Email marketing is still effective, but the competition to attract recipients' attention is increasing. So, to make an impact, companies are extensively personalizing their emails. They use many personalizations to cut through the noise, such as dynamic content, customer segmentation, and sharing personalized product recommendations.

Similarly, you can personalize your emails by sharing special offers that are more relevant and make sense to them. These offers are far more effective than sending generic offers.

The renowned cab aggregator Uber runs personalized promotional offers based on customers' locations and most frequent commuting destinations. They segment their customer based on the above information and send personalized offers that their customers like.

What is Email Personalization?

Email personalization is when marketers send tailored and specifically customized emails to their subscribers.

The CRM provides email marketers with essential data points about their target consumers such as their names and the companies they work at which they can use in the subject line or email body to capture their attention. It makes it appear as if they have created content specifically for the recipients.

Email personalization can work even if you send the emails in bulk to your mailing list. It's possible via specific coding in the app you are using to send custom emails.

For example, people love when they get an email in their inbox that has their name in the subject line or body, something like this:

“Hey Steve, interested in our End-Of-Season Sale?”

Instead of using simple generic content like:

“Dear Customer, our End-Of-Season sale is now live!”

How to Personalize Your Emails?

You can also personalize your emails using the following methods:

• Segment email lists according to customer types such as geography, interests (products), content download, position in the sales funnel, last purchase made, pages they visit, and money they spend on your products.
• Call them by their names in all of your communication. Treat them like a person and not like a product. However, ensure you don’t overdo it.
• Use behavior triggers and send emails based on your customers’ actions and behavior online.
• You can send user reports about their account activity.

How to Use DashClicks’ Email Templates for Personalization?

DashClicks allows you to personalize your emails to make them more effective and customer-centric. You will get the option to edit the Subject and Message. Select “Personalize,” and you’ll get numerous personalization options. You can change your business information, contact details, website links, etc.

Look at the screenshot below. It’s taken from the DashClicks’ Template app

Select an option, and the tool will place a code into the field.

For example, if you want to change your client’s business name, you can place the following code into the field.

“{{Business-Business Name}}.”

The software will automatically inject your client’s Business Name at the appropriate place in the email.

Here are a few more ways to use personalization in your account in DashClicks’ templates.

How to Create New Contacts?

To personalize your emails, you can use the vast data stored in your Contacts application. Simply add new contacts to your DashClicks dashboard through the Contacts app. You can easily find this app by clicking the app drawer icon in the top right corner.

Look at the screenshot below –

Contacts app allows you to sort your information by categories such as People and Businesses. Here is how you can add a new person to your contacts:

Step 1 – Look at the top right corner, and press the “+ New Person” button. Then enter the essential information in the submenu.

Step 2 – In Dave Plumber’s profile above, you can check the lead status using the dropdown menu in the field.

Step 3 – Let’s add more information. Go to the app’s home page, and find the contact name. If you hover over it, a blue eye icon will pop up. Click on this icon and edit the information.

Step 4 – Now, the magic begins. This place should have all the information about Dave Plumber, just like a powerful CRM has. Since this is a new client, you won’t find much information in any dropdown here. As you start working on the platform setting up deals, using attachments, or sending InstaSites or InstaReports, the relevant data will appear in Dave Plumber’s contact preview.

Step 5 – Go to the bottom of the submenu that says “View Record” and click the blue text.

Step 6 - Many widgets on the contact page are created in the CRM for Dave Plumber. If you wish to browse, add, or edit data for this contact, you can do it with the help of these widgets. It includes all the demographic information about this customer. Look at the right side to use InstaReports and InstaSites features for this client.

These widgets also allow you to preview, buy and send an InstaSites or InstaReports. InstaSites or InstaReports are DashClicks' unique tools that enable you to create professional-grade instant websites and generate instant reports. So, you can add any information you want.

Similarly, you can add new businesses in the Contacts App.

You can complete your contact profile this way. The contact details will appear in your communications if pulled using codes in the Templates App.

Next, we will walk you through how to inject this information to personalize your emails.

How to Add Personalization?

Once you add your lead's contact and business information, you can personalize it using the available options in templates saving time and effort.

To begin with, you have two options to add personalization here. You can either create a new template or edit an existing template.

Step 1 - Go to the editing menu in the Templates and click the Personalize icon next to the Subject field. Remember, SMS templates don't have a Subject field. Click on Personalize.

Step 2 – In the dropdown menu, you’ll find numerous options to add personalizations by Person, Business, InstaReports, InstaSites, and My Profile. In the My Profile section, you can enter your personal information.

Step 3 – DashClicks software will automatically inject the data from your contacts and replace the Business Name code once your client receives an email through this template. When you send an email to Dave Plumber using this template, the message will appear as “Hi Dave’s Plumbing (his business name)” and not the injection API shown above.

Step 4 – There is no limit to adding personalization options if you have the corresponding personal or business contact profile information.

Step 5 – Finally, it’s time for testing. Run a test on your template to ensure that everything is working fine within the template. You can test your email by sending a test mail to your preferred email at the bottom of the menu.

Step 6 – You can click the Save button if you are happy with your email template.

You can also edit the existing template –

Final Words

This article discussed how to add personalization options to your DashClicks email templates. This functionality is enormously helpful for marketers as it saves a massive amount of time and effort. It also enables you to take the maximum advantage of your CRM as you can send personalized emails with offers crafted specifically for specific customer groups. And everything happens using the power of automation. So, there is minimal scope for manual errors.

