look like your teams develop them.

White-label platforms like DashClicks have numerous features that appeal to enterprise users, including tech and non-tech, customer support, and sales, allowing organizations to manage their campaigns with complete control over the outcome.

White Label Reports: Under the Hood

Your pages will ultimately reflect your organization's branding when you implement your dashboard via a white-label platform such as DashClicks. So, your dashboard will perfectly complement your brand as it will carry its look and feel.

With such a high degree of customization, your app will look like a replica of your website. So, even a report will look like you have pulled it using a tool your company has developed.

DashClicks reporting tool – InstaReports offer a strong white-labeling experience to agencies.

• It offers a seamless user interface that allows you to edit your reports faster.
• It will enable you to use many report formats such as PDF, HTML, etc.
• Fully rebranded dashboard.
• Easy configuration of branding, including colors, logos, and fonts.

Exploring White Label Dashboard

Google generates loads of data primarily related to website analytics. White-label dashboards are UIs designed to enable users to view and analyze this data in a beautiful and precisely arranged and organized format. You can use white-labeled reports to distribute this data.

You can easily pull this data with the dashboard as it contains all the controls. The dashboard allows you to change the settings and preferences to get the insights per your needs.

DashClicks' dashboard comes with powerful analytics and reporting apps, so the platform is the ideal option if you wish to offer meaningful analytical data to your clients.

Source: DashClicks Software Tour (40 Minute Dashboard Demo) - 18:50

You can customize the look and feel of your reports and make them visually appealing.

Here is what the analytics look like in the dashboard. It also provides analytics about SEO, Google Ads, and Facebook ads. See the screenshot below -

Source: DashClicks Software Tour (40 Minute Dashboard Demo) - 23:29

Source: DashClicks Software Tour (40 Minute Dashboard Demo) - 23:37

Built-in Apps for Every Business Solution

As an agency, when you sign up for the DashClicks' white-label platform, you can resell the entire DashClicks digital marketing agency platform, completely white-labeled under your brand.

Here are a few apps from DashClicks' that will give you an unfair advantage over others -

1. Analytics

The analytics app from DashClicks is a real-time marketing reporting software at your fingertips that allows you to monitor and report your marketing campaigns in one place.

2. Contacts

Contacts is a sales CRM that helps you competently manage your contacts with the power of the DashClicks' contact management CRM software. It makes contact management a cakewalk. The sales CRM helps you manage every prospective customer in the light of their customer journey.

3. Deals

Deals is a sales pipeline management software that helps you bring automation to life when managing leads and deals. Sales is the most complex and challenging yet vital part of any business, and the very survival of your business depends on sales. With the deals app, you can easily track your prospects' journey and nurture them in the funnel.

4. Projects

DashClicks' white label project management software provides the easiest and most powerful way to manage your projects, teams, customers, and more. No doubt it's termed as the best project management software for agencies. You should also leverage the power of this app to manage your projects swiftly and efficiently.

Similarly, many other software tools from DashClicks can infuse power into your agency business, such as InstaSites, Sites, Templates, InboundĀ (a lead management software,) and Forms apps.

White Label Reports

Have a look at the following report generated by DashClicks' white label reporting dashboard. It overviews the website build, deals added, and new contacts.

It also provides you with data about page views and visitors.

These reports are easy to understand and grasp, so everybody in the organization can use them. Previously, the reports contained so much jargon and complex data in the digital marketing industry that only marketers could understand them.

It makes them quite user-friendly and extremely helpful in decision-making.

Final Words

White label fully branded dashboards are crucial for agency branding as they enable you to personalize so that you can offer digital marketing as a holistic service.

Indeed, it adds more value to your brand. It also allows you to coordinate with the SEO team, often in real-time, through a dashboard that frequently updates itself. Similarly, white-label dashboards also enable your clients to track campaign performance in real-time.

Would you like to learn more about white label dashboards and reports? Click here for a quick demo.

The process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website is called “link building.”

In simpler terms, it is a practice where you promote your website to other website owners because you wish to secure a link (hyperlink) on their website to your page.

