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What Is A Local Business Listing?

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What is my "local listing" and why does everyone want to manage it?

Businesses often get phone calls and emails offering “local listing” management. If you work at one of these businesses, I’m sure you have a few questions about what exactly you’re being offered. Before we discuss what a local business listing is, let’s start with why you might want to check and maintain your business’s local listings. Here are some compelling consumer behavior statistics to consider:

  • 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles. (Wordstream, 2016)
  • 30% of mobile searches are related to a location. (Google, 2016)
  • 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (Google, 2016)
  • Local searches lead 50% of mobile users to visit stores within one day. (Google, 2018)
  • Nearly one-third of all mobile searches are location-based queries. (The SEM Post, 2016)

Essentially, it’s very important to manage your local listings, especially if you’re a local business that relies on local awareness of what you do. Think of how often you’ve searched for things like “chinese restaurants near me” or “gas station near me.” When people want to find goods or services locally, they use a search engine every time. With good SEO practices, you can grab the top spot for a local search query and increase your organic traffic by leaps and bounds.

Local Business listing

Local Listing Management is about getting found more often by people searching for your services locally!

Often times businesses register and claim their local listing with Google, along with a Google My Business page. This is a great first step! Google My Business allows business owners to choose what appears on the Knowledge Panel for their business. The Knowledge Panel is the box full of information about a business that appears on the right-hand side of your screen on the Google search results page.

Knowledge Panels are more likely to appear for searches with local intent, which is why it’s important — especially for small businesses — to stay on top of their Google My Business profile.

In addition to the business owner, Google also receives data from many other sources. In a recent “Whiteboard Friday” video, David Mihm, Director of Local Search Strategy for SEOMoz explains how Google generates its business listings. David’s whiteboard video is one of the most concise explanations of the online directory entry creation. It’s worth watching!

There are hundreds of business directories online that all come with the opportunity for through traffic and lead generation. It is important to keep your “N.A.P.” — business name, address and phone number — consistent across all directories. This is very important and affects your search rankings, especially locally. Also important to keep consistent is the inclusion of your website’s URL. You want to link to at least your homepage on each of your local listings so you don’t miss any opportunities for referral traffic. Google My Business also gives the option of making posts from your profile, just like on social media. These can be used for promotions, events, or just general bits of information that your business would like to present to those users who find it through Google.

The process of keeping all of this information up to date can be very tedious. Keep in mind in addition to your NAP, directories often want images, videos, business descriptions, customer reviews, website links, category your business fits in, accurate hours, etc. Often — for a business owner or marketing executive — keeping up with all these directory listings is simply time prohibitive. This is why business will often employ a marketing agency for their local SEO services.

If you would like to learn more about Local Listing Management services offered by DaBrian Marketing Group contact us today!

4 Fixes For Your (Painfully) Outdated Website

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Websites have advanced a lot in just a few short  years. In the ’90s, businesses simply aimed to set up online presences, resulting in an Internet full of electronic brochures. Since then, marketers have improved both the functionality and aesthetics of their websites. As a result, they’ve delivered a better experience to customers – and better outcomes for business owners.

The corollary for marketers is that with advances come heightened consumer expectations. Potential buyers increasingly need more from websites than basic transactions and facts about their favorite brands. They want to shop, learn, and play on their own terms, in a fun, user-friendly, and convenient format. Oh, and one more thing: they want all of that from their mobile devices, and they want it right now.

What Does This Mean For You?

It means that if your business hasn’t retooled its website in a while, you’re probably sending the wrong message to potential customers. And by sending the wrong message, we mean you’re losing customers to a competitor. Someone who is more fun, more user-friendly, more convenient, more mobile-responsive, and more “right now”.  Luckily for you, we’re willing to take the time to outline a few ideas to fix your painfully outdated website:

1. Clean Up Your Site

Fast Fact: “94% of negative feedback for websites is design related”

If you’re like most of our new clients, you can probably find everything you need on your own website. And if you’re like most of our new clients, your potential customers probably can’t find a thing. That’s because when you build up a website over time, you begin to lose the intended structure. Your page organization fails to highlight newly released product lines . Links lead to 404 errors. Posts get housed under random categories. For the business owner, it’s just part of a growing business. For maximizing your website traffic, it’s a mess.