The template allows you to send an email to your customers with their names or business names and lots of personalized stuff to catch their attention. There is no need to track the information related to the website and links to prominent tools you offer, such as InstaSites and InstaReports, etc.

Let's start off by answering this question: What is lead generation in digital marketing?

It is the first contact that a prospect initiates with your business. It can be by submitting personal information for a subscription, trial, offer, etc.

But what does this mean for your business?

Well, it's great news! You have successfully piqued their curiosity and interest.

Now, if you observe the present scenario, the biggest objective of any given digital marketing strategy is generating new leads.

However, determining the methods that bring you the most leads has become extremely challenging.

Even the statistics indicate the same: 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge.

If you too face this challenge and are searching for the most effective lead generation strategies in digital marketing for your business, then don't worry! We have you covered.

In this post, we'll discuss the five most-picked strategies for generating new leads. It will arm you with sufficient knowledge to get quality leads for your business.

Let's dive right in then!

What Are Leads in Digital Marketing?

Before we discuss the strategies, let's clearly define a lead first. A lead is a person or an organization that has shown interest in the offerings of your business. They show this interest by sharing their contact information, such as an email id, a social media handle, or a phone number.

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Top Lead Generation Strategies in Digital Marketing

All said and done, it's now time to discuss the different strategies for lead generation. Let's begin!

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process where you take steps to help a piece of content or a website rank higher on Google. It is a powerful way to reach your target audience.

SEO includes increasing the ranking of your website in search results for certain keywords and phrases. This helps your potential customers discover you when they search for information or services similar to yours.

Note: It's crucial for your website to show up in the first few results to help your target audience find you when they are looking for services that you provide.

SEO is regarded as an incredibly effective lead generation strategy in digital marketing. Now, you may wonder, how to start using SEO for lead generation? Here are a few major steps you can take:

A. Keyword Research & Selection

SEO involves optimizing your content for certain keywords and phrases.

To know which keywords to target, you need to carry out keyword research. As a first step, dedicate some time and brainstorm a list of possible keywords at your end.

Next, you can use online tools to find keywords that best suit your strategy. For instance, you can use the Chrome extension Keywords Everywhere. It displays the competition level and search volume for any particular keyword.

B. Use Long-Tail Keywords

Ensure you aim to choose long-tail keywords in your keyword research. These are keywords with three or more words. Here's an example to understand why you need to use them.

Suppose you are a company that sells classic furniture. Now, the chances of your web pages showing up in the top search results for the keyword furniture would be extremely low. This is because the competition will be too high, especially if you are a startup or a small company.However, if you specialize in, for instance, contemporary art-deco furniture, then using keywords such as contemporary Art Deco-influenced semi-circle loungeā  can send people to your website looking for that very product.

Long tail keywords have less competition. These keywords are more specific, which means fewer businesses will be using them.

C. User Experience

User experience impacts the amount of time visitors want to spend on your website. Hence, it's imperative that you offer a positive user experience to your website visitors.

You can take the following steps to ensure that your site offers an impressive user experience!

• Design & NavigationYour site's design plays a pivotal role in how visitors perceive your business. It has the power to make or break your first impression. To positively impact the perception of the site visitor, ensure you design a clean, attractive, and modern website. Also, opt for a consistent design.Another thing you need to keep in mind to offer a great user experience is an easy-to-use, simple navigation. This helps keep visitors on your site for a longer time. It also helps them easily find the information they are looking for.

• Note: The factors we discussed above impact your website's ranking as they determine the bounce rate. Your bounce rate is when individuals leave your website immediately and go back to the search results.
• Pro Tip: You don't want potential customers to go back to the search results and choose one of your competitors, do you? Therefore, we recommend keeping a check on your page speed. Use Google PageSpeed Insights for the same. An ideal good page load speed is 2 seconds.

• On-Page Optimization: On-page optimization is critical for increasing your site visitors. Ensure you follow these steps for this.When trying to rank for a keyword, make sure to use the keyword in the meta description, title, text, and headings. This describes your page to search engines, which helps them rank it accordingly.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and sharing blogs, videos, and other online materials, intended to generate interest in your brand's offerings rather than to explicitly promote your brand.

Content marketing is yet another powerful lead generation strategy in digital marketing. It can considerably boost your online visibility and generate credible leads.

Along with blogging, you can use content marketing to provide valuable information in the form of infographics, online guides, videos, and long-form articles.

When it comes to infographics specifically, 65% of brands produce them to bolster their content marketing strategy.

Pro Tip: The content you put out needs to be useful, well-researched, and related to what your audience may be searching for. It should also provide in-depth information.

We say this because when individuals check out helpful content on your site, they are more likely to visit other pages on your site too. This can potentially turn them into a lead.

Also, when you post relevant content, your site visitors will start to spend more time on each web page too. This can positively impact your rankings.

All in all, if you are looking for ways on how to generate leads in digital marketing, content marketing is your quickest fix!

Content marketing even helps you gain the trust of your audience and establish you as an authority in your field. A lot of benefits from one single strategy!

3. Social Media

Social media is a fantastic way to generate new leads for your business.

Renowned platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook make it easy for businesses to connect with leads.