No, you may think why invest your resources and time in link building?

The answer is simple the higher the number of links you have from authoritative and relevant websites, the better your site will perform in the search for relevant queries. As per the latest statistics, the 1st ranking website on Google’s SERPs typically has 3.8x more backlinks as compared to positions 2-10.

Note: In case you don’t know the term backlinks, let us define it for you. The links from a page on one site to another are called backlinks. If a site links to your website, this means you have a backlink from them.

If you want to boost your website traffic from search, you should consistently secure good links from relevant sites. In other words, you need link building. However, there are some prerequisites for link building. These are brilliant communication, strong social skills, creativity, and persistence.

Why Your Business Should Include Link Acquisition in Your Marketing?

Read on to know the reasons why link acquisition is crucial for your business:

• Links are a strong ranking factor in the search algorithm of Google as well as other search engines.
• Links are helpful in audience development.
• A link is like a vote of confidence from one site to another.

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How to Build Links?

Let’s take a detailed look at the categories in which most of the link building strategies and tactics fall.

1. Adding Links

If you visit a website that isn’t yours and manually place your link there, that is known as adding a link. Some tactics that fit into this type of category are:

• Social Profile Creation
• Business Directory Submissions
• Blog Commenting
• Creating Job Search Listings
• Posting to Q&A sites, Communities, and Forums

Building links through these tactics is an extremely easy thing to do. And because of this, those links have a very low value in Google’s eyes (can even be flagged as SPAM in some cases). Moreover, such kinds of links merely provide you a competitive advantage. If you can visit a site and manually place your link there, your competitors can easily do the same.

But, we advise you not to ignore these tactics completely. These can be advantageous for your online business for reasons other than link acquisition.

2. Asking for Links

This is when you get in touch with the owner of the site you want a link from and provide them with a compelling reason to link to you. Giving a “compelling reason” is vital in this case. This is because the people you are contacting don’t care about you or your website. They wish to know what’s in it for them. Don’t worry, we have got you covered here as well. Let’s discuss some of the link building strategies and tactics that come in this category, along with the “compelling reason” you can give to the website owners:

• Guest Blogging: Write useful content for their site.
• Testimonials and Case Studies: Provide positive feedback about their service or product.
• Ego Bait: Mention their work in your content in a positive light.
• Link Inserts: Show them a resource with more information on a thing they have mentioned briefly.
• Skyscraper Technique: Show them a better resource as compared to the one they are linking to.

Right now, these strategies may seem a little exciting to you. However, after you send your first email request, you come face to face with a bitter reality your “compelling reason” looks not so compelling to them. For instance, they may find your guest post not good enough or your resource not unique enough.

So you may note a fact here. For these tactics to be effective, you should create an excellent page that individuals would themselves want to link to. Or, have a lot of credibility and authority in your space.

As it is hard to convince random individuals to link to you, a lot of SEO tactics aim to sweeten the deal by:

• Offering to share their content on Facebook and Twitter
• Offering a link in exchange
• Offering free access to a premium product

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However, offering these “extra advantages” gets you into the grey area of what is known as a “link scheme” as per Google’s guidelines. In other words, when you use these ways, you end up breaking Google’s guidelines.

Note: After going through this section, you may think we are dissuading you from using the strategies and tactics that fall into this category. That’s not what we are doing. We simply wish to set the right expectation here. We want to tell you that you must not give up after sending your 10th outreach email with no response in return. It takes extreme effort to get links with the help of these tactics without breaking the guidelines set by Google.

3. Earning Links

You earn links if other individuals link to your website’s pages without “you” asking them to do so. This only happens if you have something outstanding that makes other site owners want to mention it on their sites.

Tip: Website owners can only link to things they know exist out there. Hence, you need to promote your page for them to see it.

A few tactics and strategies that fall in this category are creating linkable assets such as infographics, surveys, maps, and data studies. (A linkable asset is a content piece crafted to attract links typically from other sites in your niche.)

All in all, we recommend that you invest your money and time into creating valuable and outstanding pages. It will result in good word of mouth and high-quality backlinks in a natural way.

