SEO is undeniably one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing. It is a viable and cost-effective way to reach customers. With a majority of the users initiating the internet browsing by performing a search, organic traffic makes up the central portion of the total viewership for any web page or website. And to convert this new traffic into regular visitors and users, website owners use numerous SEO strategies. There are many types of SEO techniques, but if your website's technical SEO is not strong enough, other SEOs might be of little help.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization techniques are specifically formed to improve the ranking of a web page on the SERPs by engaging and attracting relevant traffic. Additionally, SEO strategies also aim to enhance the page experience for users since it plays a pivotal role in Google Ranking Systems. There are various types of SEO, but the three critical ones are the on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.

Traditional SEO aims to optimize the content on the web page and is of two types- on-page and off-page SEO. At the same time, technical SEO intends to improve the website or web page architecture to enhance crawling by search engine crawlers.

What Is Technical SEO?

Every search engine works by discovering and identifying your webpage content on the internet. It crawls, indexes, and then ranks your web page to be visible on internet searches.

But the question is, how does a search engine know if you have content for them to crawl through? And if the crawlers know about your content, are they reading it in the way you want them to? Technical SEO is the answer to all such questions.

Technical SEO checks if your website content satisfies the factors of search engines that may impact your ranking on their search result pages. Some of these factors are the site's loading speed, mobile friendliness, accessibility to the content, and more. If search engines find these factors to be negative, they drop your ranking, affecting your conversion rates.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

Only 9.37% of the content over the internet gets organic traffic on Google, leaving the rest of 90.63% of content untouched, which is a massive percentage. This high percentage of unseen content on the internet is mostly not available on the first page of the SERP. Implying that, if your website does not appear as a search result on the first search engine result page, your data is as good as invisible.

Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be because your content does not provide rich knowledge or isn't engaging. This can be because the search engine crawlers could not match your content to the search query. It also may be because the crawlers read your content but could not understand its intention and hence could not appropriately index and rank it.

Image Source

Elements of Technical SEO Audit

• Files robot.txt
• URL
• HTML and XML Sitemaps
• HTTPS instead of HTTP
• Easy navigation
• Page loading speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Breadcrumb menus
• Canonical URLs
• 404 error and 301 redirecting pages
• Schema Markup

Implementing a Technical SEO Audit

Although a technical SEO audit sounds highly complex, and you may be wondering how to do an SEO audit, it is not as intricate. The technical SEO audit includes focusing your attention on the aspects that help a search engine read your content and your reader to use your website most efficiently.

You should conduct two types of SEO audits on your website -

1. Website-Wide Auditing

A website holds multiple pages together, and pages make the first impression on any visitor. To enhance the website's user experience, optimize the essential pages and web pages that drive traffic to your website. These pages may include the home page, contact page, about page, and products page.

Use the following tips to perform a website-wide audit -

A. Improve the Web Page Design

The web page content should clearly distinguish headers, titles, body, and footers. The website should match well with the brand color codes and look welcoming to the user. The call-to-action buttons and forms should be readily available.

B. Enhance User Experience

The UX matters a lot for your page to rank well. While doing an SEO audit, you should ensure that your website ticks most, if not every, points on the technical SEO audit checklist. To enhance the user experience, there should be a navigational menu on every page; the content should not be dense and should be appropriately divided into subheadings for easy readability.

Image Source

C. Create a Clean About Page

Usually, a visitor goes to the about page to learn about the owner. It also means that the user is interested in your services or products. Make a concise yet attractive about page, giving the visitor a reason to trust the content on your website.

2. On-Page Auditing

Compared to the complete website audit, on-page auditing is performed to optimize every individual page on your website that you want to rank in the SERPs. Since web pages make a website, they need to be appealing enough for users to stay on your website instead of bouncing back. During an on-page SEO audit, the elements to check for are content, HTML elements, and site-architectural elements.

Here are some tips for performing an on-page audit on your web pages -

A. Call-To-Action Buttons

To generate leads, every page should have CTA buttons and a form for the user to fill in and look at your services further. The CTAs should be evenly distributed through the content, with the first one being at the top. Moreover, you should keep only about three to four CTAs on a page, as too many of them can repel the users.

B. Add Pop-Ups

Along with CTAs, pop-ups also help in lead generation. Set the time for the pop-ups to appear. Make sure they do not appear as soon as the user lands on your website. Preferably, time the pop-ups according to how much the user has scrolled down already through the web page.

C. Simple URL Structure

The URL should be clean of unnecessary words and easy to read. The URL should show a simple hierarchy, so the user knows their location on the website. An ideal URL structure has a domain, a sub-domain, a directory, and a specific page route.

Additionally, the algorithms, especially Google, get constantly updated. And these algorithms need to be convinced that your web page is worth sharing with the people. Fortunately, the good part about updates in algorithms is that the changes are gradual, giving you enough time to improve and optimize your content for the best user experience.

As discussed above, every search engine works in three stages with your web page - crawling, indexing, and ranking. To ensure that the search engine conducts all these stages according to your preferences, performing a technical SEO audit is essential.

The Factors to Optimize During a Technical SEO Audit

1. Manage Your robots.txt Files

The robot.txt files available in the root folder of websites direct the crawlers on your website; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol. You can limit them to what they should view and what should not be indexed. Mostly the admin details are something you wouldn't want everyone on the internet to know about. Moreover, you can also stop proxy robot crawlers and spammers from over-crawling your website, reaching email addresses, and blocking the pages you don't want to be accessed by checking your robots.txt files. Google Search Central has detailed information about the robots.txt files.

Image Source

Working and Creating a robots.txt File

Working and creating a robots.txt file can be easily understood by an example –

For a URL – https://www.dashclicks.com/blog/10-reasons-why-your-website-should-be-seo-friendly/

A crawler will go to the specific path of the web page, separating it from the URL itself. The crawler will read content after the first slash (/) in the URL structure. Now, to remove the access permission, you need to go to the root folder and change the structure to – https://www.dashclicks.com/robots.txt

Structure of a robots.txt File –

A robots.txt file is a text file that can have multiple records. An example structure would look like this-

User-agent: *

Disallow: /path 1/

Disallow: /path 2/

Here, the “User-agent: *” applies the conditions to all robots, which can also be changed (See Conditions in a robots.txt files section). And, the “Disallow: /” removes access to the applicable robots from particular directories or pages. In the example above, two directories are not allowed to be read by any robots.

Conditions in robots.txt Files –

1. For excluding all robots from the complete server:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

2. For allowing all robots full access, don’t create a robots.txt file or use the following:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

3. For excluding all robots from exclusive paths:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /path 1/

Disallow: /path 2/…..and so on

4. For excluding a particular robot:

User-agent: Spambot

Disallow: /

5. For allowing a specific robot:

User-agent: Google

Disallow:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

6. To allow a particular file within a page:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /path 1/ file 1/

7. To disallow a particular file within a page:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /path 2/ file 1.html

2. Adding Sitemaps

The HTML sitemap simplifies navigation for the users, while the XML sitemap helps the search engine crawlers suitably go through your website. The HTML and XML sitemaps are available in the root folder of your website.

Image Source

If you can’t find them there, you can use the following Google search command-

Site:domain.com inurl:sitemap

It is essential to inspect your XML sitemap if you are facing errors related to crawling and indexing. Additionally, ensure that you have added all the content you want to be indexed into the XML sitemap. You should also submit your sitemap to the Google Search Console to notify Google every time your content is updated.

For WordPress: WordPress is an excellent content management system, and to create a sitemap here, you need a plugin. These plugins automatically create new sitemaps for you as soon as you add new content or update the existing one.

To Add XML Sitemaps:

You can use the following plugins in WordPress –

• JetPack: This tool is used by most WordPress-powered blog websites to create XML sitemaps. The JetPack has all the essential marketing tools needed for SEO audits.
• RankMath: It is a new tool for 2021, but it already has 900,000+ users. RankMath is packed with features after which you might not even need any other WordPress SEO plugin.

To Add HTML Sitemaps:

The most widely used plugin for creating HTML sitemaps in WordPress is the Simple Sitemap Pro. It is easy to use, efficient, and quick plugin to add HTML sitemaps to your website.

For Manually Creating Sitemaps

Manual sitemaps are created primarily when the sitemaps are heavily customized according to the user’s interaction with your website or if your website is not powered by WordPress. In both cases, you will have to manually add sitemaps to your website every time you add, subtract, update, or change the content of your website. The advantage of the manual creation of sitemaps is that the tools let you see the hierarchy of your website for better understanding. Further, even with automatic sitemap creation, it is advised to do a manual audit every 3-4 months for better results.

To Add XML Sitemaps

• Slickplan: This tool has a complete suite for your website. Slickplan will create customizable XML sitemaps for your website in minutes and build a website structure.
• Dynomapper: This tool allows you to create sitemaps in different styles, namely, default, circle, and tree. Dynomapper is a visual sitemap creator with a high crawling capacity.
• Sitemap by click5: The sitemap by click5 tool generates sitemaps for your website, creates robots.txt files, and has custom post-type support.