To determine which social media platform you should use for lead generation, check which platform your target audience frequently uses or hangs out on.

Here are some of the steps you can take on social media to maximize opportunities for your business:

• Share important details such as address, hours of operation, and contact information for users to get in touch with you.
• Share the content you create. For e.g. articles and blog posts.
• Share videos, pictures, etc. that showcase your company’s culture and give an inside peek into your business.

When you make yourself available by becoming active on social media, you create engagement and help users spread the word about your business.

This brings in more leads to your site!

The bottom line?

Use social media to connect with your target market, develop relationships, and generate leads. Then, convert them into customers by maintaining a presence in their feed.

4. Email Marketing

Famous as one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, email marketing is one of the most effective methods to acquire and nurture leads even today. With emails, you can increase your reach considerably and gain more leads.

Here's what you need to do to leverage email marketing:

• Build a subscriber list. For this, add sign-up forms to different pages of your site. You can include them in the footer, header, etc.
• After you build the list, send specific information to your subscribers, such as new offerings or links to your content.

Pro Tip: Test different kinds of emails to determine what your subscribers care about. Then, use the insights to adjust your strategy.

All in all, email marketing is an immensely useful lead generation strategy in digital marketing. It is one of the best ways for your brand to reach as well as convert clients.

5. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising is yet another method that helps you gain leads.

These are defined as paid ads that show up at the start of the search results for specific keywords and phrases.

Same as SEO, PPC utilizes keywords. Hence, you need to determine the keywords you wish to target with your campaigns. These keywords will trigger your ads to show up in search results.

Now, you may be wondering, how does PPC work?

Basically, it operates on a bidding system. In such a system, advertisers bid the money they are willing to spend for every click' on their site for any particular keyword.

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But the more important question is: How can PPC help you generate leads?

Simple! PPC attracts qualified leads for your business - people who are actively looking out to purchase products or services similar to yours.

These advertisements help your business because they let you target users who search phrases with clear intent.

If you are searching for different methods on how to generate leads in digital marketing, you can definitely consider PPC advertising.

The Bottom Line

Now that you know the most picked lead generation strategies in digital marketing, you are in a more informed position to choose some of the best methods based on your brand and business needs.

From SEO to PPC advertising, these strategies hold the potential to bring you the highest quality leads and take your business to greater heights! Get started with these strategies today.

Both new and established brands use social media for a variety of reasons - to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and boost sales. Given the number of social media platforms available these days, building a brand on social media may seem like a daunting task. However, that is hardly the case. Using social media to connect with your audience and grow your brand is not as difficult as it might seem at first.

Whether you have just begun or have been active on social media platforms for quite some time now, you can always follow some social media marketing tips to grow your audience and move ahead of your competitors. These tips also help you in times when coming up with A+ social media content can become a challenge on an everyday basis.

Social Media Marketing Tips For Every Brand

The constantly evolving social media compels marketers to shift their strategies in order to keep up with the trends and updates. However, these tips will prove useful if you are looking to beef up your social media accounts at any given point of time:

1. Focus on Visual Content

If you decide to invest in visual content, it will indeed be a step in the right direction. On average, retweets featuring pictures are more likely to gain higher views and clicks as compared to text-only posts. 49% of marketers use visual content on websites and blogs, followed by Facebook and Instagram. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you focus on visual content.

Now you may wonder how to use visual content on social media. Let us give you some examples:

You can post infographics that shed light on your industry on LinkedIn or post a high-speed video featuring a tour of your office on Facebook.

2. Consider Influencers To Promote Your Service Or Product

First, let’s look at some of the latest statistics for a clearer picture on the subject:

1. Social media influencers influence Gen Z the most.
2. 40% of Twitter users purchased something because an influencer recommended it.

Need we say more?

Investing in influencers is an excellent route you can take to generate sales. In this day and age, young audiences listen to their most-loved influencers. In case you have a younger audience, hunt for influencers in your industry and consider partnering with them.

3. Create Engagement With Interactive Content

Interactive content is a great means to easily connect with your audience or inform them more about your product. For instance, you can conduct Instagram Q&A or Twitter polls to engage with your audience. Essentially, interactive content is any content a user can click through, click on, play with, or answer. This type of content delights your audience and gets them involved. Some interactive content ideas include quizzes, contests, and interactive videos.

Tip: For more ideas on how to engage with your audience, you can always check what your competitors are doing.

4. Provide a Behind-The-Scenes Experience With Stories

Stories offer an amazing opportunity to market to Instagram and Facebook users with unique, snappy content. It may come as a surprise to you, but one-third of the most-viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses. Keeping this data in mind, we highly recommend that you use Stories to share some behind-the-scenes content of your business.

Remember, consumers use social media to engage with their favorite brands. Therefore, when you give your loyal following an exclusive sneak-peek inside the working of your business, you make them feel a part of your group.

5. Blend Your Brand Into Your Social Media Marketing

Once you establish your brand, think about incorporating it into your social strategy. Do the following to blend your brand in your social media marketing:

• Add your logo to posts
• Include a company hashtag
• Highlight your employees

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Check out this branding from a company named Metter Media. When you scroll through the company's homepage on Instagram, you can easily spot the company colors, know who they represent, and get an idea about their team as well.