The problem is that your site might make sense to you and your team (after all, you made the mess) but your audience is probably lost. So have a fresh set of eyes look over your website. Within 5 seconds of landing, can she tell exactly what your company does? Can she find the blog? Subscribe to the blog? Give her a product description to “purchase” – how long does it take her to find, view, and watch a product video? How many broken links and outdated bits of information did she encounter in her journey? If just imagining this scenario is painful, consider a (free) website audit to discover simple ways to clean up your site.  

2. Speed Up Page Load times

Fast Fact: “A 1 second delay correlates to a 7% reduction in conversions”

Customers no longer tolerate websites with slow load times. You can test the load times of pages and identify the bottlenecks with a number of online tools. You need these tools because your website is a lot slower than you think it is. You’re probably reading this blog on a desktop computer at work (i.e. you’ve got a fast, stable Internet connection). But how would it render on a spotty 3G connection? That’s where you might be losing the people who have better things to do than wait for your site to load.

Resist adding bandwidth-hogging (and annoying) features like videos or music that auto-load. Pick and choose design elements that highlight product features and engage readers – without slowing down your site. That amazing copy you wrote can only sell your product or service if the page renders. And if you have a hero video, 13 images and myriad design elements on the home page, readers never get that far. The best thing you can do is keep your landing page(s) simple. If a reader finds that landing pages take too long to load, that reader is probably going to hit the back button and shop with a competitor, instead.

3. Make It Mobile Friendly

Fast Fact: “57% of all US online traffic comes from smartphones”

How does your site look on a smartphone screen? Here’s one better: how does your site look on an iPhone X compared to an iPhone 6? If you don’t know the answer to those questions, you’re taking a big risk with your website. Customers increasingly rely on mobile devices for browsing. Many of our clients now get over 60% of their traffic from mobile channels. That means that whether browsing, shopping, or scheduling, your customers are probably doing it from their phones.

A mobile-friendly website is crucial to convert these users. Either have your site professionally redesigned for mobile or use one of the many responsive templates out there for WordPress, SquareSpace, or Weebly. Our design and marketing teams can review your bounce rates in Google Analytics (because you DO have Google Analytics code on your site, right?) to tell you what pages to focus on. Next, consider your contact us, make an appointment, and other lead generation forms. We haven’t even seen them yet but I bet they are too long, too free-form, and too hard to complete on a small screen.

Your best bet is to work with a digital agency that adheres to a mobile-first philosophy. The old practice of designing a website for desktop and then tweaking it for the mobile experience, later,  is no longer good enough. Ask your current design team for their thoughts on accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) for your site. (If their answer at any point includes a blank stare, contact webdesign@dabrianmarketing.com).

Accelerated mobile pages are part of an open source initiative that allows developers to create web pages that load quickly on mobile browsers. If your website has a lot of different stories, products, and articles combined with high (or volatile) website traffic, AMP functionality could greatly improve your performance on mobile devices. 

4. Refresh Your CMS

Fast Fact: “82% of customers have a more positive view of a company after reading custom content”

If you’re still relying on your website designer to update content on your site, you’re already behind the competition. Your marketing team should be able to add information to your site through an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), like WordPress. You should have multiple portions of your site updated regularly with current news, upcoming events, and recent blog posts to ensure that new traffic becomes repeat traffic.

Get more value from your CMS by implementing a process to review and update leading plug-ins. Plugs-ins are bits of software that can be uploaded to expand the functionality of your site. If you can imagine a way to extend and enhance your site, someone else probably has, too. And there is probably a plug-in to accomplish it.

