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Increase Your Business’ Brand Awareness With SEO

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You have a great business that does fantastic work and offers quality products or services. So, why don’t more people know about you? Why isn’t your phone ringing off the hook and your email full? You have a website, that’s enough, right (it’s not)?

In order to increase your business’ brand awareness online, you need to be investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). According to a study by MarketingDive, 82% of participating marketers see SEO becoming more effective and 42% of this group stated its effectiveness is increasing significantly. This means that other businesses will be devoting more efforts towards SEO, which only stiffens the competition.

Build your business’ brand awareness and outperform your competitors online by utilizing the SEO tactics listed below.

1. Get In Front Of Your Audience With the Right Content

Unless you’re a large national brand, like Walmart® (if so, why are you reading this?), most people aren’t searching directly for your brand. Rather, they are typing in product/service related keywords.

To ensure your business pops up front and center amongst your competitors, you need to optimize your content to include the keywords and verbiage that your target audience and industry uses.

In addition to including the most relevant, trending, and traffic driving keywords, you also need to be cognizant of the forms of content you’re producing. Is your audience more susceptible to read blogs, articles, and white papers? Or, are they a younger, more visual audience who prefer videos and infographics?

By creating the appropriate content in the form most suited for your audience, users will be more likely to find and share your content. Thus, increasing the digital exposure your business receives.

2. Dominate the Local Market With Local SEO

For over a decade, Google and other major search engines have been placing a heavy emphasis on the importance of locality. Like your business, search engines also have a product and service, and their goal is to provide the most relevant and useful information to their users. While there are hundreds of factors that influence their results, the location has a massive impact, especially in regards to business-related searches.

To enhance your business’ local performance, there are a few tactics you’ll need to pursue:

Optimizing Your Site Locally

  • Have your name, address, & phone number (NAP) consistent throughout the site.
  • Embed Google Maps on your contact page.
  • Develop localized content.
  • Link to local partnerships, memberships, and affiliations.

Being Listed, Active, and Optimized on Popular Local Platforms

Many of these platforms (like Google, Facebook, and Yelp) have a review functionality. Meaning, customers can leave reviews about your business directly on their platform for the public to see. By owning these accounts, you are able to clearly see what people are saying. This allows you to get in front of any potential negative situations that may occur.

By being on top of things, you have the opportunity to improve your business based upon feedback, and resolve the situation. Showing that you’re listening to your consumers and taking action will actually help improve your brand’s online public perception.

According to a study by Moz, online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions. Being uninformed of your online reputation can potentially spell disaster for your business.

3. Build Links Through Local Influencers

Link building, or link earning, is the process of obtaining backlinks from other websites that lead back to your website. While many owners may not see the value or understand fully the impact link building has, it is a hugely important component of a local seo strategy.

To improve your business’ brand awareness in your local market, you should target the following sites in terms of link acquisition:

  • Local Business Directories
  • Local Chambers
  • Local Businesses
  • Local News Stations
  • Local Bloggers/Social Influencers

Being listed on these sites will send local signals to search engines and place your website in front of your local audience.

Build Your Brand Organically

Increasing your brand awareness through SEO can take some time, but it’s well worth it. By following all of the steps and tactics mentioned above, you’ll set the foundation for your business to flourish digitally within your target market.

Ready to improve your brand awareness online through SEO? Schedule a FREE consultation today!

By: David McDowell

5 Tips to Measuring B2B Marketing Initiatives

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The business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing roles are continuously evolving because of social selling, marketing automation, mobile devices, and more. According to Biznology, today’s sales process takes about 22% longer than 5 years ago. So, how does your business measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns?  Below is a brief list of tips to successfully measure your B2B marketing initiatives:

Know Your Sales Pipeline Calculations

We get calls all the time from businesses that want to increase their sales and revenue.  Unfortunately, not all businesses take the time to access their sales pipeline and calculate what it will take to achieve their goals and objectives.

  • How many prospects do you need to call to book a meeting?
  • How many meetings turn into a quote?
  • What’s your quote-to-close ratio?