6. Invest in Video Content

With the speedy growth of YouTube, IGTV, and Facebook Live, users are consuming more and more video content. 49% of marketers say that video helps in engaging their audiences. 52% of marketers state that video helps them create trust among their potential customers. Keeping these stats in mind, investing in video content is a social media marketing tip that we highly recommend.

Tip: Read these stats before you begin to produce video content:

• 81% of marketers state their videos perform better with music.
• 68% of individuals will watch a complete video if it is a minute in length or even smaller.
• 84% of customers make a purchase after seeing an explainer video.

7. Join Communities

It is important to switch your focus to smaller communities within social networks. LinkedIn Groups, Twitter Chats, and Facebook Groups provide excellent opportunities to connect with like-minded people and companies within your niche. When you participate in these communities, you get to interact with your most passionate audiences and establish your business as an authority. Pretty cool, isn't it?

As a first step, search for communities linked with your industry on social media platforms you stay active on. Next, become an active member of these communities. You can even create your very own group around your brand as well!

8. Establish A Two-way Line of Communication on Social Media

Apart from posting relevant and supreme quality content, ensure you keep an eye on all the social media platforms you are using to engage with your audience. We recommend that you do the following for your social media presence to represent a two-way line of communication:

• Provide answers to questions that come up on your handles or posts.
• If you see users talking about your product or brand, don’t hesitate to chime in and add value.
• Give a prompt reply to individuals who mention you.
• Thank individuals who have shared your content.

Social Media Marketing Mistakes You Must Avoid

If the latest social media statistics are to be believed, there are 4.59 billion social media users around the world in 2022. These figures prove that social media marketing is a powerful tool to expose your business to a massive audience. Although most businesses are aware of this fact, only a few succeed in correctly using social media marketing.

For your social media campaign to show excellent results, there are some mistakes you need to avoid. Take a look:

1. Not Having a Social Media Marketing Plan

Even today, many companies fail to create a prompt social media marketing plan. They just keep posting things on social media without having a real plan in place.

Social media marketing is something that should be taken seriously. And for that, we recommend that you make a list of specific objectives you wish to achieve, make a budget, and create a plan of action that you can easily follow.

2. Choosing The Wrong Tone

Brands should definitely know this one important thing - the way a brand behaves on Instagram or Twitter is subject to strict scrutiny. For instance, if you choose a brand voice that is too official, you may sound boring to social media users. Or, if you try to appeal to the users by being offensive, it will be considered a much greater social media sin!

So before you start posting on Instagram or begin tweeting, dedicate some time to figure out the tone you are going to set. It should be consistent across all your social media posts, a reflection of your brand, and should easily connect with your audience.

3. Choosing to Remain Silent in The Comment Section

The Instagram algorithm likes you when you have a lot of comments on your posts. The same holds true about Facebook as well. So, ensure you don't stay silent in the comment section.

Leaving comments also gives you another benefit- it helps you create a connection with your followers. When they notice that you care enough to reply to their comments, they will develop an even deeper liking for your brand.

4. Promoting Yourself A lot

On social media, you should be sociable. If all you do is promote your content on social media, a lot of users will start disliking your business, decreasing your following. Promoting your brand is crucial, but we recommend that you be subtle about it.

5. Deleting Negative Comments

You may have come across a situation where a brand got a negative comment, then engaged in an ugly and lengthy conversation, and then deleted the entire thread. This is a route that a brand should never take.

If you receive a negative comment, we suggest you be objective and show your audience that you have nothing to hide. If the person who wrote the negative comment has highlighted your wrongdoing, thank them and make it a point to improve. If they are toxic in their comment, we recommend you just ignore them.

Image Source: Starbucks Instagram Page

6. Not Creating Content People Would Want to Engage With

The time you invest in creating content for your social media channels will be a complete waste if no one shares or comments on them. Therefore, take out some time to develop content that individuals would relate to and want to engage with.

In case your updates are not getting any reactions, dedicate some time to re-evaluate the social media marketing approach you have taken.

7. Treating Every Social Media Account As Same

Every social media platform differs from the other. That’s why you must only speak the language the users speak on a particular social networking site ‌you wish to grow on. Learn the language of the platforms you have chosen for your brand and speak to the users in a language they will understand.

For this, we recommend ‌you learn how different social media platforms work to leverage the opportunities they have on offer. Each platform offers its own set of unique opportunities that you can use for increasing exposure and growing your business.

The Bottom Line

To sum up, the above-mentioned tips provide you with relevant ways to upgrade your content, organize your page, and help grow your target audience. Also, the mistakes we discussed are the ones you need to avoid to succeed with social media marketing.

In the end, remember that social media, when properly optimized, offers the greatest path to brands to reach more customers and increase their sales. As your followership increases and validates your services or products, your social proof increases, and more individuals get drawn to your business, boosting your sales.

Now that you are armed with some of the best social media marketing tips, are you ready to optimize your marketing strategy with them? Which one of the tips are you definitely going to implement?

Listen Up: DashClicks' white label social media posting service helps agencies save up on the cost involved in paying for the workforce that manages the social needs of their clients. The white label unified solution (platform + dashboard) simplifies things by automating client onboarding, fulfillment, and reporting.

Online marketers have access to a full range of website data and analytics, which come from various resources such as Google Analytics, SEO tools, and other platforms.