Tip:  Even if you are starting out and have a tight budget, you can still create noteworthy content and earn links organically. At this time, you will have put in much more effort than your competitors.

What Makes a Good Link?

No one is aware of how Google measures each link’s value. But a few general concepts of evaluating links do exist. Let’s discuss two of these important concepts in detail.

1. Relevance

Let’s suppose you own a blog that is about coffee. You post a review of a coffee grinder you think is the best in the market. At a later stage, two friends of yours express a desire to link to it. One from their “15 Tips to Save Money” article and another from their “12 Top Coffee Recipes” article. Both the pages have equal authority.

Now, which one of the two pages do you think will cast a stronger vote in Google’s eyes? The answer is simple the page that is more relevant i.e. “12 Top Coffee Recipes.”

2. Anchor Text

Anchor text is defined as the clickable text in a hyperlink. In a lot of cases, it describes the linked page. Google notices the words in anchor text to better understand the keywords the referenced page deserves to rank for.

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Best Link Building Practices

Although we have already discussed some link building strategies and tactics, let’s discuss two of the most effective ones.

1. Creating Linkable Assets

As mentioned before, a linkable asset is a content piece created to attract links generally from other sites in your niche. Examples of linkable assets include case studies, infographics, list posts, etc.

We recommend that you visit your competitors’ websites to check the dominant type of linkable assets in your industry. After you find out the linkable assets that attract links in your industry, we recommend you start creating them.

Tip: As per the latest statistics, infographics are famous for attracting links. Ideal for condensing complex information, 53% of SEO specialists produce them for the purpose of earning backlinks.

2. Checking Competitors’ Links

Pursuing your competitors’ links is another link building strategy you can follow. If you get to study the links of the top-ranking page for your search query, you can figure out which tactics to use to get similar links and outrank that page.

So, how do you check your competitors’ links? We recommend that you use an SEO tool called Ahrefs. All you need to do is enter the keyword you wish to rank for in the Keywords Explorer and check out “SERP Overview.” It tells you the number of backlinks and linking websites the top-ranking pages have.

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When you click on the numbers, you get to view a report listing each one of the links.

Now, with this information, we recommend you do the following:

• Check how the links were acquired and use those tactics to exceed the number of links of your competitors.
• Try to get links from those pages that have linked to your competitors.

If you want to dive deeper into link building, these resources can help:

• Technical SEO Implementations to Increase the Impact of Your Link Building Campaign
• 9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics

Conclusion

Now that you know the basics of link building, its importance, and different link building tactics, it is time to get cracking!

If you have never built links before, you can start as soon as possible to be able to land your first link. If you have been link building for some time now, we hope you try out a tactic or two from our list to see the differences.

As we have already told you, link building is not that easy and the tactics continue to evolve. But we do hope that you get to know some approaches from this article and become an even better link builder.

Always remember, link building is both an art and a science analytical skills and technical knowledge is necessary, but our creativity is definitely the defining element.

Happy link building to you!

Pandemic has changed a lot of things, including customers' online behavior. People are spending more time online these days. According to an Adroll survey, consumers spend an average of 13+ hours online daily, which is incredibly high compared to the previous decade.

People prefer to shop online rather than visiting stores or in-person shopping. On Instagram, 90%+ users follow at least one business account, making it a hub of several newly launched companies, startups, and solopreneurs.

Marketers are investing a huge amount of money to deal with this significant shift. Still, many are unable to get satisfactory results. Even after spending money, you need innovation and leadership to deal with the shifting behavior of customers. Riding on the latest digital marketing trends will give you an added advantage over the competition.

8 Digital Marketing Trends in 2022 That Agencies Should Ride On

Here are the eight digital marketing trends you need to understand and leverage for the growth of your agency business.

1. Shifting Online Buying Behavior & Global Uncertainty

There is a marked shift in people's buying behavior as more and more people buy stuff online. Still, uncertainty characterizes every aspect of a business. However, uncertainty has also opened the gateways to many new opportunities.