Finally, grant multiple people the ability to post custom content. You can assign some to create content and others to review and approve it before it goes live. You can also outsource work to contractors, giving them limited rights to partitioned areas of your site. It takes a little bit of time and effort to get the most from your CMS, but in the end, the timeliness of content and ease of updates ensure a better experience for prospects, customers, and marketers alike. 

Wrapping It Up

The user experience needs to be the forefront of your thought process when updating your website. It needs to be a friendly, smooth-sailing, information-packed adventure that leads prospects toward a conversion. Having an updated site can make all the difference between “I don’t have time for this” and “I’m ready to checkout”.

Once you’ve refreshed your site, set a few dates to review it each year. Keep an eye on other websites and note the things they’re doing that you’d like to see on your own site. Pay attention to the way other companies interact with their customers through their websites, and emulate the best practices that might work for your business. Sooner or later, the competition may even start to emulate you.

Using the information provided here will give you insight and a starting point to fix your outdated website. But if you need a more comprehensive plan to update your business’s website, reach out to our team to discuss our free site audit process.

In the meantime, we love a good laugh, so feel free to share your frustrations with outdated websites. Tell us about it in the comments below!

A Beginner’s Guide to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

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“The secret to all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.”

 -Marcus Aurelius

You don’t need to be a Roman emperor to realize that success depends on mastering the details that others miss. However, many businesses still try to drive their key sales and marketing campaigns without capturing and integrating the necessary information. The main reason they fall short is that they are not able to collect, track, and organize customer data in a useful way.

This is where an appropriate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution can help. We’re here to explain what a CRM solution is, why you should use one, and highlight the pros and cons of three of the most popular CRMs in the marketplace today.

What is a CRM tool?

A CRM is a tool developed to help you manage all of your company’s interactions with current and potential customers. The primary purpose of a CRM is to better understand your customers and improve your relationship with them. CRM systems collect and organize customer data in a neat and timely manner so that you can go back to it and use the information when needed.

But what kind of data and information does it track? That’s entirely up to your unique sales and marketing goals. At a general level, it can track phone calls, messages, and mailings. Some of the more specific uses can including delivering what data is usable versus what is detrimental. Still not convinced about CRMs? Well, we will explain some reasons why it would be ideal to have one in your growing business.

Why should I use CRM?

1. Optimizing Efficiency
CRMs can keep track of multiple forms of data and customer information. In most cases, this can lead to the development of more accurate reporting and more efficient strategies. With the recorded data, analysts can study actions taken and recognize what works better to drive desired results. Did mailing current or potential customers create higher revenues? Which campaigns were the most effective? Which channel generated the highest ROI? Knowing the answer to these questions helps sales managers reallocate time and marketing managers reallocate budget.

2. Improving Relationships with Customers
This was a given: CRMs were originally designed to improve the relationships between employees and customers. All CRM software has features which automate processes entering every bit of data on a lead that would be tedious work if done manually. Sales representatives especially benefit from these features since they can maintain more constant contact with their client lists and devote more time to the hottest prospects. Similarly, sales reps give their low maintenance clients a little TLC – with minimal time investment – by showing that they have not thrown them on the back burner while pursuing other opportunities.

3. Tracks Performance of Agents
Sales managers benefit the most from CRMs mostly because of their ability to track the progress and activity done by agents. We all have targets to meet, be it earnings, total sales, the number of calls made, or office visits. CRMs help managers keep track of the activity and performance data for their direct reports and manage it accordingly.

Business owners can benefit from CRM tracking capabilities as well. Owners can view and understand how their agents are performing which can lead to the development of intelligent strategies. CRMs make employee schedules visible and help compare those who have been closing the highest or lowest number of deals for the company.

What is the best CRM software?

There are plenty of CRMs available across the internet, and it is essential to know which are user-friendly, simple, and effective. We chose three of the most commonly used CRM platforms and listed their Pros and Cons, below.