Knowing this information will give you a sense of your potential budget needed to create the incremental volume necessary while also determining whether or not your goals are realistic. You will also have visibility into phases in the sales pipeline that are under performing.

Capture Progress of the Sales Pipeline

It’s no secret that sales reps hate manually entering data. In fact, 23% of salespeople cite manual data entry as the biggest challenge using their existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (HubSpot, 2017). Capturing the progress of the sales pipeline in your CRM allows you to measure the impact of each sale or prospective customer’s actions. This will improve the sales forecast or closing ratio. The incentive for your business and the sales reps is to help focus on which actions will generate high revenue and sales. Use marketing automation to work on your sales reps behalf.

Access the Impact Marketing is Having on the Sales Funnel

So, you just want more sales but do you respect the sales funnel? The sales funnel is the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products or services.  The goal of your marketing is to have prospects enter the sales process to solve your customer’s problem. Access the impact your marketing is having on moving prospects through the funnel. Your business won’t increase its sales until more prospects move through your sales process.  

Create a Measurement Plan for B2B Sales & Marketing Campaigns

A measurement plan is a document that translates your business objectives into metrics that can measure your website’s offline sales. It provides a framework to customize the configuration of your digital analytics and sales funnel. It is a vital part of your digital marketing strategy and will guide you to set realistic expectations. If you can’t get to raw numbers to calculate the metrics, can you really measure it?

Report Only on B2B KPIs That Matter

There are so  many reports, dashboards, and analyses , but whichget to the point of your marketing and sales campaigns? Narrow down the metrics to your key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you’re not looking at every metric associated with your business to business (B2B) marketing and sales initiatives – only the ones that matter.

Check out Pipedrive (CRM) to improve your sales & marketing campaign tracking. Already measuring sales and marketing?  Let us know your thoughts and add to the list of tips.

Grow Social to Build Your Brand

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Social media has exploded exponentially the past few years. It started off as a way to share a conversation with a colleague (Facebook), share music with a friend (MySpace), or write all of your personal thoughts in a public diary (Every platform?). But, it has grown into a marketing tactic to allow businesses to get their products or services seen and in the right hands. With how simple it is to click “Buy”, it’s now crucial for businesses to maintain active social media accounts. If you haven’t come to this realization, you’re falling behind.

Creating an account and “posting” just isn’t enough. How do you create worthy content for your customers? How do you portray that your brand is the best to new customers? How do people even find what you’re posting!? With the right advice, this can all happen in no-time.

First Things First: Build Your Organic Reach

With Facebook’s new algorithm, it has become harder to build your organic reach, but doing so will only expedite your social success. Share a mix of intriguing content letting users discover not only helpful tips or information about your industry but allow them to get to know your business and your employees. Customers want to get to know YOU, your employees, and your personality. Any business with a strong company culture can soar on social media, no matter which industry you’re in. If your not an old, bland company, prove it.

Wendy’s strong social media presence gets everyone talking, even their competition.

— If people like your content, this can also help your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, too! Social posts can be found in search results. —

Make It Known You’re There to Help

When someone messages your company on social media, do you reply? Do you wait days to respond? Do you have an automated message setup and think that’ll suffice? Customers want to speak with one individual, real human being NOW. A bot or automated response may be a time saver and at times, helpful, but it won’t do anything for the customer and in turn, your business. Most feel more comfortable writing to a business rather than calling about a question. Make it known that no matter how they reach out, you care enough to respond. So start getting those responsiveness rates up on Facebook!

Spend Money Where It’s Worth It

While growing your accounts organically is important, there’s nothing wrong with putting money behind the posts that are worth it! In fact, it’s important! There are several opportunities across all platforms that, depending on the scenario and the goal, you should put a few dollars behind. Facebook advertising can benefit almost every business. For this reason, Facebook offers many opportunities to do so such as Boosted Posts and Facebook Advertising. There even is a special, additional way for local businesses to expand their reach. Before you start spending money, think about what you’re trying to accomplish, what will resonate with your audience, and how much should your company spend on this ad? You’ll be surprised how little that cost could be.