So, our marketing strategies should have a system to reduce uncertainty.

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According to a Gartner report, unpredictable events such as COVID-19 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine have an unforeseen and rapid impact on businesses globally and require massive shifts in strategic planning.

Marketers should be quick to respond to such events and exhibit agility. Say 'no' to time-intensive approaches. However, a proscriptive approach will help.

A change in a situation also warrants a change in the strategic plan. Traditional plans have static short-term planning models running over one to three years, but agile strategies involve continuous evaluation, improvement, and planning while responding to change.

Since the world is constantly changing, digital marketers should be prepared and plan for uncertainty. The planet is still struggling with COVID-19, the Ukraine-Russia war, the food crisis, inflation, and rapid changes in technology.

Here is a six-step formula to manage uncertainty in the digital marketing industry –

• Update your marketing planning on an annual and quarterly basis.
• Conduct the right team meetings, track success metrics, and monitor progress.
• Do impact assessments, conduct training programs, and stakeholder analysis
• Establish robust communication among cross-functional teams and with the audiences
• Lead the change management, write a stump speech and deliver it at every meeting
• Drive strategic transformation initiatives and be ready to get your hands dirty if needed to get the job done.

2. The Dawn of the Metaverse

Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse is among the major digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2022 and beyond. It's about an immersive experience, virtual reality (VR), blockchain technology, and VR advertising.

The Metaverse will connect both online and physical worlds through a network of 3D virtual worlds powered by virtual reality. You won't need any VR gears to put on, as you can access the virtual world using your favorite device such as a mobile or laptop.

Let's look at one such 3D events platform, "Nowhere," where you can view events, virtually participate in those live events, and meet others online over the net.

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The Horizons Workrooms Beta is a virtual meeting space where coworkers can join a meeting.

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Users can create their digital profiles or avatars and join a live meeting in the virtual world. So, people can perform a wide array of activities in the Metaverse. They can communicate, interact, buy, and trade.

For a better understanding, here's a concert by Ariana Grande. Fortnite created these concerts for its users that are part of a game.

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Marketing evolves along with the up-gradation in technology. If we look at the marketing mediums on a timeline, they evolved with contemporary technologies such as printed press, radio, and television, and now the Internet has taken over everything. The next phase is the Metaverse, which will revolutionize marketing.

It's going to happen very soon!

Must Read: Why Your Business Needs to Prepare for the Metaverse

Facebook changed its name to Meta, a strong indicator of where things were heading.

Some luxury fashion brands such as Nike and Gucci have already started working with NFT developers to step into Metaverse. There has been a 400% increase in Metaverse-related jobs this year.

Here are a few Metaverse trends every marketer should follow -

A. Immersive Marketing

The immersive experience is an exotic feature of Metaverse that brings endless possibilities for marketers. Conversion depends on your customer interaction, and Metaverse's engaging, immersive experience can be a boon for you.

On Internet browsers, customers can only see the products, whereas, in the Metaverse, they can also "try on" the clothes. It's going to be a highly engaging customer experience (CX).

Related: Unlocking the True Potential of the Metaverse

B. Impact on Growth Marketing

The Metaverse will also boost growth marketing. It will bring plenty of valuable data you can use in growth marketing. All it needs is the standard "internet cookie," and it will collect data about every move the visitors make. This way, marketers will have loads of data about consumer behavior. So, even businesses that don't have a heavy Metaverse presence can access Metaverse data to improve their marketing strategies.

C. Virtual Worlds

The tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram offer numerous marketing tools to target their audiences. However, you might be restricted by the tools' limitations. Metaverse provides a whole new virtual world where you can invite customers to join.

D. New Opportunities

The Metaverse empowers marketers to leverage the technology, so you can employ strategies such as advertising through immersive games or hosting global online events.

3. Rise of TikTok-Like Short Videos

TikTok started this trend that swept the entire world. With decreasing attention span of the users, short videos are gaining momentum globally. Short videos are entertaining, informative, and refreshing, and above all, they are quite prevalent, so people go on binge-watching them.