3. Build a Good Website Framework

A solid outline of your website’s content will help visitors and crawlers easily access pages and posts. Make a simple yet effective structure defining all the pages and precisely relating one page to another. View the following aspects for a good website architecture –

A. Content: Keep your content streamlined and connected. Get rid of any content that may not be useful for the present times or is an old concept. Update your content with new statistics to make it more relatable to the current scenarios.

B. URL Structures: The URL structures should be clean and void of anything that makes them look stuffed up. An ideal URL structure is detailed in Tip#5: URL Structure section.

C. Menus for Easy Navigation: To enhance the UX of your website, you should create menus for easy navigation. These menus should define and link to every primary page present on your website so the user can reach the preferred content quickly.

D. Breadcrumbs: A breadcrumb menu is created at the footer or a header to show the user’s path to the current web page. A breadcrumb menu also allows the user to reach several pages back with a single click. This menu can also show the hierarchy of the path for the website. A breadcrumb menu looks like –

Home>Blogs>White Labeling>SEO Reselling Guide (Updated 2021)

E. Internal Linking: Integrating pages using hyperlinking on the source page is called internal linking. They establish an information hierarchy, making navigation more manageable, and grouping the content to reduce cluttering.

Image Source

4. Simplify the Content

Search engine crawlers consider websites with too much content irrelevant. Moreover, websites with a complicated hierarchy are not preferred by the users either. Streamlining the content will help users and crawlers to read through your content quickly and easily. To simplify your website structure, you can combine the content in the following ways-

A. Group the Content Based on Similar Keywords: Combine all the content with identical keywords so the user and crawlers will have only one place to target when they need it.

B. Group the Content Based on Relevancy: Although grouping the content according to keywords will also combine them with relevance, sometimes topics could be related and still not share keywords. In those cases, employ your manual skills to divide or merge the content.

C. Highlight Essential and Updated Content: To stay at the top of the game, keep updating your content with the latest data, information, and keywords. You can highlight crucial information by bold formatting or changing the text color to enhance its visibility to the reader.

5. URL Structure

Long and complicated URLs are discouraged by search engines and frowned upon by the readers. The URL should only contain the major elements of the page and website. You should follow the following for a good URL structure-

• Remove the unnecessary words and digits from the URLs
• Use a maximum of two keywords
• Use HTTPS over HTTP for enhanced security
• Use canonical tags to stop crawlers from reading drafted versions of the same content
• Follow a standard structure

https://www.dashclicks.com/blog/10-reasons-why-your-website-should-be-seo-friendly/

The above example is a simple structure clearly defining the path of the blog.

6. Check the Loading Speed

The page should load quickly, preferably within three seconds. Any reader usually searches for a topic to get answers in urgency. If your page takes too much time to load, the reader will leave to check out another page. This will increase your bounce-back rates, which is not suitable for getting a rank in the SERPs.

Image Source

To optimize your website for loading speed-

• Use Google PageSpeed tools and modules,
• Check the loading speed of your content regularly,
• Compress the included images and videos,
• Avoid too many plugins,
• Manage JavaScript files

7. Enhance Mobile Friendliness

Your website will earn a higher rank if it is accessible by the users through a mobile phone. The guideline by Google in early 2021 mentioned that mobile-friendly sites would be prioritized since most searches today are done through mobile phones. Moreover, using a responsive web design, you can make your website viewable on any device. Using HTML and CSS, an RWD design adjusts and resizes the website content according to the device the reader uses without pixelating anything.

You can check out the following tools for using responsive web design for your website –

• Bootstrap: It is the world’s most popular tool for developing mobile-first websites. Bootstrap is a tool to quickly design highly responsive websites, with mixins and Sass variables, responsive grid systems, and much more.
• Webflow: It is a complete web design tool, CMS, and hosting platform. The flexbox is the most bougie feature of the Webflow tool, which allows you to customize layouts that are hard to work on.

8. Improve Content Structure

Content is the most crucial part of your web page and website that provides you with good traffic. For top-class content, you can use the following tips-

A. Use Schema Markup Strategies: To enhance the quality of your content, use strategies that involve writing content with a decent amount of keywords or phrases that help search engines quickly locate your web page. Moreover, add structure to your content for enhanced readability.

B. Remove Duplicated Content: While performing a technical SEO audit, make sure the content is not copied from another source, as this deteriorates your ranking. Remove paraphrased sentences and plagiarized text to enhance your content for the crawlers.

C. Address the Demand: Quality content will resolve the problem in focus for the user. The solution should be easy to follow and at a level that your average readers can comprehend.

D. Add Visuals: Good content is not only about the text but also about making sure that the information reaches the user. Images and videos help better communicate to the users, as visuals can be understood and remembered quickly and effectively.

E. Content Should Be Accessible: The content available on your website should be available to everyone. If your content is hidden or saved as e-books, it takes longer for the reader to reach it, and as a result, they give up and leave.

9. Security

Google also prefers websites with HTTPS instead of HTTP because of the higher security level. The HTTPS provides encryption to users’ data, enhancing their trust in sharing their personal details with your website. HTTPS also has an SSL certificate that uses a third party to verify the reliability of your website. Security and privacy play a vital role if your website falls under the category of YMYL websites.

Image Source

10. Improve Clarity of 404 Error Page

The 404 error page informs users that the content they are looking for is no longer accessible. The 404 error page should clarify the issue and help the user to reach other pages easily.

11. Use 301 Redirecting Pages

The 301 redirecting pages are used to send the users to authority pages when you give preference to one page over the other. 301 redirecting pages can also be used to club multiple URLs if many pages exist for similar content on your website, acting as a tool for canonicalizing (Read canonical URLs section). Moreover, the 301 redirecting pages should also load quickly, providing all the details to the user for a better experience. Further, these pages should have a similar web page architecture as the rest of the pages to simplify navigation for the user.

12. Set Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs are used when there are multiple copies of the content on your website. The duplicates may be due to the updated content on those web pages. Canonical URLs allow you to direct the crawlers to the principal or preferred page that you would like it to index. Canonical URLs are meaningful because if the crawlers read the duplicate copy you did not want them to, they may rank that web the lower and irrelevant page.

Image Source

For adding canonical URLs to your website, use the following methods –

Method #1: Use the “rel=canonical” tag in your website’s header. Most CMS platforms allow specific canonicals even if you are not a web developer.

Method #2: For WordPress: Setting up canonical URLs is straightforward with the use of the correct plugins for WordPress SEO audit. You can use the following plugins in WordPress –

• Yoast: The canonical URL creating tool by Yoast is a highly efficient tool that lets you manually customize your canonical URLs, provides security and developer controls, and reports to you which pages you shouldn’t put under canonical tags.
• RankMath: It is a complete set of SEO tools. For adding canonical tags in RankMath, follow the following steps-

Step #1: Open the page containing duplicate content that needs to be added to the canonical URL and open the editor.

Step #2: Open the advanced mode in the editor. If you cannot find the advance tab, you can enable it from WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > Dashboard.

Step #3: Edit the canonical URL by changing the directory domain to the main content you want crawlers to read.

Step #4: After completing, you can save the settings. Now, the updated URL will direct the crawlers directly to your prioritized page.

For example, if you wish Page 11 to be read instead of Page 3, you can go to the advanced tab on Page 3 and edit page 3 to page 11. Canonical URL will help the crawlers to reach and index page 11 instead of page 3, even if they are on page 3.

Tools for Technical SEO Audit

1. DashClicks’ InstaReports Tool: This tool highlights your online marketing campaign’s pain points so you can fix them and achieve the best results. Create in-depth performance reports in seconds to help close deals faster with InstaReports, a white-label digital marketing audit tool.

2. SEMRush Site Audit Tool: The SEMRush site audit tool scans your website for a thorough SEO audit report.

3. SEO Audit Report Tool: You can get a comprehensive website audit report with this tool. SEOptimer reviews your site to identify the problems keeping your website from reaching its potential.

4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider: It is an SEO website crawler that you can use to identify your weak points. The SEO Spider tool extracts data and audits your website for common SEO issues.

Conclusion

Technical SEO plays a vital role in making your content readable for crawlers and users. It is not the traditional SEO strategy that only aims at the keywords and structure, but a complete architecture of the web page and website. The tips mentioned above should be a valuable and detailed guide to improving your website’s technical SEO audit for better ranking and enhanced user experience.

Social platforms have gained immense popularity among B2C marketers as well as B2B brands. There are many simple explanations as to why. They provide you with a stage to reach out to your audience and showcase all your achievements and services. Additionally, social platforms bring you closer to your customers as you can also check their interests in their profiles. Unlike B2C, effective B2B marketing requires a different approach. B2B marketers have to develop a unique game plan to reach business owners and decision-makers. However, step on these stones carefully because social media can quickly build you or break you.

Here is a helpful guide for you to create your own social media strategy for B2B business-

1. Recognize Your Focal Points (Goals)

Every successful campaign needs to be thoughtfully planned, and the first step begins with understanding why you want to be present on social media.

Recognize your goals and focus on achieving them.

The following are the main focus of every B2B social media strategy-

A. Brand Awareness

People need to know who you are and what you can provide them. Social media platforms offer you an excellent space where you can comfortably showcase to your prospects why your brand is better than your competitors. Through separate posts, your viewers can see your products and services. Moreover, the comments on your posts act as reviews for other customers and an analysis of your brand's performance.

