Category Archives: Digital Marketing

6 Ways to Optimise Your Youtube Practices

Billions of people watch videos on YouTube everyday. This makes the platform the second largest search engine after Google. Videos have risen as an important part of online marketing. While many companies have come to realize the power behind videos, they don’t necessarily know how to optimize their YouTube practices or content. How can you make sure that you and your brand capture this traffic? Taking just a few extra steps to optimize your videos will give you an online advantage, making your content easier to find and to share.

1. Name Your Video with a Target Keyword

The title of your YouTube video is important as it serves as a meta tag, which tells the search engines what the web page and your video is about. Just as it is important to optimize your written content for your website, it is important to identify keywords that help to identify your video. For this reason, it is important to use keywords in your video title. When people browse or search videos on YouTube, one of the first things that they notice is the video title. The title is what determines whether or not the viewer will actually click to watch your video. As long as your keyword fits naturally in your video title, it will serve you well to optimize your title.

2. Write Your Description with SEO in Mind

The description boxes on YouTube videos can also be helpful for search engines and viewers. Description boxes can be up to 1,000 characters, however, many viewers do not read past what YouTube automatically displays for description boxes, which would be only the first two or three lines of text. Despite this, it is still beneficial to optimize your description box with keywords and phrases. An optimized description allows your video to show up in the suggested videos sidebar on the website, which helps to expose your video to more users.

3. Tag Your Video with Related Keywords

Using tags on your video allows both YouTube and your viewers to know what the content and context of your video is. By using relevant tags, YouTube can place your video in the suggested videos sidebar as a similar video, in turn, broadening the reach of your video. Tags should be a mix of the most important keywords and more general keywords. However, it is important to avoid using irrelevant tags as Google may penalize users who do.

4. Track the Right Metrics

YouTube Analytics allows you to see your greatest areas of success as well as areas that need improvement. The three main reports that YouTube provides are Revenue Reports, Watch Time Reports, and Interaction Reports. Other important analytics to keep track of include audience retention, demographics, playback locations, traffic sources and devices. These analytics will

allow you to see everything from what location and devices people are watching your videos from, to how people discover your videos and when they stop watching them.

5. Encourage Embedding

If someone embeds your video on their site, it allows your video’s rating to be boosted in search engine results. If you embed your video on your own website, you also give your site the opportunity for increased traffic by giving search engines added content to rank. Embedding your videos on a website acts like a back link, enabling your videos to be placed in search engine results, resulting in more views. It also helps you reach a wider, more diverse audience apart from just your usual YouTube audience.

6. Encourage Your Viewers to Like and Share Your Videos

The most important interaction metrics that YouTube shows you on your interaction reports include Subscriber numbers, Likes and Dislikes, Comments and Sharing. These metrics show you how viewers feel about your videos and give you the opportunity to interact and form relationships with your subscribers. It is beneficial to promote your videos on your other social media platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, if you have any. It is also important to encourage your viewers to comment, share and leave a Like on your video. Similar to Views, the more Likes that you have on your video, the better your YouTube SEO ranking will be.

Having a strong YouTube presence can have a huge impact on your brand reach by giving you the opportunity to engage with the billions of users on the platform. Once people watch your video, you have the chance to expand your communication with them by encouraging them to go to your company website, ultimately leading to conversions. By optimizing your YouTube practices, you can take full advantage of the branding power that the platform provides.

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What You Missed At #LearnInbound

This years Learn Inbound event took place in The Mansion House on the 13th & 14th of September, and was once again a delight to attend. Guest speakers from all around the world came to share their thoughts and expertise on the changing digital marketing landscape. Anyone who attended is better off for it, but if you were unfortunate enough to miss it don’t worry; we’ve got you covered.

Let’s take you through the highlights of the conference. Thankfully many keynote speakers shared their slides for anyone interested in inbound marketing to read online.