TikTok made them so popular that everyone from YouTube to Instagram started imitating TikTok like short videos. YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are also highly popular among users.

Related: Short Video Success: TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

With an average attention span of just eight seconds for Gen Z, short videos are a long-term trend.

How to Succeed at TikTok Marketing?

TikTok is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience. It's a social media platform thriving on short videos that are fun and easy to consume.

Here are some tips to succeed at TikTok marketing –

• Create attention-grabbing, engaging, entertaining, and high-quality videos
• Use relevant keywords and hashtags and optimize your videos for the TikTok algorithm.
• Promote your TikTok account incessantly
• Use graphics and visuals to attract the masses
• Learn the art of keeping your videos short and sweet and keep them under 60 seconds.
• Use creativity to cut the noise
• Use pleasant music. You can add popular music using TikTok’s built-in Lip Sync feature.
• Collaborate with other content creators with similar target audiences and users
• Run a contest
• Leverage TikTok ads in the awareness stage
• Leverage influencers
• Follow trends
• Don’t forget to add a CTA
• Use analytics to increase engagement
• Be consistent and post videos regularly

4. The Unstoppable Rise of Podcasting

During the lockdowns, people were craving human connection inside their apartments. According to Forbes magazine, listeners consumed around 15 billion hours of podcasts in 2021, roughly 125% of its 2020 volume.

In this Tweet, King Digi mentions starting a podcast as his third marketing goal. Most marketers are switching to podcasts to reach out to their audiences and make a more profound impact.

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Podcasts are one of the most effective marketing tactics with the highest conversion rates, even higher than videos and webinars. 20% of people decided to buy a product or service after listening to its recommendation on a podcast. Podcasts have a tremendous impact, and they can amplify word-of-mouth recommendations to a great extent.

Podcasts are more effective than outbound marketing tactics such as email marketing, cold calling, or text advertising. Outbound tactics are losing effectiveness and are termed annoying by most customers.

In podcasts, specialists discuss real-life problems and evaluate analytical data. Furthermore, you can search for your favorite topic and listen to your favorite podcast at will, unlike radio broadcasts where unrelated issues are combined.

Related: How to Create a Podcast Marketing Strategy That Speaks to Your Audience

Tips to Create Professional Podcasts:

Here are three tips for creating professional podcasts:

• Identify your target audience.
• Hire scriptwriters, collaborate with experienced speakers, and buy professional equipment.
• Your text script should attract your target audience. It should effectively promote your products or services while adding value to the content.
• Avoid intrusive advertising in podcasts.
• Promote your podcast.

Podcasts are considered the best place to stay abreast with the latest trends. The following Tweet recommends a few podcasts to keep in touch with the latest marketing and advertising trends in 2022 in digital marketing.

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Here is the DashClicks podcast Marketers Mindset with Chad Kodary on iTunes. Our Marketers Mindset podcast aims to help entrepreneurs start and grow a wildly profitable marketing agency business.

5. Evolution of First-Party Data Marketing

Google will soon phase out its third-party cookies from Chrome, likely in 2023. Some new tracking technology will replace it. Third-party data was designed to help marketers and small company owners. But, agencies should prepare for first-party data, which is more relevant to their needs, especially conversions and lead generation.

More prominent companies have vast buckets of first-party data, which is vital for targeted marketing campaigns.

So, serving personalized ads in a post-cookie world will be less difficult. As an alternative, businesses can invest in market research while exploring new ad measurement practices.

Here are a few tips for surviving in a cookieless world –

• Prepare for sustained disruption by redirecting cookie-related media spending.
• You can try different measures such as identity solutions, Publisher Provided Identifiers (PPIDs), first-party data, and Contextual advertising.

Related: 9 Best Alternatives To Third Party Cookies (2022) Definitive Guide

6. Emphasis on Core Values

Companies are returning to their core values to build trust and cut the marketing noise. Hulu, the well-known streaming service, emphasizes its five core values one such core value is its "viewer-first" philosophy.

