Tag: digital marketing

How Responsive Website Design Can Take Your Business Forward

It is easy to understand this concept even if you don’t have special technical knowledge. The idea behind responsive design is to make the website usable across all connected devices. It responds to the environment created by the hardware to make viewing and interaction comfortable, pleasant and productive.
Simply put, the website is equally easy to view and to use on desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets. What value can it bring to a business? Let me answer this question from the point of view of an experienced web development consultant.

Cost Efficiency
With global mobile web traffic already surpassing desktop traffic, it has become perfectly clear that there is no way back – mobile is here to stay. If businesses want to keep up with the trends and stay competitive, their website has to be optimised for mobile. It is possible to have a mobile website in addition to your existing one. This option typically requires a smaller initial investment. However, it is not cost-efficient as you will have to invest in the search engine optimisation, marketing, maintenance and future development of two different platforms. Furthermore, content duplication issues may occur and you can be severely penalised for this by Google.
With responsive website design, you will be able to focus your effort and investment on a single platform. You can expect higher return since the platform will continue to work effectively for all of your marketing and other business purposes in the long term.

Improved Visibility
Since April 2015, Google has been giving priority to websites which are optimised for mobile devices. This means that responsive website design has now become fundamental for SEO and digital marketing in general. If you want your optimisation efforts from content creation to link building to pay off, you will need to have a website which is equally functional on all mobile devices. With higher search engine rankings, your website will have more qualified leads and this will help for increasing the rate of conversion.

Higher Conversion
Eventually, it all boils down to sales and revenue and responsive design can help to improve both. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, mobile is becoming an ever more important channel for generating information and social sharing. With a website optimised for smartphones and tablets, you and your products and services will get found more easily and quickly not only via the search engines, but via the social networks too.
Around half of all online shoppers use multiple devices to make a transaction. For instance, they may find a cool product on their tablet and then buy it later on via their desktop computer. Additionally, one in four e-commerce sales is now made via a smartphone. These statistics come to prove that responsive design is necessary not only for gaining new customers, but for keeping existing ones.
As mentioned in the beginning, the core purpose of this design is to improve user experience. When the user enjoys satisfactory experience, the chance of sale increases by two thirds. You will not have to worry about missing to capture a prospect customer because your website is difficult to navigate with gestures or slow to load on mobile devices.

Become even more competitive with responsive design for your business website.

You already have a vision for your business’s responsive website? Share it with me.

How Do You Achieve High Website Traffic and Conversion Rate?

The simple answer is digital marketing, but you probably already know this. The bigger question is what’s behind this seemingly complex and constantly expanding term. In my experience as a web development consultant, the best way to look at digital marketing is from a strategic point of view. With a complete digital strategy, you will be able to achieve your business goals online. Let’s look at the main elements of the strategy more closely.

The Goal
With digital marketing, the details are paramount. You don’t simply need lots of visitors to your website, but targeted traffic. These are users who are interested in your products and services and seek them as a solution to a particular problem.
At the same time, even high targeted traffic does not guarantee you a good conversion rate if you don’t have a well-developed marketing funnel on your website. It has a lot of elements to it from the design of the pages, menus and CTA buttons to the selection of sign-up and payment options available.
Keeping these factors in mind, you can set measurable goals. Reliable website analytics will help you to monitor your performance, analyse it and make adjustments to your marketing strategy, when required.

Target Audience
Defining your target market is in the core of every business strategy executed either online or offline. You will need to do through research to define your audience’s demographics. Your website’s analytics will help you to learn more about user preferences and behaviour which is crucial for marketing and for building a loyal customer base.
Currently, the trend is for websites and all web-based services and products to become ever more personalised to match the individual user’s preferences and needs even more perfectly. There is a broad set of tools for achieving this. These range from personalised product suggestions to tools for finding your preferred style.