How to Measure Brand Awareness on Social Media?

Method #1- Direct Traffic: If your prospects visit your website by directly searching your website or brand name in the search engines, they become your direct traffic. Direct searches indicate that your viewer is interested enough in your brand that they remembered you.

Method #2- Tags and Mentions: When someone tags you in their post, it means they are involved in some way with your brand. Tags, mentions, and hashtags are efficient and simple ways to know how many people you are reaching out to and how many like your services.

Image Source

Method #3- Searches: When someone searches for your business as a keyword over search engines and social platforms, it increases your search volume. The clicks and searches can be analyzed using the Google Search Console. It will also show you the best-performing ad campaigns.

Method #4- Your Reach: The number of people exposed to your brand through social media campaigns counts as your reach. Every platform offers multiple ways to track your reach, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. In the similar way, LinkedIn scraping powers better segmentation and strategic planning for marketers. You can also check impressions on Twitter, which is another way to track your reach.

B. Brand Introduction

Letting your consumers learn about your brand is beneficial to building trust. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest introduce your brand through posts with photos and short videos about you. Other platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn educate your viewers more through textual involvement.

Tips for Introducing Your Brand -

Tip #1: Many businesses use content and SEO to educate their prospects about their brand. The content should solve an issue that the customers are probably facing and searching an answer for.

Tip #2: You can also opt for publishing e-books that are about your business. It can let other prospective companies explore your journey.

Tip #3: Researches and reports are also a great medium to let people know about your involvement using case studies. People like to buy products from companies that are enthusiastic about their performances.

Tip #4: Every product has a specific method of being used. And in most cases, customers fail to understand how something should be used. Make how-to videos for the ease of your customers. The views will also translate to how much visibility your brand has.

C. User Engagement

It is a crucial part of social media strategy for B2B business, even if it does not exactly show your growth. Content that gets your viewers actively involved in your brand reflects how you influence people. Users will only engage in your products if they like them. High user engagement also proves the social platforms' credibility and better content of your brand. In turn, social media showcases your business to a much larger audience, boosting your visibility.

Every platform gives the option to check your user engagement rates with filters like a particular post, week, month, and more.

Image Source

Measuring User Engagement -

Method #1- Comments: When viewers comment on your posts, it means they are intrigued by your brand. Comments also suggest that people want to get involved in a discussion related to your products. Higher conversation rates can signify greater interest of customers.

Method #2- Reactions and Polls: Since netizens have a very microscopic attention span and do not want to waste their valuable time on boring content, reactions are a good way to know if the viewers are interested in what you offer. Reactions, polls, and likes options are available on every platform today to assess your performance.

Method #3- Shares: Sharing content over a social platform directly translates to relating your content to the viewer. People only share relatable and valuable posts. Every social media platform has shared posts data you can check to get your assessment.

Method #4- Views and Time: Getting views on your videos suggests that the viewer got attracted to your content and wants to know more about you. Although, if no one is spending time watching your complete video, it means you did grab their attention but could not keep it. For best practice, make interesting videos with short content.

Method #5- Clicks: If you attach a link to your posts, the click-through rate helps determine if the users enjoyed your ad and want to check out more services that you provide.

D. Trust Building

As a consumer of your products, your customers will want to see how much they can rely on you. Social platforms are a fantastic way to show your work is better than your competitors through comments on your posts and other social proofs.

Tips for Building Trust-

Tip #1: Reshare the posts that your customers tag you in. These posts are testimonials of your products and services from your clients.

Image Source

Tip #2: Positive reviews on your products are also social proof of your quality and reliability.

Tip #3: Acknowledgements like trophies, awards, and milestones are an excellent way to show your trustworthiness to your prospects.

E. Conversions

Lead generations are an essential aspect of any B2B social media strategy. Your social presence aims to add value through promotion and convert the viewers into your regular customers.

Image Source

Methods to Measure Lead Generation and Conversion Rates -

Method #1- Calculate your Cost per Lead (CPL): The campaigns should bring you leads. But if the cost of those methods is more than the clicks they are getting, then the campaigns are not benefiting you. Calculate your CPL, brainstorm what will better match your requirements without wasting money, and focus on that strategy.

Method #2- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): The leads you generate should convert into your customers. The primary reason for not getting conversions would be that the leads are not your prospective customers.

Method #3- Estimating Return on Investments (ROI): A great way to get the approximate value of your ROIs is by calculating the profits that one lead gets you and multiplying it by the expected lifetime of that lead with you. You can then assign the obtained value to new customers to get your total ROI estimate.

Method #4- Closing Rate per Channel: The closing rates are critical for determining which platform brings you more leads and hence profit. You should then focus your investment on those channels with higher closing rates.

2. Choose Platforms for Your B2B Social Media Strategy

When used appropriately, social media platforms provide an ocean of benefits to B2B marketers. According to Statista, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are the top marketing platforms for B2B businesses, with Facebook at first place with 89% usage and LinkedIn at second place with 81% usage.

However, before investing big, it is advised to experiment with every platform because every social media has its own pros and cons for supporting brands. If you are wondering how to use social media for B2B business, here are the most effective platforms to achieve your defined goals-

A. LinkedIn

With almost 850 million members, out of which over 58 million are registered companies, LinkedIn is a brilliant professional networking platform and has gained immense popularity among B2B marketers. In 2021, 81% of B2B businesses used LinkedIn to grow by providing job opportunities, posting on trending topics, and collaborating with profitable networks.

B. Twitter

Twitter is popular for trends. It has over 396.5 million users actively tweeting their thoughts on the latest news. A great platform to introduce and promote your brand, Twitter has 82% active B2B business accounts.

C. Facebook

Most famous and the king of social platforms, Facebook reaches 59% of social media users, more than any other platform. Although, with the transformations in the overall view of Facebook through the years, it has become more ad-forward. But with well-planned strategies, it is also an excellent way to communicate and reach out to other prospective B2B businesses.

D. YouTube

Launched in 2005, YouTube supports 80 different languages and has more than 2.5 billion active users worldwide, coming second to Facebook. Moreover, some people watch videos without using Google accounts as well. YouTube provides different methods for reaching out to your audiences, like videos, commercials, and stories. Through its stage, you can make how-to tutorial videos, review videos, and much more.

E. Instagram

Instagram is the new social media craze having more than 1.4 billion monthly active accounts as of January 2022. It ranks third in the social media race with its ease of use for both consumers as well as companies with photo filters, stories, and reels for short videos. It is an incredible place for B2B businesses to thrive in a friendly manner.

3. Build a B2B Social Media Strategy

Once you have chosen the social platforms that suit your brand and are focused on your target goals, you can create a robust social media strategy for your B2B business. Here are some points you should practice and include in your plans for a successful social presence-

A. Tell Your Story

Consumers love to know what goes behind the building of a brand. Social platforms provide the right stage to show your prospects your evolution, the reason behind it all, and the vision you have for the future. Stories also play a critical role in building trust and influencing customers to know you and use your brand instead of others. An inspiring story can include-

• The inception idea behind your brand
• Struggles faced
• Growth and experiences
• Products and services
• Plans and vision for the future

Work Around Your Target Customers: As a company that sells services to other B2C businesses, your customers are the managers, entrepreneurs, and executives of those places. Social platforms work as efficient channels for B2B businesses because the consumers can go back in timelines and see the progress you have made. It is also reliable as the comments, likes, and followings act as social proof. Moreover, make sure to include feedback and reviews from your customers in your social media strategy for earned testimonials.

Image Source

B. Analyze Your Audience

Customer analysis helps you uncover new and innovative methods to engage their interests more. Customers who have purchased your services belong to the audience group that wants them. You can create customer personas based on their profiles, which will give you an exact idea of their requirements, and you can work on them to your advantage.

Use demographics such as age, gender, location, position, industry type, and business size to the list of information to your buyer persona to better understand your consumer market.

For instance, Twitter analytics will help you gain insights into the likes and dislikes of your targeted customers.

Analyzing Audiences Will Help You-

• Learn what works for them
• Create similar posts that interest them
• Advertise in appealing and suitable ways

C. Stay With the Trends

B2B social media trends are vital to follow to make your social presence visible. You do not need to hire a completely new team to keep your posts up to date with your target's choices. Many tools for social listening help you monitor your mentions, customer feedback, and conversations. Moreover, they also plan long-term strategies using the data they collect.

Tools to Use for Social Media Listening-

Tool #1 - Sprout Social: It offers a complete set of features you would need for social listening. Some features of Sprout Social are audience listening, consumer research, competitor comparison, trend research, and much more.

Tool #2 - Socialbakers: The tool by Socialbakers uses artificial intelligence to help you conduct social listening. It also allows you to monitor competitive and industry benchmarking and identify the content your competitors invest in.

Tool #3 - Digimind: This platform provides you with real-time social listening and brand monitoring options, focusing on sentiment analysis over consumer care and community management. Digimind is also based on artificial intelligence.

D. Create Engaging Content

Social media is all about creating intriguing content and attractively presenting it. Even though B2B services are usually presumed boring, they can still provide exciting content to their targets. Moreover, your prospects also need you. Hence, you are not boring but essential to those consumers.