The analytics data will greatly help if you use the appropriate metrics to get the correct insights. You should drive your primary data from different marketing channels.

For example, you should find the following information.

• Your best-performing posts on social media and how people land on your website.
• The top landing pages that are converting the most customers.
• The areas of improvement and where to put in more efforts to optimize your campaigns.

In this article, we will define data-driven marketing, its scope, and its benefits. Additionally, we will provide some tips and how to use data-driven marketing to the fullest to improve your digital marketing and overall profits.

Case Study of a Winter Apparel Store

A winter apparel store selling clothes worldwide was struggling with the most suitable type of advertising medium and timing. As the product was used during a specific time of the year, they realized they were wasting a lot of money advertising all year round. Finding the best time to start advertising campaigns in different areas of the world was essential.

Off-season sales happen only in certain products that are considered expensive, and these purchases are carefully planned. Most people don't buy FMCG products far ahead of time.

Unplanned and heavy online advertising resulted in reduced profit margins. They needed to identify the best time to run their advertisements in different locations worldwide.

For this, the company created two datasets. In the first dataset, they created a custom dashboard that included information about the purchase time and the buyer's location.

They created another dashboard to provide the information related to the weather data for those specific locations where their customers were mainly based.

Analyzing these data sets quickly led to information about the ideal time of the year when people started planning to buy their winter outfits.

When they started using this information to plan their online advertising, it significantly reduced their advertising cost. Apart from the advertising cost, the store could better manage its stock levels and drive a higher ROI for the company.

It means less warehouse inventory, less maintenance, and better delivery control.

It is impossible to achieve without conducting a data-driven analysis. A data-driven approach is also effective in analyzing consumer habits and purchase patterns. It helps you plan and implement effective strategies to boost sales and decrease expenditure.

What Is Data-Driven Marketing?

Businesses use data-driven marketing, leveraging the power of data and analytics to make better marketing decisions to improve overall profits. It also helps you to enhance your branding, customer experience, and online visibility. The key to successful online marketing is personalized communication for different customer segments.

Data-driven marketing also helps you measure results, optimize campaigns, and quickly take corrective measures.

What are the Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing can improve your ROI and overall business performance. But apart from it, it has multiple benefits. It helps you to segment your customers, target their messaging and personalize your campaign.

When you make informed decisions, your marketing becomes laser-sharp, achieving much better results.

The other benefits are as follows.

• It helps you better utilize your time and resources, which is crucial to your success in any business.
• Data-driven marketing helps you to understand your customers better. It is the key to improving marketing campaigns with better targeting and effective strategies.
• It also helps you to identify new markets and growth opportunities. By analyzing the purchasing habits and current trends, you can quickly identify new markets and the need for new products to bridge the gap in the market.

What Is a Data-Driven Marketing Agency?

A data-driven marketing agency uses data to make its critical marketing decisions, including the selection of the most effective marketing channels and messaging to use for your target audience.

When you hire a data-driven marketing agency, you are confident that your hard-earned money is not wasted on experimentation. Your campaigns are fully optimized, and your marketing strategies are incredibly effective. It also ensures you hit the right audience with your messages instead of doing guesswork and praying for your campaigns to work.

A data-driven marketing agency ensures your clients receive value for their marketing spending.

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How to Do Data-Driven Marketing?

In a data-driven marketing environment, data is analyzed before making any decision.

To effectively implement a data-driven marketing campaign, you need the following things.

1. A Robust Reporting Tool

To use customer data, you need to have a proper collection and storage strategy. It would help if you had a robust reporting tool for that.

Pro Tip: You can use the DashClicks InstaReports tool to get the best insights and tips to improve your campaign. InstaReports is an automated tool that can gather information from numerous third-party tools and platforms and generate a report in seconds.

2. Data Analysis Skills

Raw data is of no use. You need valuable insights and discover trends; for this, you must have advanced analytical skills.

3. Ability to Take Action Based on the Insights

You need the necessary skills and experience to take the required action based on these insights. So, you can create new marketing campaigns and tweak your existing campaigns and approach.

4. Willingness to Take Risks and Experiment

Data-driven marketing is inspired by innovation and a willingness to learn and take risks. If you're not ready to experiment with new things and explore unchartered territories, it will not work. There are endless possibilities, and you should be willing to take calculated risks.

How to Analyze Digital Marketing Data?

When you analyze data, you know what works and what doesn't. So, phase out the wasteful or weak strategies and replace them with the most effective ones.

Data-driven marketing provides you with the right kind of information that you can use to make your campaigns more effective. There are many ways you can use your data to get valuable insights.

Here are a few such tips:

1. Optimize Your Website for Bounce Rate and New Keywords

The success of your website largely depends on how you optimize it for new keywords and the bounce rate. Google does not like web pages with a high bounce rate as it indicates that the visitor didn't find the information interesting and relevant. Your keyword choice can also be a sign of poor targeting and substandard content.

That's why you should continuously experiment with new keywords and trends to create the content your audience is looking for. You can use Google Analytics to find out your bounce rate.

A high bounce rate often indicates that users' search intent is not fulfilled, so avoid using wrong keywords at any cost. Using relevant keywords is the key to success.

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2. Improve Your Content Quality

If you are not getting enough traffic on your web pages, your content quality is not up to the mark. Make sure your content offers value and addresses the pain points of your customers.