Every step they take starts with the viewer, and everyone in the company knows this. Hulu employees work as one team with aligned goals and a sense of responsibility, ultimately resulting in excellent Cx. They boast a great work culture, where employees feel free to be creative, grow, and learn.

GAP is also a well-known fashion brand and believes in its core values, such as equality & belonging.

They also claim that they are "inclusive, by design," and hence GAP offers clothes that fit every individual regardless of age, race, body type, or gender.

They insist on color palettes for different skin tones and sizes for more human dimensions. The same follows in their work culture, where you are free to raise your voice.

They firmly believe that "inclusion is going to change the world."

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It connects GAP with younger audiences such as Gen Z, who buy from companies they believe are investing in the causes they care about. They also pay attention to equality. GAP is the first Fortune 500 company to announce equal pay for equal work.

They also work for sustainability and create opportunities and a healthy environment for their customers and employees.

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7. Prevalence of Shoppable Links

Marketers often go on a spree to present exotic shopping options to their preferred customers, which improves the entire shopping experience. Dishing out shoppable content is one such tactic. Shoppable content includes links or visuals where customers can directly shop from the content. It also allows them to add products to the cart without taking the usual route, i.e., scrolling through each product page.

Brands usually share shoppable content through social media posts that feature products. You can provide other details such as price, features, checkout link, etc., enabling users to buy those products directly from the posts.

The stunning product images and videos ignite their purchase decision and prompt them to buy the products as shoppable content, minimizing their buying efforts.

The idea is to inspire the users and minimize the buyer's inconvenient journey that begins from the product description page and takes them through various long-drawn zig zag steps. It delays conversion.

Shoppable content accelerates the sales process and makes it result-driven.

Shoppable links are a popular digital trend, and you'll see them growing further in 2022. Here is an example of shoppable ink. Soft vegan butter is an ingredient mentioned in the Pumpkin Doughnuts recipe. They have added the link to Salted butter sticks below to enhance the visitor's experience.

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Related: Shoppable content: The new way of buying online (and three brands doing it right)

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This Tweet includes a Walmart shoppable link that takes us to the Walmart page where you can buy Alaffia SkinCare products.

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The shift from physical stores to online and social shopping has been growing steadily for the past decade. But the pandemic accelerated it by almost five years.

A. Shorter Sales Funnel

Shoppable content such as videos, social posts, and ads enables customers to get what they want when they want it. In this age of instant gratification, people don't want to see delays or an extended sales funnel.

B. Better Customer Experience

Millennials and Gen Z love to see minimum disruptions. You won't find any abandoned shopping carts here. In other words, they get a fantastic customer experience.

C. Increased Brand Loyalty

You can instantly build trust through storytelling. Through shoppable content, you can post real stories. You can also feature your verified customers in your stories, making them more powerful and memorable.

D. Improved Conversion Rates

The ultimate goal of all marketing and advertising is to be present at the right place and at the right time. You can boost conversion beyond expectations with laser-sharp targeting through targeted and personalized shoppable ads.

8. Emphasis on Quality Content

In the stone age of SEO marketing, pumping out content in higher volumes made you the victorious king nobody could beat. There were no advanced SEO reporting tools that could provide you with deeper insights into your content's performance on search engines.

To run a successful campaign, you should regularly measure the performance of your content and keyword rankings. Agencies need robust SEO reporting and analytics tool. You can go to the DashClicks dashboard, which will act as a unified client dashboard software for you. It will allow you to run analytics and view detailed SEO reports to determine your areas of improvement.

Final Words

The year 2022 offers an excellent opportunity for brands to capitalize on emerging trends such as Metaverse, AI, podcasts, short videos, brand stories, and shoppable links. But be careful: Millennials and Gen Z prefer only those brands that are authentic, friendly, and transparent.

Furthermore, you need to understand these trends before leveraging them for your marketing. For example, before creating podcasts, arrange the equipment and hire scriptwriters. Collaborate with experienced speakers and send them an invite to join your podcast. Consider hosting interviews with experts in your field.

These are the trends that have changed the way digital marketing is being conducted so far. So, ride on these trends carefully and transform your digital marketing.