Here Are Some Points to Remember When Creating Your Content –

• Create long titles and headlines because they have 76.70% more chances of shares.
• Aim for questions as they get more than average shares and views.
• A professionally written content does not have to stick to the rules of formal language.
• Be social media-friendly with indulging posts.
• Keep commenting open. People feel more comfortable when they can communicate their thoughts about something.

E. Focus On Creating Short Posts

The average social media user does not want to spend much time on one post. Moreover, you have a character limit that needs to be obeyed for every platform. This means you will have to promote your service in the quickest possible way. Instead of creating long blog posts, try to go for the following few points-

• Use captions and formats of your posts that are most appealing,
• Choose infographics over long textual posts,
• Post short videos if your content is long to read,
• Long texts are standard on LinkedIn. For any post that has a technical format and too many characters, use LinkedIn.
• You can add Twitter threads instead of external links.
• Make list posts instead of paragraphs, as they are shared 218% and 203% more than how-to videos and infographics, respectively.

F. Use Attractive Multimedia

As mentioned before, people do not have time to waste on long-form textual posts. To instantly grab their attention, you can use multimedia as your option. Multimedia has more potential of engaging the viewers and getting you more views. Use following instead of text-based posts-

• Use infographics
• Add exciting elements to your campaigns
• Post short and easily readable content
• Use short clips and videos
• Share stories to build and sustain interest

Image Source

G. Create Dedicated Support Accounts

Simple things grab more attention. Keep your profiles streamlined by dividing them into different categories. This separation also helps the consumer. For example, they do not need to search for a customer support section in your marketing profiles. The various accounts you can create may be-

• Manufacturing insiders for educational purposes and internal insights
• Marketing for promotions and sales
• Support services
• Customer relation and testimonials
• Research and development for persevered curiosity

H. Check On Your Competitors

For your business to succeed, you should always know what your competition is doing. Monitoring gives you beneficial insights into what will work and what does not. You can either do it manually or use monitoring and social listening tools to keep an eye on your contenders.

Things to Check While Monitoring Your Competitors –

• Invested campaigns,
• Used hashtags and keywords,
• Schedule and lengths of posts,
• Targeted consumers and networks

I. Conduct Performance Analysis

To evolve your social profile with the company’s growth, you need to analyze the efforts you have put into your branding. Look out for the following when conducting performance analysis-

• Follower growth
• Engagement rate
• Effects of your optimizations
• The efficiency of your social media strategy
• Improve your plans according to B2B social media trends

J. Invest Money for Better Reach

Just like for B2C brands, B2B businesses also need to build campaigns and get in front of more people. Social media allows your brand name to reach out to a much larger crowd when you invest in their ad strategies.

According to Gartner, marketing budgets have climbed to 9.5% of total company revenue in 2022, an increase from 6.4% in 2021.

In 2022, the total social media advertising spending by US companies is expected at just under $80.67 billion, expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2022-2027) of 10.10%.

For a better reach, try creating ads that will relate to the pain points of your targets. For instance, you can create effective ads using the LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

Here Are a Few Practices to Follow to Create Effective LinkedIn Ads -

• Stay Within the Specifications: You can create attractive promos with visuals and texts using the specs provided by LinkedIn. LinkedIn offers multiple options, so you don't entirely depend on long-form textual posts. Some options are- single image ads, carousel ads, video ads, and message ads.
• Attach Lead Gen Forms: LinkedIn features the option to attach their Lead Gen Forms with your sponsored ads and in-mails. These forms help generate leads by filling in all the details, and the viewers only need to submit them to you.
• Analyze Your Ads: LinkedIn ads are created to gain some form of return on investments. Analyzing your ads will help you understand which ones are worthy of improvement and which ones should be entirely removed to improve your visibility. You can track all these key metrics using the LinkedIn Ads Manager. Further, use LinkedIn Insight Tag to gain more knowledge of your prospects.

K. Use Employee Advocacy

The best people to review you and your brand are those who work closely with the services you sell. An employee with a large following can be used as an asset to enhance your reach. They can be key influencers for your business. Your consumers would prefer getting an internal perception of your work.

Image Source

Reasons for Using Employee Advocacy

• Increases the trust of the prospects in your brand
• Humanizes your brand,
• Suggests that you value your employee’s opinions
• It is an earned advertisement

FAQs

1. Do Social Media Platforms Work for B2B Businesses?

We make most of our decisions based on what society thinks about something. And social media provides you a stage to showcase your brand in front of a large crowd to boost your business. You can easily promote your products and services and effectively reach out to your audience.

2. Which B2C Strategies Can Be Used as B2B Social Media Strategies?

Whether it is B2C or B2B business, eventually, we, as marketers, sell things to a human. You can employ all social media strategies used in the B2C market for B2B businesses with little to no changes.

3. Which Is the Most Effective Platform for B2B Businesses?

LinkedIn runs first in the professional networking platform base. However, other platforms like Facebook and Instagram also have a substantial impact on B2B clients.

4. Should I Hire a B2B Social Media Agency or an In-House Manager?

Although developing a social media strategy for a B2B business is not a complex task, you can still hire professionals if your requirements are more. Make sure the outsourcing service or the in-house manager you employ checks all of your specific needs and is result-driven.

Conclusion

In the tough competitive market, every business needs to play its best card to win. Social platforms are a rich source of media to help you enhance your sales, create networks, and communicate with your prospects directly and more openly without being too much in their face. The above guide will help you realize your goals and work on them using different platforms. You can use the given B2B social media strategies involved with any social media for whichever purpose suits your need the best.

Did you ever feel the heat as an online business when you found yourself losing big because of form issues?

Forms are essential to collecting leads and payments.

What if the friction in the process frustrates the user? Will it not bring down conversions?

It becomes even more annoying because many users must be interacting with your website for the first time. It negatively affects the user experience and your overall brand image.

As forms are directly responsible for boosting conversions, it becomes pivotal that the majority of your forms convert.

Major Issues Users Complain About Online Forms

For agencies, it becomes quite a task to manage forms coming from different sources because of their varying types. Device incompatibility can further complicate the issue.

Forms management is easier said than done, and you can't tackle it in a day or two. It can be challenging even if you are a small agency owner, as you might need to source and process forms from various third-party softwares and platforms.

That's the reason you need a robust and smart forms management tool. Your forms App should be able to create dynamic forms and enable real-time reporting, a seamless distribution process, and comprehensive document management.

DashClicks Forms App comes to your rescue here.

You can swiftly manage forms across different channels and enhance user experience using the DashClicks Forms App. It's a white-label automation tool that will transform data collection into an incredible experience. It improves your workflow designed to meet your every need.

What's more, it will dramatically improve the conversion rate on your website.

This article will discuss the Forms Application and how it works.

What Is the Forms Application?

The Forms application is a marketing automation tool created by DashClicks, the popular white-label platform for digital marketing agencies. With this App, you can quickly create, share, and embed forms on your websites and landing pages and resolve all your forms-related woes.

Replace default forms on other platforms with the forms created by the Forms App and make your life easier by bringing all your lead information to one place.

We will walk you through the various features of this intelligent App so that you can use it like a pro.

How to Use the Forms App?

Watch this video to learn more about Forms App.

How to Access the App?

Go to your DashClicks dashboard and open the app drawer in the top right corner.

How to Navigate the Forms App?

Click the Forms icon to reach the home page of the Forms app - My Forms.

1. My Forms

My Forms is the tab providing an overview of all the forms you created with updated information on submissions and pending requests.

Since you haven't started using the App, you won't find any forms in the table. However, you would still be able to see the column titles. These titles are listed below.

2. Form Type

This column is created to categorize your forms into three major types: Card, Classic, and Group.

3. Form Name

The terminology of the forms happens right at the moment they are created.

It's primarily dependent on the campaign it's created for and its general purpose.

4. Submissions

This section provides us with the number of submitted forms by the users.

5. Pending Requests

Many users might not fill up the forms at any point in time, despite your invitations. This column will highlight those users who haven't responded to your request and need a reminder.

6. Date Created, Last Updated

As evident from the column title, it provides you with the date you created the Form and last updated it.

7. Categories, Tags

By default, you'll not find any details in these two columns. You can manually create the tags and categories to classify the forms to keep them better organized. You can easily filter these tags and types in the column on the extreme left.

To create these tags and categories, click this help article.

8. Search Forms

Go to the search field at the top of the page if you want a specific form. If you know the form name, enter it. You can also enter any other relevant information to view the closest results.

9. New Form

Go to the + New Form button on the top right corner. This is the first step to creating a custom form. Move to the Builder tab now.

The Builder tab has a simple look. You can choose from the Classic Form or Group Form.

You need to click on any one of these to create brand-new forms.

Refer to the following help articles to create all three types of forms.

• Classic Form
• Group Form
• Card Form

How to Create Classic Forms Within the Forms App?

Here is the step-by-step process for creating a classic form within the Forms application.

For those not familiar with Classic Forms, a classic form is a general form that provides each question on the same page, followed by a button to submit.

These are the most basic and popular types of online forms that we frequently spot on websites and landing pages.

Here is the process of creating a classic form.

Click on the + New Form button in the top-right corner.

Or click on the Builder tab.

Next, select the form type by clicking on Classic Form.

Enter your form name.

You can name it according to the campaign you're running or just the objective of the Form.