You can effectively use marketing data to check whether your content is providing value to your audience or not. There are several metrics that you can use to check the engagement levels.

3. Use Audience Analytics to Target the Right Audience

A data-driven organization is always interested in audience analytics because this is the only way to attract the right people and spend your money on the proper channels.

You can use social media analytics i.e., Facebook and Twitter analytics, because many people engage with you on social media. Social media analytics also gives you ample information about your audience, including the demographics and habits of your customers.

It also includes the information related to the products and the content your audience is interested in.

Pro Tip: You can use DashClicks' social media dashboards to get the desired information.

4. Take a Local Approach if NeededĀ

Switch to location analytics if location-based marketing is essential for you. Location-based advertising and marketing also provide you with an edge over your rivals.

If a large portion of your audience lives in a specific location, you can use these insights to create localized content and targeted messaging to drive the best results.

5. Use Customer Journey Insights to Optimize Your Touchpoints

A customer goes through various stages and uses different touchpoints when interacting with your brand during his journey. Knowing these touchpoints and customer journey stages is crucial so you can use them in your marketing strategy.

Ā You can use social media analytics and search engine analytics to get to know the devices they use and the content they like to consume. It will also give you a fair idea of the returning customers.

Such insights will make your marketing more effective. It will also help you to clear the roadblocks your customers come across and the concerns they might have before they decide to purchase from you.

These data points will also provide helpful information about the issues in your website, the main areas of friction, and the pages customers are bouncing from.

Final Words

You can use the vast data available through various sources to optimize and improve your digital marketing strategy. You can use DashClicks’ dashboard to get the wealth of information at your fingertips. It’s possible because of the numerous third-party integrations the platform allows and its robust automated reporting tools that can create digital marketing reports within seconds.

Today, video content forms an indispensable part of a powerful digital marketing strategy. It helps boost your brand’s credibility and increases user engagement.

Owing to the extensive benefits of using video as a marketing tool, businesses all around the world are leveraging it to increase brand visibility and growth.

And why not?

As per Social Media Week, 55% of people view online videos daily and 78% people watch online videos weekly.

In this day and age, not having a dedicated video marketing strategy means losing a good chunk of customers.

You, as a business, may also want to leverage the benefits of video content and share engaging and informative videos on the web.

But for this, you need to undertake measures that help rank your videos on Google.

Now, do you know how you can rank your videos on Google and make your brand visible online? Do you know what video rich snippets are and the importance they hold?

In this post, we’ll talk about how to strategically optimize your videos for Google search with video rich snippets. In short, we’ll know the secrets of video snippets success!

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

What Are Rich Snippets?

Before we dive into video rich snippets, it’s important to know what rich snippets are.

We all know what a SERP (search engine results page) result comprises of:

• A URL
• A meta description
• A title

This is called a “snippet.”

Rich snippets, also known as rich results, are the Google search results consisting of some additional details such as events, reviews, recipes, etc. It helps a searcher better understand a website and make a decision about whether or not they should visit it.

Here’s what rich snippets look like:

Image Source

As you can see, these search results are visually more appealing with add-on information shown alongside the URL, title, and description.

Note: Do not get rich snippets confused with featured snippets.

Featured snippets, or as they're also called, answer boxes, place content extracted from a web page in a box. This box takes the zero position on the SERP and answers your query in a way that's bound to grab your attention. The CTR (click-through rate) of featured snippets is significantly high as they are the first things you see on a SERP.

Now, on the other hand, when you talk of rich snippets, they rely on structured data pulled from the HTML of a web page.

What Is a Video Rich Snippet?

Now, it's time we come to the main subject of our post ā video rich snippet.

A video rich snippet is the information appearing on Google with a small video showing up along with the result.

Now, you may wonder what's the purpose of this snippet?

A video rich snippet helps a user learn about a certain search query in a more comprehensive manner with a related video. It works as a brilliant way for businesses looking to boost the CTR (click-through rate) of their search results.

Here's an example of a video rich snippet:

As you can see, video snippets consist of a title, description, and URL like any other snippet. But they also include extra information such as the upload date and duration of the video. They even have a thumbnail.

Now that you know what video rich snippets mean, you must also know one other thing.

Search engines can’t watch your videos, even though they know that your content is out there.

They need to put in a lot of effort to learn what your content is about. Hence, to assist them in this process, you need to incorporate structured data into your content. More on this in the next sections.

What Do You Mean by Structured Data?

According to Google, “structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.”

Let’s understand structured data with the help of an example.

Suppose you write an article on “how to make a pancake.” A post without structured data won’t share information such as the ingredients used, the time taken to prepare it, and the number of calories.

However, with structured data, you can assist search engines in crawling with relevant information, such as:

“It takes a total of 30 minutes to cook this recipe.”

“It contains 186 calories.”

“This is how it looks.”

And so on.

To help you understand this better, here’s an example of a video rich snippet that appears on entering the search query “how to cook a chicken stew.”

Image Source

To add structured data, the majority of websites use Google-recommended schema.org.

The reason for this is that most leading search engines easily understand this markup. You can also call schema markup the language of search engines.

How Can I Add Video Rich Snippets?

Although there are other options to add video rich snippets, we'll discuss the simple option of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper to implement schema.

Adding schema markup to your website is easy, all thanks to the help you get from this helper. Here's what you need to do.