Build a Brand Worth Talking About

Building your online presence is an ongoing process and takes a lot of time. While these tips will get you started, there’s much more you can do! If you still don’t see that you need to combine social media with all your other marketing efforts, let’s have a chat – especially if you’re a local business.

Avoid These Productivity Killers

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Working at a desk

We all have the same hours in a day but are we all making the most of the time we have? Benjamin Franklin said, “Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of.” We may not be able to change our workload but if we can get work done quicker and avoid needlessly wasting precious hours of our day, it’s a win! Let’s discuss a few changes we can make.

Be Proactive to Eliminate Distractions

We get info faster than ever before, but this can be overwhelming these days with the notifications, updates and reminders flooding our devices. Rather than constantly checking, turn on your “do not disturb” settings and designate time to check your updates at once. There’s also some great apps and plugins that deter the urge to check all the time.

Distractions can come from all angles especially if your work area isn’t private. Offices with open floor plans can be great for collaborating, but if others are interrupting your workflow by chatting by your desk, it can be hard to carry a thought. Let coworkers know your schedule and the best times of day to chat or ask them to set up a time to talk. If the office is just too noisy, headphones can be a great quick fix or find a quiet space like booking the conference room just to work. The change in surroundings might be a nice change of pace as well.

Sometimes, distractions can come from within when our brains won’t be quiet. It’s hard to be productive while thinking of a list of things I have to do and trying to remember them. I like to keep a notepad close by and jot down what I’m thinking about to get it off my mind and plan for it later.

Fatigue

Have you ever thought about how your overall health can affect your work performance? Many of us take pride in doing the best we can, neglecting our health at times, in order to get a job done well. However, cutting corners on health can catch up to us and not much is going to get done if you need a sick day or two. Getting sick is inevitable but do your best to eliminate the frequency by investing a little more time in yourself throughout the day.

Getting a good night’s rest can have a huge impact on our productivity. Research shows that lack of sleep can have an impact on a lot of the abilities we need to be productive like memory, thinking, and the speed in which we get things done. Rather than burn the midnight oil, feel good about going to bed early and if you’re thinking about the next day already, write it all down and rest easy.

If you think you can run full steam all day without taking any breaks, you are being unrealistic. Rather than planning on getting work done in large chunks at a time, space out your day a little with 5 minute breaks to let yourself reset and get back to work with a fresh energy and motivation. Don’t just use breaks to stare at your phone, get up, move around, and breath. Studies showed that taking a 30 min walk during lunch breaks at least three times a week improved enthusiasm, relaxation, and nervousness at work and resulted in less sick days.

These changes might not be easy to make all at once so start small and incorporate a few changes at a time. Stay mindful of what is cutting into your productivity, be proactive about improving yourself and turn it into a habit that you’ll be more likely to keep.

Resources

https://positiveroutines.com/increasing-productivity-with-sleep/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3290659/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25559067

DaBrian Marketing Partners with Pipedrive to Deliver Integrated Sales and Marketing Solution

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DaBrian Marketing Group added Pipedrive to its suite of client solutions. The strategic move will help area businesses improve their lead nurturing processes and accelerate sales cycles by fully integrating their marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. DaBrian will provide configuration, integrations, support and consulting to better align sales & marketing efforts for clients and allow them to extract the most value from Pipedrive.

Automatically Update Contacts

DaBrian Marketing Group’s marketing automation solution fully integrates with Pipedrive, allowing businesses to instantly sync contact information across both platforms. Any customers or leads added to or updated by sales and support teams are instantly connected with marketing efforts, and vice versa – eliminating the need for manual import/export. The automation removes human error from the data entry process and saves time. After an initial set-up by DaBrian Marketing Group, Pipedrive’s continuous integration does all the work to keep marketing, sales and support information aligned. This ensures consistency in data between systems and enhances database segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and many other contact handling functions.