Click the Create button.

You can use a drag-and-drop form builder. Find the components in the Fields Styles and Options columns, which you can use to customize your Form further:

To know how to work with many elements and options, you can click the following help doc links.

• Styles
• Fields
• Options

Click here to learn how to add, move, and delete fields and publish the Form.

Help doc on creating Classic forms.

Templates

Every Form has a template, which largely depends on the purpose it's being used for. The Templates tab is the storehouse of pre-made form templates. You can quickly choose a template and start creating forms without reinventing the wheel. You can select a template according to a specific purpose, such as collecting leads or booking appointments. Since these templates are already set up, you won't need to spend time on them.

Look at the column on the left side, and choose a category. Under each category, there are numerous templates you can choose from. All you need to do is to select a template to start creating the Form you need. It's that simple to use the Forms App.

You can also locate a template using a search field at the top of the page.

Customizing the Forms App

Here are a few ways to customize your Forms App.

Column Customization

Be ready to explore fantastic options for customizing your experience on the Forms App. Similar to the My Forms tab, you can quickly locate the Manage Columns button in the top-right corner of the page:

Go to the menu, and set the columns you want to display within your table. You can remove the columns from your page view by clicking the blue check marks next to the corresponding column names.

Note - Form Name can't be removed or moved up or down in the column.

You can use the section on the right if you want to drag and drop columns in your preferred order. Click the X to remove a column from the view.

Click Save at the bottom to save your customizations.

Similarly, you can follow the instructions and make other customizations.

How to Share & Embed Your Form?

Now that you have successfully created a form for your business objective, the next step is to share it with your audience. You can share or embed your Form using the Embed or IFrame options.

To embed, you need to post an HTML code in the text editor of your web page. It will integrate the Form and allow it to appear on the website exactly as it's designed so that users can interact with it on your website.

Final Words

DashClicks' Forms app creates custom forms for any data collection through easy-to-use forms. Moreover, you also get a drag-and-drop forms builder that's entirely white-label to make life easier.

Forms template also allows you to choose from hundreds of pre-built form templates. It will help you speed up your workflow by saving your time and ability to create forms on the fly.

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most potent tools marketers can use to promote their brand.

But what really is user-generated content?

It can be any content, such as videos, reviews, images, text, etc. that people create rather than brands.

As compared to brand-pushed marketing content, UGC is regarded as the most trustworthy, authentic, and reliable form of content. If you see the latest statistics, 92% of customers trust the recommendations and reviews shared by individuals and not advertisements.

You can imagine UGC as a vote of confidence. If you observe the current scenario, any brand's biggest fans can be seen writing reviews, snapping pictures, and publishing blog posts promoting its services and products, many a time without any prompting.

In all, user-generated content is a killer asset, and can completely change the game for your business. In this post, we unearth the benefits of this kind of content and how your business can leverage it for successful growth. Let's begin:

What is User-Generated Content and Why Is it Important?

User-generated content is any content users create and share based on their opinions, feedback, ideas, or experiences. Different social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are the hub of this kind of content. Also, with comments sections on blogs, the ability to publish content for free with a single click, and digital forums, UGC is at an all-time high.

Image Source

Now that we are done with the definition, let's look at why user-generated content is important:

UGC simply boosts your credibility by outsourcing content creation to users.

It is effective content that builds authenticity and trust in your brand, further saving your financial resources and organization time!

Owing to its many benefits, 86% of companies have added UGC to their marketing strategy.

Here's more on why businesses are increasingly focusing on displaying user-generated content on different platforms:

1. A Win-Win Situation for Both You and Your Fans

User-generated content puts your customers front and center, while benefiting your brand as well.

When you use UGC in your marketing, this is what happens:

• You let your fans tell your story.
• You market “with” your audience and not “at” them.
• Your marketing messages come from your customers.
• You spotlight individuals who are helping shape your brand!

2. UGC Indicates That Your Brand Is Open to Conversation

In this day and age, people look for different ways to share their opinions about different brands. When you share UGC on branded social channels or simply use it in your marketing, it can make your audience feel seen and heard. It also shows that you are open to conversation.

3. You Get To Cut Through the Noise

UGC content marketing offers a way to cut through the various ads and promoted content your customers are bombarded with on a daily basis.

UGC is genuine and not salesy. It instantly grabs the attention of your audience and works to engage them because it is created by a member of your target audience only.

Image Source

4. UGC Provides Social Proof

Another reason why user-generated content is important is because it provides social proof.

Social proof is the validation you get from your customers about the authenticity, trust, and reliability of your activities and products. In this digital age, a brand needs to have social proof. This is because social proof can influence the buying decisions of a brand's customers.

5. Unlimited Flow of Content

As creating marketing campaigns is a constant process, there will always be a requirement for trendy, authentic content.

UGC helps you receive an unlimited flow of such content from your users.

It eliminates the need to spend money on constant idea generation and content creation!

Types of User-Generated Content

UGC comes in many formats and styles. Let’s take a look at the different types of user-generated content:

• Videos
• Testimonials
• Images
• Social media content (e.g., a Tweet about your brand)
• Blog posts
• Live streams
• Product reviews (learn how to get customer reviews)
• YouTube content

Top User-Generated Content Examples

Irrespective of their size, brands use UGC to boost social engagement, expand their reach, drive awareness, increase conversions, and cost effectively scale their business.

Here are some of the best user-generated content examples out there:

1. LuluLemon

LuluLemon is a Canadian athleisure brand offering leggings and yoga clothing to its customers. To increase their reach on social media platforms, they asked their followers to share the photos in which they are wearing LuluLemon's garments. They also had to use this hashtag:

#thesweatlife

Image Source

This benefited the brand in two ways:

• It got tonnes of easily searchable UGC content for repurposing.
• Sharing content from brand ambassadors increased its reach across social media.

2. GoPro

GoPro is a popular video equipment company that uses UGC for its YouTube channel.

If you check their top three videos, they are actually filmed by customers. These videos had 400 million views in total (as of December 2021).

The best thing is this content didn't cost the brand anything.

3. La Croix

La Croix is a sparkling water brand that also uses a hashtag (#LiveLaCroix), similar to the strategy that LuluLemon used. The hashtag helps the brand mine for UGC on their social media networks.

Image Source

The best thing about the brand is that it shares content produced by anyone and not just brand loyalists with higher follower counts. This makes their UGC super relatable to their followers.

User-Generated Content Tips

It's now time we discuss some important user-generated content tips. Let's begin:

1. Requesting Permission Is Mandatory

Always ask for your customer's consent before using or republishing their content. It keeps you out of hot waters regarding copyright concerns.

Asking for consent is also important because a lot of times individuals can use your branded hashtags without even knowing that you have tied them to a UGC campaign.

2. Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

Ensure you give proper credit to the original creator when you share UGC on your social media networks. What we mean is, directly tag them in the post and indicate if you are using their visuals and/or words.

Note: You may also want to share UGC across social media networks. For instance, you may want to share a picture from Instagram on your Facebook page. In this case, you can always ask the original creator how they want to be credited on the other platform.

Why is giving credit so important anyway?

Giving credit not only recognizes the work of content creators but also encourages them to use and post more about your brand.

3. Provide Clear Guidelines

If you observe the current scenario, only some businesses provide clear guidelines on the kind of UGC they want followers to create and share. UGC creators want to share their content, but they also want to know exactly what to do when it comes to UGC.

Don't be afraid to share specific requirements and tell the creators what kind of content fits your needs.

Tip: To determine the kind of content you should feature, ensure you follow these two steps:

• Sit with your social media strategy document to look for ways user-generated content aligns with your current marketing goals.
• Use this information to create a statement that tells users what type of content you will most likely feature.

Share your UGC task at places you know individuals will interact with your brand, such as your website, your social channel bios, your product packaging, or in other UGC social media posts.

4. Make UGC Entertaining

UGC should be entertaining for your followers. Sometimes it doesn't have to be product-related at all!

For instance, one of the best UGC trends you can see out there is:

Brands reposting their follower's tweets on their Instagram feed.

How to Get More UGC for Your Brand?

Apart from creating a unique hashtag, here are some ideas on how to get more UGC for your brand:

• Ask for feedback from users.
• Launch a contest on Instagram.
• Create a compelling challenge that pushes users creatively or physically. For instance, a fitness content creator can design a multi-day fitness challenge in which users can participate and share their progress on social media.

The Bottom Line

From helping you increase your reach to providing social proof, it's easy to see why user-generated content is important for brands in this digital age. It is a complete game-changer for businesses because it increases user engagement, which in turn boosts conversions and revenue.

All in all, UGC is a secret ingredient for successful marketing, and brands and marketers should definitely leverage it in their marketing activities. Just ensure you follow important user-generated content tips like always asking the customer's consent before you republish or use their content.

Welcome to another episode of the Marketers' Mindset.

DashClicks is a platform that you can use to scale your agency. Apart from that, you can also use it as a client reporting tool, a source of education, and an affiliate dashboard for your agency.

Marketers' Mindset is a podcast and video series where Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks, shares the best-kept secrets of digital marketing and agency business.

You won't find these tips and tricks documented or published anywhere else.If you prefer the video format, here is the link to the first part of this webinar.

What Is InstaSites?