Barry Adams

Barry Adams is a well known specialist in SEO, and owner of “Polemic Digital”, an SEO agency based in Belfast. Barry’s best work comes in the form of his expertise in Technical SEO, travelling Ireland to speak about the three pillars of SEO; Technology, Relevancy and Authority. His presentation on “Technical SEO in the real world” was one of the highlights of the Conference. Make sure to check out Barry’s advice below and apply it to your website.

Britney Muller

To no one’s surprise, Britney Muller’s presentation on The “Future of SEO” was one of the most popular talks of the festival. There were no seats left as Britney weaved her way through the both daunting and bright future that SEO has as a digital marketing tool. The specialist over at Moz and also the founder of Pryde Marketing was kind enough to share her deck online; check them out below:

Aleyda Solis

One of the more intriguing decks of the week came from Orianti founder Aleyda Solis, who is also an experienced international SEO consultant, author and speaker. Aleyda gave a presentation titled “OK, How can I rank for Voice Search”, capturing the minds of even the other keynote speakers at the conference. The presentation gave more realistic predictions on voice search and its impact on SEO and display going forward. Her slides already have thousands of views since the event; so check out below to make sure you don’t get left behind!

Ian Lurie

Ian is the founder of the agency “Portent”, who cover all aspects of internet marketing. He spoke about Content workflow using Github and Markdown. This article is a must read for all content creationists, speaking through structure and also different tools to help you help you create and publish the best possible content. Check out the tweet below, and take a read of Portents blog for more insights on everything digital.

Dana DiTomaso

Dana DiTomaso is the president of “Kick Point Inc”, and spoke about an often overlooked aspect of digital marketing; reporting. These slides were eye-opening to anyone working in an agency who has delivery monthly or weekly reports to various clients. Dana’s advice on communication and language when talking to customers with different goals and ideals was particularly helpful. Check out her slides below.

Paddy Moogan

Paddy is the co founder of “aira.net” and the publisher of the linkbuildingbook.com. Paddy also spoke about content, this time about how bets to build up your inbound links. The presentation, “Content driven link building: what does good look like?” went down a treat, describing how its best to have a process and a data-led system in place to build up your links. Check out the slide deck below.

Oli Gardner

More content marketing goodness came from well known marketer and speaker Oli Gardner, who co-founded the landing page optimising agency “Unbounce”. Oli kicked off day two with one of our favourite talks, not just because of his knack for public speaking or creative slide deck, but the insightful information on Google Tag Manager. Read “Content Marketing Is Broken & Only Your Mom Can Fix It” below.

The event was filled with amazing guests, not just the ones above but all the men and women who brought their expertise to the table. The event was run ever so smoothly and I suspect it will once again next year. Thank you to the speakers who shared their slides, and if we missed any decks be sure to share them with us!

Check out the Learn Inbound Facebook page for photos of the event.

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Benefits Of Linkedin

Linkedin offers an online platform for networking, social selling and more for business professionals in all industries. If used correctly, it can be a gold mine with endless sales leads for your company. Linkedin can be a difficult platform to really tap in to, as often it comes across as a clutter of random connection requests and mundane or repetitious industry updates.

We here at Evolution Digital are experts in extracting leads and executing your business goals through the online professional network. We get past the clutter to identify the key benefits of having a prominent, consistent and well-glossed presence in the right areas of Linkedin.

Linkedin Training

Learn about your prospective client/customer/employee

Linkedin offers Directors and Managers the ability to analyse the profile of their prospects; to identify the quality of leads by delving into their professional background. Linkedin is a recruiters dream, with CVs, interests, education and previous work projects all attached to better inform your decision before picking up the phone.

Act as on an online vehicle for you and your brand

Linkedin gives you the opportunity like no other to present yourself and your brand’s image in a circle with other working professionals. Separating yourself from your competitors on Linkedin can give you the edge when it comes to standing out against the crowd and becoming the no.1 choice for Linkedin can give you the edge when it comes to standing out against the crowd and becoming the no.1 choice for whoever is your target audience. Linkedin has over 500 million members, with over half of this logging on each month, and a further 40% of these then logging on every day, proving that it is ripe with opportunity simply waiting to be excavated correctly.