Step 1: Visit the Structured Data Markup Helper Page

Go to the Structured Data Markup Helper page and sign in.

Step 2: Choose the Website Tab

From the two tabs, Website and Email, click on the website option.

Step 3: Choose a Data Type

Google will prompt you to choose a data type to learn how to categorize your data. The options you get here include:

• Job Postings
• Datasets
• Book Reviews
• Events
• Articles
• Local Businesses
• Question & Answer Page
• Products
• Restaurants
• Software Applications
• Movies
• TV Episodes

Step 4: Enter Page HTML or URL

If your page isn't ready and published, you can paste its HTML in the bar present at the bottom. However, if your web page is published, you can paste your URL.

Step 5: Tag the Elements You Wish to Markup

Next, you need to highlight page elements and assign tags to them, which will help you optimize the video for SEO. Ensure you create a comprehensive markup.

Choose the ‘Add missing tags’ button in case you can’t find a tag on the list.

Step 6: Create the HTML

Next, click the ‘Create HTML’ tab that you will find on the top right.

You will see a drop-down menu. We recommend ‌you choose JSON-LD because Google prefers this structured data type. It’s easy to use too.

Copy the code and insert it into your web page. Submit the web page to search engines after you create the HTML.

Test Your Video Rich Snippets

Before you publish your page, it’s crucial that you thoroughly review the inserted schema markup. This step ensures that you fully utilize the potential of video SEO.

Use Google Rich Results Test to quickly gauge the performance of your schema markup.

Note: Even if you have correctly implemented your rich snippets, there’s no guarantee they will be shown in the SERPs immediately afterward. Google talks about the same in its guidelines.

Google can take weeks to crawl and index your page in the proper manner.

So, all you need to do is implement the markup and leave the rest to the search engines. If all goes well you may see results in a few months, if not weeks. And certain changes may be required too.

Tip: You should learn how to fix schema validation errors.

Final Words

As the wheel of content creation and consumption keeps on moving, businesses find it harder to grab the attention of their audience. This makes it even more important to adopt the practice of adding video-rich snippets for video content. If you put in your best work with the tips and tricks we have discussed so far, you will most likely get to boost click-through rates for your pages and drive more traffic to your site.

Now, what are you waiting for? Take steps to stand out on SERPs with a beautiful and intriguing video attached.

A robust digital marketing strategy requires several components - from social media to email to search engines and much more. While each competent is equally important to advertise your business online, content is unarguably the most important part of these efforts.

Are you a small business owner wishing to increase your audience and boost your brand recognition? If yes, then you must try content marketing.

Content marketing involves the creation and dissemination of online materials such as blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, and social media posts with the purpose of stimulating interest in the services or products of a business. It helps grow traffic to your website.

In this blog, we will discuss why small business owners should build a powerful content marketing strategy and how to craft one.

The Importance of Content Marketing For Small Business

Content marketing enables you to create and share timely and useful content. It allows you to build loyalty and respect among consumers and become a thought leader in your industry.

You may wonder how. Content marketing offers your audience something that has value, developing trust among your prospects and customers.

Another way content marketing aids you is by recognizing the pain points of your customers. It also helps build a customer base you can engage with for the purpose of driving sales.

Additionally, another benefit of content marketing includes the evergreen content you produce. For instance, a blog post that talks about the history of your industry. Such an asset will not become outdated.

Businesses today have recognized the importance of content marketing. As per the latest marketing stats for 2022, 70% of marketers are active investors in content marketing.

All in all, with the help of content marketing, you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content marketing. You also get a chance to grow your brand awareness and establish and maintain a successful brand identity.

Content Marketing For A Small Business: 7 Tips For Success

Let's discuss the tips every business owner should follow to build a successful content marketing strategy for their small business.

1) Start a Blog

Companies that consistently write blogs get 67% more leads per month on average.

Blogging is a free way of marketing your capabilities and services. So, if you want to know how to market a small business, blogging is a route that you can opt for. It also helps you become an industry expert.

Blogs help in different ways, such as:

• Boost your SEO rankings
• Drive traffic to your website
• Provide increased value to your consumers
• Add to your brand’s exposure
• Get leads and increase the likelihood of conversion

2) Stay Active on Social Platforms Your Audience Uses

You may have a social media presence if you are actively involved in selling a service or a product. However, simply being present on social channels is not enough. You are required to stay active on all the social media channels your audience spends their time on.

Now you may wonder how to select the right social media channels for your business. For this, you are required to identify your target audience. On social media platforms, you are speaking to a set of consumers who have specific interests and not everyone. After you learn about the individuals you are speaking to, figure out how to reach them.

Tip: To check where your audience is active, you can do the following:

• Use existing consumer data to determine where your audience hangs out online.
• Check out the social profiles of your competitors to know where their most active users are.

3) Deliver Content as per the Stage of Your Customer Within the Marketing Funnel

To reach the conversion phase, individuals go through a process called the marketing funnel. From learning about your business to conversion, this funnel includes everything. These are the four steps most marketing funnels have:

• Attention: Consumer views your social media post, ads, or learns about you via word-of-mouth
• Interest: Consumer is interested and wants to learn more
• Desire: Consumer is at a stage where they want to convert
• Action: Consumer takes action (for e.g.- subscribing to your email newsletter or purchasing your product)

To align this process with your creation, ensure you provide relevant content to the target customers present at the different stages of the funnel. For instance, an in-depth asset can overburden a potential customer who is currently at the attention stage of the funnel.