DashClicks’ InstaSites is a website-building automation tool that renders a niche-specific website within seconds. You can use InstaSites in multiple ways, but its best and most innovative use is for prospecting.

InstaSites as a Powerful Prospecting Tool

We built InstaSites almost three years ago for our digital retail agency, “Social Agency.”  The idea behind it was simple. We used to do a lot of cold calling to reach out to people.

Typically, people use the same old script for their sales calls, and sadly it doesn’t work anymore. 90% of the agencies offer a free consultancy and a free audit report to show their prospects where they are struggling. This approach doesn’t differentiate you from others, so, obviously, it has no appeal.

When you use this approach, you offer immense value to your prospect. It must address a big pain point. You will begin by saying that a few weeks ago, you audited their website and found that it had several flaws in it. A significant issue with the website is that it fails to engage visitors. You must be wasting your ad spending when a website doesn’t offer a good user experience and can’t engage or convert.

You can add, “So, our team spent a few weeks and built a custom website that will drastically improve your conversion rate. I would like to send you the link to view it. I can send you the link via email or a message on a social media app such as WhatsApp.”

Employ some empathy, and soon you’ll realize that it’s an irresistible offer, and even you can’t say “no” to it. It’s a killer offer when somebody uses their resources and time for two weeks and builds a whole new website to allow you to kill the old look of your website.

How Is an Instasite Different From Ordinary Websites?

Your new 60-page InstaSite is a highly responsive, custom-built, niche-specific, and content-ready website, with all the images and graphics already incorporated. DashClicks’ backend team has already built it for you, so you can use the preview link, import it into your website builder and activate it.

This offer differentiates you from others and dramatically increases your odds of converting a prospect.

At least, it gives you an edge over your competitors to be considered for the second round of sales i.e., an invitation to provide a demo.

So, first, you set up a call center and use these tactics to break the barrier, i.e., lack of trust. The hardest part of cold calling is that it’s challenging to establish trust over the call on the very first attempt.

It helps you drop the gate, the entry barrier for 99.9% of cold calls. And you provide value without even asking for their credit cards which the prospects will most likely love and accept.

The Number Game

Think about making a hundred phone calls and offering the same old stuff that everybody does, such as website issues, Facebook Ads, keyword rankings, lead generation, social media services, etc.

Sadly, if you are a marketer, you must be aware of the dismal results this approach gets you.

Suppose you need 10x better results. What about one person making about 30 bookings each day? Making 100 calls answered doesn’t sound realistic, so let’s put it as 50. So, let’s assume that you make 150 or 200 calls using an automatic dialer, and 50 people answer your call.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 1 Time Stamp: 12:24

Now, you can book an appointment with 30% of those, and in this case, it means you have your appointment calendar booked for 15 people. It can be a game changer for your marketing outreach.

Pro Tip: With ten people in your call center, you can raise this number to 150 (appointments booked).

Now, you have 150 people interested in your products on your calendar — ready to listen to you. It doesn’t happen through an outrageously innovative software program but through a software-based strategy.

The Modus Operandi

To implement this tactic, first, you need to sign up for DashClicks. Then you need to click My Agency>Agency Tools in the main menu>InstaSites.

You'll reach the subscription page, where you'll find four paid subscriptions. You can purchase any of these four subscriptions.

This strategy is so good that you won’t think twice before implementing it.

Initially, we offered the website for free and packaged it with other marketing services.  The standard development cost of a 50-page website is around $4000-$5000.

An InstaSite can open numerous sales opportunities in front of you.

It allows you to sell your client SEO, Google Ads, and content marketing services. If your client struggles with bringing traffic to their website, you can offer them your paid and organic marketing services.

InstaSites Overview and Plans

Let’s move to the InstaSites overview.

InstaSites has four different plans.

The lite version is free. It allows you to build three InstaSites per month.

So, if you want to use it for commercial purposes, opt for a paid plan. Furthermore, the free package will not work if you’re going to book 15 calendar appointments per day.

We are in the process of creating more templates for various industries, and every month, our developers are busy designing new and innovative templates. Dedicated content writers inject fresh content into each template.

The Lite Plan

With the Lite Plan, you get access to all the site templates. The 30-day site storage option provides an additional 30 days window to build and customize your site before you sell it to your prospects.

After 30 days, your website will be automatically removed. However, you can recreate your website when you buy it by paying a one-time fee of $97, followed by $25 per month. It includes hosting an SSL certificate and access to the drag-and-drop website builder.

It will automatically appear in your dashboard with a welcome message!

With the Lite plan, you can build three sites a month; with the basic plan, you can create 100 websites a month. The basic package also allows you to send SMS and email notifications, instantly sending the link to the website you have created using our tool to your prospects.

It is crucial during prospecting if you want to improve your conversion rate.

Pro Tip: Keep your lead response time under five minutes.  A Harvard study shows that businesses that respond to leads in five minutes or less are 100x more likely to connect and convert.

Thus, the capability to send emails and SMS instantly makes you a winner.

InstaSites Plus plan

Our InstaSites Plus plan costs $197 a month and allows you to build 250 InstaSites per month, apart from the features you get with the basic plan.

Suppose you have to build 250 websites for businesses such as plumbers, painters, roofers, electricians, etc. All you need to do is make a list of these 250 businesses, enter their business details on an Excel sheet, and upload it into InstaSites.

Select the notification references and a template and leave the rest to InstaSites. InstaSites Plus will automatically create 250 beautiful websites with an average of 50 web pages. The best part is you don’t do anything to make those sites.

InstaSites Premium Plan

The $297 premium plan offers value with a bulk site builder and a feature to build 500 websites.

So, I recommend you buy SMS packages along with these plans so that you can fire off SMS messages just after your sales call.

SMSes have a higher conversion rate than emails as they go straight into a customer’s phone and have much higher chances of the recipient reading them. Most emails get buried under the flood of incoming emails from social media and other random marketers.

To switch to a premium plan, all you need to do is to click on Upgrade Plan.

To purchase the Premium Plan, choose InstaSites from a dropdown on the top right, add InstaSites premium to the cart, and complete your order.

Now step two is to add clients and send onboardings. Ignore it, as it is an agency tool without any onboarding documents.

So, go back to agency tools. Under My Active Plan, you’ll be able to spot my site credits which are now increased to 500. As you don’t have any SMS credits, buy a thousand SMS credits.

The cost per credit goes down as you buy in bulk. You just need to pay a one-time fee of $120. The entire process shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.

You’re ready to rock and roll with 500 site credits and a thousand SMS credits.

How to Use InstaSites Like a Pro?

While on a free plan, you might have seen some locked boxes under Bulk InstaSites builder and notification templates. In a Premium Plan, those locked boxes are now available, and you can click on each one.

Go to the InstaSites builder, enter the prospecting phase and speak to your prospects. Let’s suppose it’s Bobby, the painter in this case. Bobby is interested in the website and wants to see what it looks like.

You need to enter his business contact details, such as business name, address, and phone number. The software will use the same phone number to send out SMS messages and the email address you enter to send emails.

Currently, the tool can send SMS to the US, UK, Australia, and Canada, but we are adding more countries.

You can set up custom templates with a premium plan. Initially, the tool wouldn’t display any template (flashing a message “No Templates Available”). Still, you’ll receive an email and SMS notification that it will soon be sent from your default view. Set this button to “ON.”

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp: 15:43

You can entirely customize your website if you're in the premium plan, and that's how you skyrocket your conversion rates.

We have templates readily available for seven industries, including locksmith, painting, roofing, plumbing, towing, and electrician HVAC, and we add new ones every month. So, soon, you'll see plenty of templates.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp: 16:06

Check the box off to agree to the terms of service.

You need a whole group of web developers to quickly build your website. My InstaSites shows that your website is in the “Queued” section right now.

Once this website is wholly built, it will move from the “Queued” tab to the “Prospecting” tab. It will take less than a minute.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp: 17:35

The website is ready now; you can show it to Bobby, the painter. This is how the website will look on three major screen types i.e., desktop, tablet, and smartphone.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp 17:48

It’s much better than the website you make using the popular website builders available in the market.

Now check the content injected. The home page says, “Need a Qualified Painter?”

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp 18:02

You can also see a call button here. Overall, it’s a highly conversion-oriented page without any fluff or unnecessary fancy text. It includes all the relevant keywords, such as

• Painting services
• Trusted painting services
• Painting services in Miami, Florida

The “About Us” section is also optimized. The title is “About Bobby the Painter.”

And it reads like this: “At Bobby the Painter, we provide high-quality services in Miami for you.”

So, it injects everything visitors need to know about the business. They can instantly locate the contact numbers and the services offered.

The Websites That Offer Excellent User Experience

The InstaSites tool builds engaging and high-quality informative websites.

The InstaSites template for the painting industry builds a 60-page website highlighting all the services you may offer, such as Miami Residential painting, Bobby the painter, Interior painting, Exterior painting, Docks and decks, roof painting, etc. These services are similar to what every residential painting service can probably offer.

For example, if you look at the roof painting section and click on it, the page you reach is entirely on roof painting. On the sidebar, you can see Bobby, the painter’s phone number just injected into it by the system.

There is enough excellent content in the commercial and industrial painting sections.

You can view his complete contact information and a map on the Contact Us page.