1. Pipedrive

Pros

  • Mobile app
  • Multiple pipeline creation
  • User-Friendly
  • Helpful guidance

Cons

  • No lists of new leads and contacts
  • Manually adding activity and updating information
  • Paid subscriptions

2. Hubspot

Pros

  • Free
  • Live Chat
  • Better Insights into customer interaction
  • Can be used with other CRMs

Cons

  • Lack of Flexibility
  • Lightweight and cant handle large sales team

3. SalesForce

Pros

  •       Customizable dashboard
  •       Easy to navigate
  •       Social capabilities

Cons

  •       Pricing
  •       Uncontrolled administration
  •       Problematic technical support

What's Next?

It’s very beneficial for any company to integrate CRMs into their sales and marketing data as it helps you turn that data into actionable insights. Giving you the assurance of having an organized and trackable system that will let you take your sales and marketing initiatives in an informed direction. With a quality CRM, you will see your sales team reach new heights.

If you have further questions about CRMs or want to know more details, then contact us or leave a comment below! Further info can be obtained directly from the platform websites:

https://pipelinecrm.com/

https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm

https://www.salesforce.com/crm/crm-for-small-business/

What To Know Before Setting Up WooCommerce

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In my last blog post, I went over how to use the popular ecommerce platform Shopify. Today, we’ll focus on another popular ecommerce tool used by millions of online stores: WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin used to power a large portion of the ecommerce industry. It can be easily applied to any WordPress website.

Why Should I Use WooCommerce?

One thing that sets WooCommerce apart from platforms like Shopify is that it’s completely open source. This means that you have as much control over the site as you please. In this case, with great freedom comes great opportunity — you can design your site any way you think would best appeal to your customers. Apart from web design, you also have control over most of the ecommerce process, from the kind of products you sell to shipping, and then to payment and checkout. This allows for a good amount of optimization on your part.

How To Create a WooCommerce Store

In order to take your first step on your ecommerce journey, you have to download and install the WooCommerce plugin. You should be able to do this from your WordPress dashboard. Then, run the WooCommerce Setup Wizard, which will help you build the basic framework of your site.

From this point forward, it’s up to you to manage your site’s settings. You have power over things from your default currency to the logistics of your checkout page. You can also choose from WooCommerce’s huge selection of themes for your site in order to build an attractive store for your future customers.

WooCommerce’s Product Options

With some ecommerce platforms, you’re only able to sell physical goods. This isn’t the case with WooCommerce. With this plugin, you can sell anything you put your mind to. Things like downloads, access codes and services can all be distributed through WooCommerce, on top of good old physical products. This is another example of what makes this plugin so open-ended. No matter what your specialty is, WooCommerce will help you take it online!

Once you choose what to sell, you must then make sure that the product pages are as helpful and informative as possible. The more product information you give customers, the more likely they’ll be sure whether or not they want to make a purchase. More information also makes your store look more credible.

Adding Additional Content

Like any other website, it’s always a good idea to provide your users with rich content when it comes to ecommerce. Things like product reviews, case studies, blog posts and more all help to enhance the user experience for your online store. After all, 82% of consumers have a more positive view of a brand after reading its custom content. From an SEO perspective, it will also increase your search engine visibility, therefore bringing in more potential customers.

Best WooCommerce Plugins To Start With

For those of you who have less experience with web design, WooCommerce’s freedom may be frightening. Never fear! There are plenty of plugins available that make setup manageable for anybody regardless of experience.

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
This plugin helps the user find exactly what they are looking for with a handy search bar at the top of the page. Reducing the time it takes for the customer to find what they want leads to more sales!

WooCommerce Checkout Manager
Checkout Manager allows you to play around with the layout of your Checkout page. Having a Checkout page that is as easy as possible to maneuver will reflect well on your conversion numbers.

Stripe Payment Gateway
Stripe is another way to streamline your checkout page. It does so by allowing users to pay on your site instead of being redirected to a different one, e.g PayPal. You’d be surprised how finicky users can be, and keeping them on your site throughout the payment process will make it more likely that they stay focused on making a purchase.