Marketing Channels
Which ones will have the highest return on investment? A well-rounded strategy will include a set of channels, which are focused on your target audience and can be used together for achieving higher efficiency and better results. A key consideration here is that modern digital marketing channels are highly interlinked and the best way to exploit them is to go for full integration.
Modern search engine optimisation and content marketing go hand in hand. The idea is to create content, which is valuable to users and optimised for the current Google algorithms. Social media marketing is an effective channel for promotion your website and content. It can be used for direct advertising and for customer engagement via different campaigns.
Video marketing emerges as a top trend as web video traffic continues to grow and consumers increasingly using this type of content for making purchase decisions. Email marketing has been highly underrated in recent years, but it still has high ROI, especially in the B2B field. This is a highly effective channel for delivering marketing content and personalised offers and for building loyalty.

A digital marketing strategy using multiple integrated channels may seem complex to implement, but you can always rely on automation with custom software especially developed for your business.

Need a solid digital strategy bringing high ROI? Let’s discuss it.

5 Website Design Tricks for Increasing Conversion

The purpose of a business website is not simply to present the company, but to convert interested visitors into customers. Let’s say you invest £100 in digital marketing and gain 100 visitors to your site. However, only 50 of them become your customers. What has made the other 50 go away? Maybe they haven’t been convinced about the quality of your product or service or they have found it challenging to take a specific action. As a web development consultant with a decade of experience, let me give you useful advice for achieving a higher conversion rate through design.

1. Arranging Elements to Follow the Eye Movement
You naturally look from left to right not only when you read. That is why it makes sense to put the most important elements on the left-hand side of a webpage. When you use a ribbon to present a product how do you arrange the different boxes on it? Given the natural eye movement, the top left and right sections should offer a picture of the item and a short description. Ideally, the bottom left section will have the “hook” which stimulates the customer to take action such as a discounted price, special offer, testimonial or positive review. The last section which the visitor will look at (the bottom right one) should have the call to action.

2. Gaining Credibility
If you have a new business, adding seals of approval from national, local and possibly international professional associations and quality assurance and consumer organisations will help you to convert more visitors into customers. When these have attractive shape, bright colour and simple font, they will be even more influential. For new products that you try to push in, you can use seals to place emphasis on the guarantee, a testimonial or the promotional offer that comes along with the item.

3. Letting Headlines Shine
The first text that people see on a web page has to have large enough font and to be clutter-free. It is a mistake to add embellishments or to have lots of components surrounding it. If you use push ads, make sure that they don’t show up to block the page’s content before the user has had the time to read the title.

4. Leading Consumers by the Hand
It should be easy for visitors to follow the path to taking action. Simple card design is fundamental, but it is also helpful to add visual cues such as arrows. You should never leave the prospect guessing what to do next. The ideal CTA button is not only big and brightly coloured. Giving it a lining will make it stand out. Adding a visual element such as a shopping cart icon will literally show the customer what to do.

5. Fast Page Loading Speed
Yes, if your website is slow, you will lose prospect customers. A study by Amazon has revealed that every extra 100 milliseconds of load time lead to 1% drop in sales. A recent survey among online shoppers has shown that two thirds of the participants changed their mind about purchasing a product due to slow work of the e-commerce website. Don’t let your conversion rate fall victim to technical matters. My team and I are readily available to give you a website with improved design and performance. Make full use of all five tricks for higher conversion.

If you want a modern and functional mobile-friendly website, send me an email or message me. If you get in touch with my office just ask for Philip Philipov.

The Scope of the Digital Consultant’s Work

Why do companies hire a digital consultant? The simple answer is that digital marketing and e-commerce have become so well-developed and advanced that a single person or even a team may not be sufficient to manage them. While a small local business may not have the right specialist for the job, a large company may be lagging behind competitors because their specialised department hasn’t been quick enough to catch up with the latest trends. The professional will help you get on the right track and achieve your goals. Here I will share with you how this works based on my personal experience as a digital consultant.

Key Roles
A business of any size, level and industry can take advantage of digital consultancy to improve its performance regardless of how long it has been present on the web. If you have just founded a new company or you have been using outdated and ineffective online marketing methods, you can get a head start or restart with a complete digital strategy. It will have clearly set business goals and precisely defined time frame, schedule and budget. It is my primary objective to tailor it to the specific needs of the business given its own characteristics, the marketing conditions, which it operates in, and its target audience.