4) Conduct Keyword Research to Find Great Topics

An important step is to optimize your blog for SEO. You must conduct keyword research as a part of SEO. Keyword research is a crucial part of content marketing because:

• It helps identify trending topics individuals are interested to know more about.
• It helps improve your search engine rankings.

Watch this video to know how to do SEO keyword research -

Note: The keyword strategy for your business is the most critical part that determines your ranking on the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). However, you must also know that SEO-friendly websites rank higher on the SERPs, too. If you do not have an SEO-friendly website, it is time to build one for your business.

If you need an SEO-friendly, professional, niche-based website, you should know that it takes many days to build one. We recommend that you use DashClicks' Sites tool that helps you make an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.

5) Create a Content Calendar

Monthly content calendars include blog posts, emails, social posts, and any other content you wish to produce in that particular month. It helps you stay organized. Also, with the help of a content schedule, your readers get comfortable as it increases familiarity and trust for your business.

A content calendar is important because:

• It ensures that every content-related task is actually taking place
• It makes it convenient to collaborate with outside partners as well as your team
• It provides you a big picture of the upcoming stuff

Let’s discuss the steps that help you create your own content calendar:

• Decide the types of content you wish to publish, such as case studies, landing pages, e-books, opinion pieces, blog posts, etc.
• Discuss with your customer service and sales team to know the most asked questions by your potential customers. Then sit and brainstorm with your marketing team to determine different content strategies and more topics that you need to cover.
• Use the SEMRush Content Audit tool to analyze the current pages on your website and check what you should update, remove, or rewrite. Use this tool to analyze your competitors as well.
• Choose social media channels by checking the platforms your target audience uses. For instance, Facebook typically works great for B2C audiences.
• Before a type of content reaches production, define every step of the content process. Then, decide on a publishing schedule as per your content auditing and analytics data.
• Schedule evergreen content and publish them at a time when there are content delays.
• Don’t forget to add guest content to your content calendar.

6) Bring Your Reviews to Life

You may be surprised to know that 91% of people in the age group of 18-34 trust reviews published online as much as personal recommendations.

Also, a majority of consumers (58%) would pay more or travel farther to support a business that has positive reviews.

What's even more important is that 83% of consumers only trust relevant and recent reviews.

With these stats, you can definitely see the power of reviews. They help in driving a business, especially one that is both local and small.

Keeping this information in mind, we recommend you bring your reviews to life via social posts and testimonials that you can post on your website and blog.

Testimonials are considered one of the most effective content marketing tactics. Let's discuss how you can convert your blog post readers into buyers with the help of customer testimonials:

• Use screenshots of your client’s statements and place them within your blog posts.
• Use these statements as quotes in your blog posts.

Tip: To know how to get reviews and leverage them in your content marketing, read this blog.

7) Find a Unique Angle

Your competitors can indeed provide you with a lot of topic ideas, but avoid producing content that is too similar to the content created by others. The goal of content marketing is to provide information that is useful and adds value to your customers, not something that is already available to them on the web.

If you find a great idea, do not replicate it with tiny alterations. What you can do instead is to see it as a starting point and search for ways to incorporate your own unique angle. Doing so will only help you provide interesting content to your readers.

Bonus Tips:

• Start an email newsletter to let your readers know about an upcoming event, a new product, industry-related news, and much more.
• See what is resonating with your audience and create a variety of content types. Think about content repurposing as well.

How to Craft a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Let's discuss what you need to do to craft a marketing strategy for your small business:

1. Build Your Buyer Personas and Fine - Tune Them

Create buyer personas to better understand your audience and their respective pain points. When you determine who is buying your products, you get to know the kind of content they need and when.

2. Solve a Problem

Consumers look for information that provides a solution to their problems. Identify the content assets that can fulfill the unique needs of your buyers. Do this after you have identified buyer personas.

3. Set Business Goals

Set business goals that align with the strategy. The principle of SMART goals makes your benchmarks attainable and reasonable, so do use the principle during this time.

4. Determine Distribution Channels

When it is time to share your content, determine which content piece is right for which channel. This is because not every content piece does well on every channel. Hence, to achieve success and reach, this step is important.

Check the image below to see how the three distribution channels - owned media channels, paid media channels, and earned media channels - overlap and the way in which you can combine them:

Image Source

Also, take a note of how you can distribute different content types:

• Distribute your interview content or podcasts through Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.
• Distribute your infographic content through your blog and Pinterest.
• Distribute success stories and case studies through a dedicated website page.
• You can distribute your video content through YouTube.

Conclusion

Even though you run a small business, there is a high chance that you have huge competition. To grow your audience and help your business stand out, you require a content marketing strategy that will help you showcase your value to your current and future consumers.

When you build your buyer personas, you take a step forward towards building a winning content marketing strategy. After you do so, ensure you create content centered around your buyers' pain points and the stage they are at within the marketing funnel. Stay active on social platforms your audience uses and bring your reviews to life through testimonials and social posts.

Bottom line: Try implementing most of the above-mentioned tips for your business.

Now, it is our turn to ask you a question. Which of the above-mentioned tips do you think will be the most beneficial for your business?