Dynamic Pricing and Discounts by ELEX
This plugin will allow you more creativity with the pricing of your items. Discounts based on many different factors are enabled by this plugin, which will help you increase your sales. You’re also able to implement Buy One, Get One Free deals.

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
Many of the ecommerce stores you have visited probably had some sort of wishlist feature. This is a great thing to implement in your own store. It gives people who don’t want to make purchases immediately a reason to come back once they’ve made up their mind. With the YITH WooCommerce Wishlist plugin, they can also share this list with family and friends for holidays or birthdays.

WooCommerce Currency Switcher
If you plan on selling your products globally, the WooCommerce Currency Switcher is a must-have plugin for your site. It allows your international customers to easily switch between currencies. It even calculates the conversion rate so they know exactly what they’re spending.

WooMarketing Bundle
In ecommerce, marketing is one of the most important areas you have to consider if you want to make sales. The Woomarketing Bundle is a plugin developed by the WooCommerce team that gives you control over things like email marketing and remarketing.

Conclusion

In closing, WooCommerce is a great way to sell your products and services online no matter who you are. It grants you the freedom to go in whichever direction you want with your online store and can be finely tuned to get the best conversion rates possible. With a quality product and a quality site, you’ll be making money in no time!

If you have further questions about WooCommerce or need help developing your ecommerce store, contact us or leave a comment below!

4 Steps To Find Your Brand Voice

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Congratulations! You’ve just launched a new service and are eager to create a strong online presence. Or perhaps you’ve just been given the green light for your business’s first website redesign since Al Gore invented the internet. Either way, you’re ready to start the process of crafting a winning digital brand strategy. However, before you start shouting your message to anyone and everyone, there are some important things you need to consider.

The Importance of Brand Voice

First, you need to establish your brand’s voice, or how you plan to consistently express your brand through words. While images, videos, and podcasts have grown in importance, text-based communication remains critical to online marketing. Relatable language lends credibility to your message and can contain the keywords that your customers are searching for.

While you can certainly improvise and have some success, by not having a defined brand voice you risk confusing your audience with different messages. And since 83 percent of customer loyalty is driven by trust, mixing your messages makes turning first-time customers into returning customers that much harder.

Instead, consider how you’re going to communicate your value before you start a conversation with the audience. The process can be broken down into four easy steps:

1. Define Your Major Brand Traits

Think of a few words or phrases that describe your business, your product, or your culture. Are you professional or fun? A thought leader or a product innovator? Whatever words or phrases you choose, these brand traits will form the foundation of your company’s marketing efforts and the cornerstone of your brand voice.

The characteristics should reflect the value you aim to provide. Do your B2B customers want to hear that you’re adventurous? Maybe not. But if you sell gaming products, that trait might resonate with a large segment of your target audience.

2. Convey Why You’re Different

Odds are, the traits you’ve chosen to reflect your company aren’t exactly unique. We get it: here at DaBrian, we’re also quirky and authentic. Remember, you’re trying to reach the same buyers as competitors in your industry. This means there’s a good chance that you’re all defining yourselves in similar ways. However, if you can move past the “what” and the “how” to convey the “why” to your listeners, you can quickly set yourself apart from the crowd.

The WHY is about what a company believes in, not about what you make or how you make a profit. So extend each of your key defining traits so that they begin to tell a story. If one of your traits is “irreverent”, have a plan to explain why you’re irreverent. People want to hear your David vs. Goliath origin story, not the latest software features you offer. Influential companies link their purpose with their brand voice to convey why they are different.

3. Give Your Voice a Break and Listen Up

This is a key step that many companies skip in their rush to spread their messages. Don’t forget that the audience you’re trying to reach probably has its own way of communicating. Take a break from developing your own brand voice and tune in to what your peers, competitors, leads, and customers are saying.

Every industry has jargon that you need to be careful to include – or avoid – in your own messaging. Brands that fail to embrace the language of their target audiences come off as outsiders who don’t care about the people they want to work with. Companies that listen develop stronger brand voices, and come across as consultants instead of the latest in a long line of product pushers.