Optimized for Different Devices

Try this website on multiple devices, and each time, it looks stunning. This website is mobile optimized, so it will likely receive tons of mobile traffic.

Didn’t it excite you? If you feel excited, what will happen to Bobby, the painter, when he sees such an intuitive website? Wouldn’t he get excited too?

The answer is a resounding yes!

Using this secret recipe, we sold millions of dollars worth of digital marketing here at DashClicks and Social Agency.

It’s more likely that Bobby, the painter, will dance with joy when he sees this website. It’s highly functional, detailed, conversion-oriented, and pretty. They may decide to buy this website immediately and provide their credit card details.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp 21:23

You can get Bobby, the painter, on your invoicing system and charge them for this beautiful website.

Look at the little green “purchase” button on the screen and click “add to cart” to place the order.

It’s easy to complete your order.

So, the InstaSites website for Bobby the painter costs $25 a month with a setup fee of $97. So, a total of $122 has to be charged for the first month, and it covers an SSL certificate, the drag-and-drop web builder, and access to the dashboard, which is fully white-labeled under your agency.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp 22:10

Onboarding Docs

Look at the onboarding docs for Bobby, the painter.

Go to setup>>Click on “Proceed.”

Enter Bobby’s first name, last name, and email address and send Bobby the onboarding documents. The system will quickly shoot an email to Bobby, so he can fill out his contact information from whatever’s left that we didn’t already pre-fill.

Another email your system will send to Bobby will be about your branding. It will inform them that they can access the dashboard and edit their website when needed.

Bobby, the painter, now has access to the CRM and website builder, and they can edit their website.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp 24:00

They can edit anything they want, click the check box and republish in less than 30 seconds.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp 24:14

DashClicks makes your life super simple. Just go back to Agency Tools>>InstaSites>>TutorialsAnd check this out.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 2 | Time Stamp 25:00

That’s all. You can now point your domain name to the fresh website.

The Sales Process Summary

Let’s sum up the InstaSites sales process here.

A. Sign up for the DashClicks dashboard

B. Create an account for your agency

C. Go to Agency Tools

D. Choose InstaSites

E. Buy the $297 plan and complete your order

F. Buy a list of plumbers, roofers etc. from Yelp, InfoGroup USA or ExactData.com for a few dollars and start firing off emails and SMSes to everybody on the list

G. Create a spreadsheet using your prospect’s contact details for the website you’re trying to build and upload the CSV file on the tool

Steps: From the Top Right, download a sample CSV file template >> Download an excel template>>Add your information and re-upload it.

H. Go to website builder

I. Choose a website template based on your target industry

J. Build a website using InstaSites for Bobby, the painter

K. Fill out a form

L. Call Bobby or send him an SMS/email

D. Sell the website using the script suggested below

A Sales Call Script to Sell Your InstaSite

You can try this script for your first sale call.

“Hey, I just sent you a link to your new website. Can we chat for a minute quickly? I’ve spent two weeks building you a wonderful website. Would that be cool with you?”

The ads for InstaSites work because nobody can offer your 50-page website within seconds.

Use This Cool Script

Here is the script you can use and share with your frontline callers.

“Hey, Bobby! How’re you doing? My name is Chad, and I’m calling from Social Agency. I’m actually local, right here in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I’m right down the street from you. I was going through your website, and I see that your website is outdated and it’s not doing too good on Google Searches. So, I got my web development team to build you a brand new website.

It sounds crazy, and a random phone call, but I want to work with you. I’m looking for some painters in the area to work with. So, I took the time to build your website, and I would love to send you the link. All you need to do is to preview the link, and if you like it, I can activate it for you.

Okay, may I know your email and a good phone number?

(Note down his email and phone number.)

Okay, I got it.

So, I’ll go ahead and build your website in about one or two minutes.

(or, I’m going to go ahead and send you the link to the website in about one or two minutes.)

You’ll get an email and a text message with a link to the website. You can find my contact information at the bottom.”

If you’re in the premium plan, which you should be, all you need to do is fill out the form, select the industry, click painting, and turn on notifications. And it’s done.

If he is busy, you can still send the link and check with them after some time.

The InstaSites Plan That Will Skyrocket Your Sales

Buy a premium package and SMS credits and use your call center agents to sell these irresistible websites. Make long-term customers by offering additional digital marketing services such as SEO, PPC, social media, content marketing, local SEO and email marketing.

Don’t go for the $97 plan; if you want to scale your agency and earn real profits, go for the $297 premium plan. It has a bulk website builder that allows you to build 500 websites to skyrocket your sales.

Some Tips About Using InstaSites

Here are a few useful tips about using InstaSites.

Watch the video for details.

1. Take a list of 100 businesses. These can be painters, plumbers, roofers, electricians, etc. but make sure that you choose one business type at a time as we have industry-specific templates. So, choose painters first and upload their list as a CSV file.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 3 | Time Stamp: 00:32

Suppose you choose 50 painters; they will appear in the My InstaSites tab once you upload them in the Queued section.

2. Select your email or text message notifications>> select the template you want>> click Build InstaSite.

And you are done. You can move outside for half an hour, watch a movie or catch up with a friend and the system will create bulk websites for you.

3. You can upgrade your plan anytime you want and won’t lose your money. So, for example, if you are in the $97 plan, it will be deducted from the $297, and you’ll pay only the difference.

4. You need not know coding to create these websites.

5. The second message has to be completely different from the one when you did prospecting.

6. The tool allows you to send customized messages in bulk. Go to the email and SMS templates page to create the second message. The automated tool will automatically extract the business name and other information from its database and inject the “merged tags.”

A merged tag is a piece of information you give to Instasites. We will take that information and inject it into your messaging. Keep in mind that each SMS message is limited to 160 characters.

The InstaSites preview link you’ll share with your clients is 45 characters, and business names can extend, so write your message accordingly. With unnecessarily long messages, you’d lose your SMS credits.

The message can be: “Hey Bobby! I decided to build you a new website. Here’s the link. (It’ll actually give them the preview link.) Call me Chad from DashClicks.”

Here is the outreach template sample.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales - Video 3 | Time Stamp: 05:54

Enter your email separately in the provided space; if your client presses the reply button, their mail will land in the sending server email (such as noreply@notifications.com) and can be lost.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales – Video 3 | Time Stamp: 13:26

Assign a template name.

You can easily customize the message.

This way, you can create 50 templates in an hour.

Find Tutorials for Everything You Need to Build InstaSites

Use Tutorials for everything if you are stuck while creating InstaSites.

Tutorials are available for everything, including Single InstaSite Builder, Bulk InstaSites Builder, Notification Templates, Purchase InstaSites, Setup Custom Domain, Setup SSL Certificate, etc.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales – Video 3 | Time Stamp: 18:10

How to Upsell?

Upselling is an art, and we have charted a date-wise map of how to approach a customer for upselling your agency products.

In this video, Chad explains the process of step-by-step upselling that every agency owner should learn and practice. It prevents you from looking savage as you don’t charge exorbitantly for the website. Still, you make decent money through a one-time fee (OTF) and monthly recurring charges.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales – Video 4 | Time Stamp: 6:48

Now, look at the math when you sell 20 websites a month.

You earn $3980 as OTF and $980 per month as recurring income. Now it adds up even further when you offer your local listing services after seven days. Look at the screenshot below.

This additional service (local listings) will bring $792 OTF and $790 per month recurring income.

You might think you can easily sell this website for $3K to $4K. That’s fine. You can do that, but it would be savage. You can instead earn a decent income slowly through this value-based upselling process without hurting your client.

Watch the video for details.

Pay attention to the sequence. Also, save the first call for the fronters, i.e. the frontline sales callers, which can be the 21 members of your call center. The next upselling can be assigned to senior sales reps or customer care officers. Remember to take your customers’ feedback regarding their first purchase and cautiously offer the second product and tell them its benefits.

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales – Video 5 | Time Stamp: 02:50

A week after you sell a website, you can pitch a customer for Local Listings, and after 21 days, you can pitch for SEO services. If everything goes fine and the customer is happy, call them after two months for your outstanding and affordable PPC services. OTF is a one-time fee followed by recurring monthly charges.

Watch the video for details.

The value ladder goes from a low minimal product value to a higher product value.

The outreach methods other than using call center agents are as follows:

A. LinkedIn automation

B. Social media advertising

C. PPC Campaigns

D. Cold Calling

How To Use InstaSites Software To Super Charge Your Sales – Video 5 | Time Stamp: 15:30

Final Thoughts

We successfully use these strategies to sell InstaSites and other digital products. If we can do it, you can too. So, take your first step with the $97 plan, and if you see it’s working and helping you close deals faster, upgrade it to $297 and enjoy the fruits of scaling.

Do you want people to take a specific action after they find and consume your content?

The action is the thing you want them to do next. For instance, it could be making a purchase, reading another blog post, or downloading something.

If your answer is yes, you require a call-to-action (CTA) to convince them to take that action.

Essentially, a CTA is a piece of content intended to prompt users to carry out a particular action. It can be a line of text, a button, or an image. It usually takes the form of a directive or instruction and uses action verbs like “register”, “buy”, “follow”, “sign up”, etc.