The online home for your company

The use of company pages on Linkedin grew from 24% in 2015 to 57% in 2016. Brand’s are seeing more and more the fact that you are missing out by not being present on Linkedin, however it is crucial to develop goals and not be online just because everyone else is. A well polished company page, with consistent posts shows prospective clients that you are active, and can be the crucial difference in capturing new clients or customers. Relevant and quality content is just as important as frequency. The Company page also gives your brand the chance to:

  • Tell it’s brand story
  • Showcase your clients/projects
  • Show off your business locations and staff, presenting in a professional yet appealing manor.

Linkedin posted the following infographic earlier in the year, showing that marketers identified Company Pages as the no.1 aspect of the social network that they needed help with.

Infographic for Linkedin Products chart

Video on Linkedin

Linkedin was not traditionally associated with video, however things began to change in 2017 when they introduced the native video option for businesses. Since then, they have expanded their horizon further with the advent of sponsored video ads. Linkedin’s Senior product manager Peter Roybal announced last year that users are 20 times more likely to share video content that any other format. This proves the potential impact of your ads or campaigns provided there is engaging content, and you captures user’s attention early.

The right people

Linkedin is effective because of its primary audience; the prominent presence of middle and upper class individuals. Not only is there a strong presence of upper level individuals, but they are also amongst the most active. About 45% of article readers on Linkedin are in the upper ranks of industries, such as CEOS, VPs, managers etc, so you know your time is not wasted.
This automatically makes for higher quality leads, particularly if you seek out the right groups. As of August 2018, there are over 2 million Linkedin groups with over half of its users being a member of atleast one group. Linkedin groups had lost some steam in the last couple of years, but just this month they have announced some changes to breath life back into the area.

Graphic of Linkedin's market classes

www.adscode.com/social-media/infographic-linkedin-facts-stats-2018

techcrunch.com/2018/08/15/linkedin-groups-relaunch

marketingland.com/linkedin-officially-rolls-native-video-uploading-worldwide-not-businesses-yet

blog.linkedin.com/2015/07/09/1-million-linkedin-publishers

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Close up image of mobile screen with social media icons

Social media strategy is more than just posting

It’s normal for a business owner to set up their company on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter Instagram and LinkedIn. But after you set up, then what? You post an inspirational quote here and there, a random photo of your coffee and caption it “on my way to work” or share a funny video and hopefully, people will react the same way as you did. However,
it’s 2018, and your business needs to have a social media strategy to get your business out there!

What is your objective?

What do you want to happen to your business with social media? Do you want to increase sales? Drive traffic to your website? Increase brand awareness and let people know about your service or products? Whatever it is, you need to think in advance and have a goal.

Focus on what matters

People have this mindset that the more social media platform they are, the better, but sometimes that’s not the case. You have to consider that your target audience may not be active on Twitter or Instagram etc. Remember, time is precious so focus your time and resources on specific online platforms where you are definitely will find your target audience, this is where you need to do your homework and research where your audience hangs out? Where are they primarily active? Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc.? What time do they engage with your posts? Morning, after lunch or night time etc.? You’ll then be able to decide where and when to invest your time.

Research

Sometimes having competitors can be annoying because your target audience is being divided, however, when it comes to researching your social media strategy, this is where they come in handy. You can learn from a direct competitor or a group with similar objectives as your business to help with your business strategy. Observe what they are doing and what’s working for them. You’ll be surprised at how much you can take in from your competitors because this will help you save time in having to test everything yourself. Remember, the key is to do something similar but do it better! Be creative and get your business noticed!

Picture of open laptop on a desk

Quality over quantity

Always consider what you are posting. If you are posting random photos, links etc. for the same posting then people will not take you seriously. You want to display content that is relevant to your business. Material that will bring people to your website.