4. Put Brand Voice into Action

Once you’ve agreed on a few unique traits for your brand voice and confirmed that they align with your audience and industry, it’s time to put your plan into action. Extend your voice characteristics to include a few practical “do’s” and “don’ts” for your marketing team. If your brand voice includes “passion”, you might give the direction to include strong action verbs and to take a stand, even on controversial issues. You might also tell your marketers to avoid passive voice and lukewarm endorsements.

Lastly, make sure your team is on-board. Your brand voice needs to be clearly articulated to everyone in your organization as part of your overall brand guidelines. Go through examples of content that hit the mark. And show content that misses the mark, and make suggestions to fix it. Doing so will provide clarity for your content team and ensure that your brand voice is consistent across your marketing channels.

Conclusion

Developing your brand voice is crucial to conveying your brand’s personality and authenticity to potential customers. With just a few unique traits that resonate with your target audience, you’ll be on your way to digital content that builds brand awareness and customer loyalty.

For more information about brand elements to consider when designing digital content, contact us or leave us a comment below!

What to Look for in Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

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In the age of digital marketing, it’s hard to know where to begin or even the different avenues you can take to market your business online. In most cases, digital marketing requires businesses to hire specialists in all areas of digital marketing including PPC, SEO, Social Media, Graphic Design, and Programming, just to name a few. This process can not only be time-consuming for you but costly. By selecting the right digital marketing agency, you can not only cut down on in-house costs of hiring and maintaining staff, but you will be working with experts who stay up to date on the latest developments in the digital world.

So you’re ready to start looking into agencies, but not quite sure what to look for. Here are a couple tips in order to help you select the right one for your business.

Selecting the Right Digital Marketing Agency for You:

You might think that hiring the right agency will strictly depend on performance-based work and the culture of the company doesn’t matter, right? Wrong! Before selecting the right agency, it is important to meet with them and get a feel for their company’s culture. Make sure that it aligns with yours. Ask to meet or speak with the team members that will be working on your account to get a sense of their background and that their vision aligns with what you want. They must take your company’s culture, values and mission seriously.

Figure Out What Kind of Client You Are

A good digital marketing agency will understand each client is different and has different approaches to their marketing and goals. An agency will tailor a marketing campaign that is catered towards your business but first, figure out what kind of client you are and want to be.

“Do It All” Client– Once you have chosen the right agency, your motto is, “Just get it done”. You want all the work done by your agency with little input.

“Do It My Way” Client– These clients have a definite vision of what they want and are hiring an agency to deliver those visions. They are less interested in feedback or collaborating.

Collaborators– These clients want an agency that will sit down with them and strategize the best approach to reach their marketing goals and conversions. The agency and your business will go back and forth to collaborate the best strategy for your business.

Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

Do Your Homework!

If you have never worked with a digital marketing agency, you will want to make sure you do your homework and learn a few things about them. There are many digital marketing agencies out there that will promise their clients the world, and deliver lackluster results. While most businesses are not like this, there are some things to be cautious of when researching a potential agency. To make sure you are hiring the most reliable agency, there are a couple things you can do:

  • Be cautious of hiring overseas agencies
  • Hiring the cheapest agency isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes the cheapest equates to low-quality services
  • Look up agencies on the Better Business Bureau
  • Reach out to clients in a potential agency’s portfolio and ask questions about their service
  • Check their credibility: Do they work with similar industries as yours? Do they have an eye-catching website?
  • Request case studies: Ask to see specific examples of how they have helped their current or past clients achieve success. What did they do to help their clients reach their goals? What steps did they take? What were the results?

Make a List of What You Want

Every client wants something different out of their marketing agency. make a list of must-haves when hiring an agency and follow some of these guidelines when doing your research. There are many different tools a company needs to be successful, but online marketing is definitely the most effective.

To learn more about what DaBrian Marketing can do for your business, schedule an appointment today with our marketing consultant!