You need to create a precise and effective CTA if you want customers to take a specific action when they land on your website.

Want to know more about what is a call-to-action, its importance, and how to craft the perfect CTA? Keep reading.

What Do Calls-To-Action Mean?

Put simply, a CTA is a marketing term referring to a prompt on a site that asks users to carry out an action. For example, you can ask them to download a demo, sign up for a newsletter, or purchase a product.

A CTA can appear in different places on a website, such as:

• Checkout pages or purchase pages
• Side panels
• Ads
• Pop-ups and slide-in content
• End-of-page for landing pages or articles
• Persistent headers

You can see a CTA as a hyperlink text or a clickable button. When potential customers click on it, they move a step closer to conversion.

Now, let’s discuss the types of CTAs.

The CTA types you will find on any professional website include:

• Newsletter subscription CTAs
• Social sharing
• Purchase CTAs
• In-line content upgrades
• Learn more
• Contact form submissions

Common Call-To-Action Examples

You may have seen or clicked on CTA buttons such as:

1. Buy now
2. Sign up today
3. Learn more
4. Download template now
5. Get 25% off your first order
6. Add to cart
7. Follow us on Instagram
8. Schedule a free consultation
9. Add to wishlist
10. Get your free ebook
11. Register for free webinar
12. Share on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn
13. Try a 15-day free trial!

You can also view CTAs as hyperlink texts in action phrases like:

Wish to know more? Read our post on XYZ!

Here are some top CTA examples ‌you can use in 2022:

1. Take a peek

Use “take a peek” on your CTA button when you want to give a tour of your platform. Using it can be a great substitute to “Learn more” as well. Here’s how thryv.com have used it:

Image Source

2. Try It

You can consider replacing “Sign Up” with “Try it” on your CTA button (if the context fits).

Here’s an example:

Image Source

3. Sure

“Sure” is a great way to replace the “yes” CTA button. Check out this image:

Image Source

4. I’m In

You can also use “I’m In” on your CTA button if it fits the context. Here’s a great example of a fact-based, amusing CTA that incorporates it:

Image Source

Why is a CTA Important?

Strategic CTAs effectively assist your visitors through the buying journey. They affect your conversion rates in a direct manner. A compelling and powerful CTA will grab the visitor’s attention, pique their interest, and encourage them to take action.

Let’s take a look at the importance of CTAs in closer detail:

1. The Next Step Becomes Easy and Obvious: When you make the next step easy and obvious with the help of a CTA, people are more likely to continue through your sales funnel and convert.
2. CTAs Encourage Interactions With Your Website: Let’s understand this point with the help of an example. If you add a CTA at the end of a blog post to provide links to the readers to read more information on a subject, you can convince them to stay on your site. This way, they interact more with your site. As a result of these interactions, they start to familiarize with your business and develop trust in your brand.
3. Visitors Don’t Have to Struggle: A CTA is an important aspect of the pages of your site. CTA links or buttons double up as signposts, signaling visitors about the next step they need to take. This way, they never have to struggle to find the route to sign up for a service or purchase a product.
4. CTAs Eliminate Decision Fatigue: Simple instructions or directive statements tell your clients what to do next and where to go, making the user journey simpler and time-efficient.

How to Write a CTA?

There’s not one defined formula to follow when it comes to writing the perfect CTA.

Here’s an example formula for crafting a CTA:

problem + solution + action

Take a look at this image that implements this formula:

Image Source

Listen Up: Consider these two key things when you write a CTA:

1. It should be impactful and catch your audience’s attention
2. It should convince your audience to take the required action

How to Create an Effective CTA?

Today, people expect to see a CTA in a prominent position on your landing page and website. Even if you place it correctly, you need to craft an outstanding CTA to convert your potential customers. Without a clear and effective CTA, site visitors may click away after feeling overwhelmed or confused.

To get your CTA right, you can take the help of some proven techniques. Here is a list of steps you can follow to create a tantalizing call-to-action:

1. Go for an Eye-Catching Design

Your CTA image or button should stand out from the design of your landing page. It needs to make a solid impact. Create it in a way that it pops out, combining brand colors and fonts that match your style.

Here are some helpful pointers on creating a powerful CTA button design:

• Size

Your site visitor is more likely to notice and click on a large CTA button. However, don’t create an oversized button as it may create a feeling of pressure on the visitor.

• Color

You can make your CTA buttons more noticeable with the help of color as well. Colors can cause a shift in emotions and mood, so use them accordingly. Here’s a complete list of color meanings for your ready reference:

• White: Clean, calm, and simple.
• Red: Confidence, power, and youth.
• Green: Peace, health, and growth.
• Orange: Friendly, energetic, and warm.
• Purple: Luxurious, wise, and creative.
• Yellow: Happiness, warmth, and optimism.
• Black: Reliable, experienced, and sophisticated.
• Blue: Security, trust, and stability.

Note: Bold colors such as red, black, and orange can instantly grab attention.

• Shape

The shape of your CTA button also plays a key role in making it noticeable to the site visitors. Refer to these shape meanings when you decide to design your CTA button:

• Rectangles and Squares: discipline, courage, reliability, strength, and security.
• Triangles: risk, excitement, danger, stability, and balance.
• Circles, Ellipses, and Ovals: eternity, magic, and universe.
• Abstract Shapes: uniqueness and elaborate.

Conventionally, CTA buttons are given the shape of horizontal rectangles, giving them the appeal of clickable buttons.

Image Source

Listen Up: We suggest you design your CTAs with rounded corners as they draw attention to the copy.

2. Create an Actionable Copy

Channel your inner copywriter and craft an action-focused copy.

Ensure you strike a balance between clear, simple instruction and jargon-free, compelling copy.

Also, don’t forget to use action words such as “start”, “register”, “download”, etc. in your copy.

Listen Up: You can always take inspiration from major brand websites to get creative while crafting your copy.

3. Make It Sound Urgent

You can also add a sense of urgency to your CTA to keep your visitors focused on the action you want them to take. Are there only a few items left in the stock? Is it a limited offer? Adding the element of urgency will let the visitors know that they need to take an action at that point in time instead of putting it off for a later stage.

4. Keep Your CTA Short in Length

For a CTA to fit into a button format, it needs to be short in length. A longer length of CTA can fail to grab attention in such a format. We recommend you keep the words to five or even less.

5. Tell Your Customers What They Should Expect

No one wants to get tricked or deceived into clicking on something that offers no value to them. Ensure you craft a copy that clearly communicates to your customers what they should expect if they click the CTA. We recommend you create an informative CTA that explains the benefits of clicking on it. For instance, you can tell your customers if they will be taken to a new page to complete an order or will they be signed to a newsletter.

Tip: If you incorporate target-audience-specific language in your CTA, you get to increase the conversion potential.

Bonus tip: You can consider using SEMrush’s Keyword Gap tool to search for keywords to use in your CTA. This will help you craft some unique CTAs (that your competition isn’t using) and assist you in your SEO ranking.

6. Ensure a Smooth and Logical Flow

It’s crucial that you align your CTAs with specific stages in the buyer’s journey so that you can make relevant offers. Let’s understand this with the help of an example. Promoting a full-year premier delivery subscription to a new visitor will be futile as it will be too early in their buying journey.

Call-To-Action Strategy

You can always use some effective CTA strategies to increase inquiries and customer data capture, which will in turn help you increase your sales. Here are some of these strategies:

1. Include More Than One CTA

The most common way you see a CTA appear is in a sentence, placed at the end of a blog, email, or website. However, you must incorporate more than one CTA in your blog to prompt the reader about what they should do next.

2. Don’t Go Overboard

While we recommend that you have more than one CTA in your marketing material, you must know how much is too much. Don’t include too many CTAs and overwhelm the readers. They may find you insincere or simply desperate if you go overboard with CTAs.

3. Placement Is Important

A difficult-to-find or hidden CTA doesn’t benefit both you or your audience. Ensure your page layout is such that your potential customer can easily find a CTA.

Here’s what you can keep in mind while deciding the placement of your CTA:

A simple offer that doesn’t need a lot of thinking to make a buying decision can use a CTA that’s placed above the fold. But if you think your readers need to digest all the information they have got and then make a decision, you should place the CTA at the end.

Image Source

4. Prioritize Your CTAs

It’s important to note that not every CTA of yours will carry the same priority. For instance, a CTA prompting a customer to “buy now” will be of greater priority as compared to the one that offers a white paper to read. Ensure the CTAs with the most priority are the easiest to locate.

5. Conduct A/B Testing

A/B testing compares two versions of a CTA to check which one performs better. The performance is checked based on real-time data and statistics.

Why do this kind of testing?

This is because it will let you know if you have the right message, placement, and design.

Now, when you create A/B test versions, ensure you change only a single detail so that you know what impacted the results.

Here’s an example of A/B test variations:

Image Source

Wrapping It Up

Used in marketing campaigns, a call-to-action is a written directive that encourages visitors to take the desired action. From eliminating the decision fatigue of your site visitors to increasing the number of interactions with your website, the importance of using CTAs cannot be emphasized enough. A persuasive CTA can help you gain subscribers, shares, likes, and customers. If you follow the tips and strategies we have discussed above, you will be able to create a CTA that's powerful enough to encourage your site visitors to take the desired action.