Push Marketing Insights to Sales Team

Businesses can now use Pipedrive to connect leads directly to the campaigns that generated them, allowing managers to focus their teams’ sales efforts and providing context to those sales conversations. DaBrian’s marketing automation platform will identify the most effective marketing channels and the most active prospects, directing the sales team where to increase efforts. Integrating marketing information with Pipedrive also allows members of the sales team to more effectively target prospects and personalize their messages. Better understanding the sources, preferred channels and interactions of prospects with marketing efforts arms sales forces with the insights they need to close more deals.

Simple CRM that Drives Profits

Pipedrive was developed by salespeople, for salespeople. In addition to integrating information between marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management systems, Pipedrive helps simplify and organize the sales process. Users can be up and running in less than 3 minutes and it’s easy to add or remove team members. Salespeople are notified about key prospect activities to ensure timely follow-up. And the solution comes with native mobile applications to increase convenience and productivity. An attractive user interface and graphic pipeline representations further increase usability and effectiveness. The CRM starts at $10 per user, per month for subscription.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides original strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses. DaBrian Marketing Group’s digital marketing services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web hosting, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

About Pipedrive

Founded in 2010 by seasoned sales pros, Pipedrive is a sales CRM solution designed to help salespeople rather than control them. It is built on a proven selling framework that gives visibility into the pipeline and drives actions that push deals to close consistently. Pipedrive is serving more than 60,000 customers worldwide with corporate offices in New York and Estonia. Pipedrive ranks no. 14 on the Inc. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing private software companies. For more information, go to www.pipedrive.com.

How To Keep Your Gmail Organized

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Looking for every opportunity to automate our workflow is a big help, even the smallest changes can have a major effect. One way is by taming our inboxes! I use Gmail specifically, and I love it. But no matter what you use for emails, they tend to run a mock. Between keeping up with new emails and finding older ones when you need to reference them, it can be a headache when you are trying to accomplish much larger tasks efficiently.

Cleaning House

The idea of cleaning out your inbox and archived emails probably falls at the end of your to-do list and understandably so. However, you do not want to have to do it out of necessity when your storage space is completely filled up.

Then, you have to decide between paying for extra storage or cleaning out your storage at the most inconvenient times. Instead of deleting emails one by one, utilize the filters in the search bar. Type in the email address or date range to filter out dated emails and delete it! Once you’ve whittled down your old emails (and freed up some storage space), you can focus on keeping new emails organized as they come in.

Gmail creates several labels and categories by default but you can add/edit more by going to your setting, then “labels”. By building in a few extra labels such as “Accounting”, “HR”, “Travel”, etc, I can more easily navigate to an email I’m looking for in the future.

Gmail Extensions

There are some pretty great extensions out there. One add-on I really like is called Mail Merge for Gmail. I find it very useful because it allows us to send personalized emails to a larger group of people without much work on my part – can even merge attachments if needed. This add-on- starts in Google Sheets were you can input the info you want in a template. From there, you can open your Gmail and compose the email with the special fields. You can set the emails to send at scheduled times or right away It will all come from your personal Gmail account. I have found this useful for things such as emailing job candidates or sending updates to clients.

Stop composing emails that are sent into the abyss. With the help of Boomerang for Gmail, you can set a reminder for when the recipient hasn’t responded to you within a certain amount of time. This way, you don’t have to keep notes on when to follow up. Boomerang’s Respondable also gives a helping hand in writing your email to increase your chances of getting a response in real-time as you write your email. Boomerang also has a few other neat tricks: being able to schedule your email to send at a scheduled time or even tracking whether the recipient opened your email.

Gmail Labs

Don’t forget to check out Gmail Labs for some added help (in your settings > under the “Labs” tab). You can enable/disable different experimental settings. One small, but effective setting is the Preview Pane. This will assist you in reading emails quicker without having to actually go in and out of each one.

By keeping your email organized and up to date, your overall workday can go a lot smoother. Google also provides some helpful tips and tricks to get your Gmail setup the way you like.

What are your favorite email tricks to staying organized? Share them with us in the comments or on our social channels!