Solving problems is another major role of the consultant. Most companies can clearly identify the nature of the problem related to their online performance, but cannot find the cause and come up with a solution. If you experience a drop in your online sales, for example, my role will be to pinpoint the weak points in your marketing, search engine optimisation and e-commerce website performance, to name the main areas. The next step involves determining the most effective and cost-efficient solution.
Very often, companies prefer to outsource specific projects like ones for website and mobile app development. In such cases, the role of the consultant can range from setting criteria and a process for hiring a developer to outlining a development strategy. As a consultant who has a team of developers and designers, I can execute the strategy as well.

Level of Client Involvement
Will the consultant present the ready strategy, solution or project plant directly or work together with members of the company’s team to create it? As the company or department manager, you decide how much involvement you and your team will have in the process. The bare minimum is for the consultant to have access to data and other useful materials and to establish reliable communication with the person in charge. Close cooperation usually brings the best results. This is what my personal experience has shown.

Effective Communication
No matter what the level of involvement of the client is in the actual work on the project, the two parties should be on the same page at all times. It is paramount for the digital consultant to keep the client up-to-date on the development of the project and to inform the company about any changes which have to be made. Similarly, if there are shifts in the business’s plans, the professional should know about them as soon as possible.

Managers are not supposed to be digital specialists, but they have the opportunity to hire the help which they need and to negotiate the most favourable terms when doing so.

If you are looking to hire an experienced digital consultant call me or send me an email or a message. When you contact my office at Whiz, seek Philip Philipov.

Why Your Business Needs a Digital Strategy

Establishing your brand’s website and social network presence is not the end of your online marketing effort, it’s only the beginning. How do you plan to proceed from this point on? Most businesses choose to run promotional ad campaigns when they have a new offering and to send email newsletter to people who have signed up for this. Do you think that this is effective or efficient? It’s neither. For exploiting all marketing opportunities which the web has to offer, you will need a complete digital strategy with clearly set goals and methods for achieving them. Let me explain why this is important in greater detail.

Effective Target Marketing
Let’s say you are making great SEO effort and it is paying off in the form of higher traffic. Has this resulted in higher conversion? If not, your on-page marketing doesn’t work. Maybe you are not targeting the right people or you lack re-marketing. What if your sales increase during an ad campaign, but drop sharply afterwards? This means that you have missed the chance to win loyal customers.

With a digital strategy, you will not experience these and similar pitfalls. In the core of the strategy sits your target audience. It will be clearly defined after thorough research on my part as a digital consultant. The strategy will feature all the right instruments for targeting prospects from search engine and email marketing to social media engagement and ads. With detailed analytics, we will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of each instrument and make improvements where needed.

Engagement and Loyalty
Individual marketing efforts have short-term effect and you most certainly know this from experience. With a complete digital strategy, you will not only be able to attract customers and to increase your sales in the short term. You will enjoy strong performance and steady growth in the long term because you will have customers who have a connection with your brand and who form an expanding loyal customer base.

Cost Efficiency
Do you know what ROI you are getting from your digital marketing effort? Around 53% of the businesses in the UK don’t, according to Smart Insights’ report for 2015. If you cannot measure what return you receive from each pound spent, you are most probably losing money. One of the key advantages of a digital strategy is that it will have accurate data for measuring performance. You will have a clear idea of how you spend your money and what monetary and non-monetary benefits like brand loyalty you are getting in return.

Long-Term Success
A digital strategy allows you to establish strong marketing fundamentals which will keep producing results over time without extra spending. Once you engage a large number of customers via your Facebook page, for instance, you will no longer need a large investment to maintain their interest. This will give you the opportunity to invest more in innovative tools for marketing. This is how the big players manage to stay competitive in the long term. You can be among them too.

Did you know that only 55% of organisations in the UK had a digital strategy in 2015? If you want to gain a leadership position in your industry, now is the time to get one.

Source: http://www.smartinsights.com/guides/managing-digital-marketing-2015/

Count on me and my team to build and implement a digital strategy for you. Email me or call my office and ask for Philip Philipov.