Calendar

As we’ve mentioned before, time is precious in any business which is why we suggest you schedule your posts in advance to save time. A social media schedule can sometimes be challenging to commit yourself to entirely, but it is time efficient, and it allows you to publish when your audience is most likely to engage. Always think in advance, consider what will happen in the future and schedule that in. There are many useful social media management tools out there where it allows you to schedule all of your posts on different platforms, and our favourite is HootSuite. Some are free, others are not, but this is where you need to decide on what works best for your company.

Picture of a large calendar on top of a neat business desk

Room to improve

You will never have a perfect social media strategy because social media is continuously changing. You need to sit down maybe once a month and keep track of the numbers if your plan is working or not. Go back to your objectives, if it was to increase sales or traffic. Have you seen much difference, go back to the source and see where it came from, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Remember, you can’t report success if you don’t know what’s happening.

Our main point is that a social media strategy is more than just posting something for the sake of a new post. It requires time, creativity and work. Take it step by step, and you’ll slowly but gradually find the strategy that will work for your business. If you have any questions about social media strategy, Evolution Digital can help. Be sure to get in touch with us on 01 288 5118 or drop us an email on info@evolutiondigital.ie and we can have a chat!

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Conversion Rate Optimisation

How Conversion Rate Optimisation can help your business.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is about making sure you are directing the visitors on your website towards the action that you want them to complete. This could be anything from purchasing a product, completing a contact form or signing up for a newsletter online.  In other words, you want to convert online visitors into customers to increase your sales by giving them a positive experience on your website. The process of CRO will provide you with a better understanding of how visitors make their way around your site, what actions they take and what’s preventing them from completing your goals.

How does Conversion Rate Optimisation work?

As a business, you must understand that your current customers are your best customers. It’s much easier to maintain a loyal customer relationship than to make a new one; this also goes for your website; your best pages will continue being your best pages. With a good CRO strategy plan, your best-performing pages can even be better than before. Instead of focusing on the average pages or spending time and energy creating a new page that may or may not perform well, you can put more effort to the top pages that will give you substantial results.

CRO Research.

You need to have a good idea of your current website analytics. How many people visit your website? What are the most and least visited pages? What channel are your visitors coming from (organic, direct, social, etc.)? You can use tools such as Google Analytics to help you find answers to these questions. Researching who your potential clients are is very important, where they are from and what they do for a living, this will give you a better idea of how to sell your products or service to them.

Experimentation.

The basic strategy plan for conversion rate optimisation is experimentation. Start with a hypothesis and test parts of your website to see how the change affects the number of conversions you get per visit. For example, “if we move the ‘contact us’ form at the top of the landing page instead of being at the very bottom, we’ll increase conversions.”

Results.

After testing, review your results and use analytics to determine if the outcome was significant or not. If the results were positive and saw a dramatic increase of conversion, i.e., more people had filled up the ‘contact us’ form because it was moved to the top of the landing page instead of being at the bottom.  Take note of the change and apply it on to other parts of your website to enhance the page’s performance.

One of the world’s biggest online retailer Amazon revamped their website design so many times over the years before finding the right method for them. Until you find the correct CRO strategy that works for your online business, it will be a constant trial and error, so don’t worry if you don’t see the results you were hoping for overnight.

The importance of Conversion Rate Optimisation.

  1. Increase revenue: CRO identifies the different opportunities for you to boost your revenue and conversions.
  2. Increase customers: CRO focuses on the needs of the right customers for your website. You can also understand the objectives of your visitors on why they are visiting your site.
  3. Competitors: The more visitors you convert to customers means you are doing better than your competitors. It also says that your website traffic is increasing and your social media activity is improving.

How can Evolution Digital help?

You have to remember CRO is not about increasing the numbers of visitors to your website but converting them into customers. With time and the correct actions, a good CRO plan can increase sales, generate business and help build a loyal consumer for your company. If you have any questions about Conversion Rate Optimisation, Evolution Digital can help. Be sure to get in touch with us, and we can have a chat!

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The Importance of an effective Landing page

A landing page is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search result or an online advertisement. Many companies don’t know the power of specific landing pages. Customised pages are essential in order to maximise conversion of leads. Let us now delve deeper into the important role these pages play in digital marketing campaigns.

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