Start Thinking About Customer Experience On Your Website

Posted on August 27, 2019September 19, 2020

Nowadays, websites are usually the main source of information for potential customers to learn about a product. When you have a great website, it helps set the foundation for future online and in-person sales.

Look to the Right (LTTR) can help improve the chances your visitors turn into clients and customers through conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO uses a variety of methods to entice customers into a desired action.

If you want to continue to grow, you need to start thinking about the customer experience on your website. LTTR can help you give your customers a better overall experience with our internet marketing, CRO, and SEO services.

With so much competition on the web, a good strategy involves staying two steps ahead and being detail-oriented. Attend to your customers in the best way possible by staying on top of their wants and needs.

Research proves that customers today are looking for a smarter online experience. They don’t want to call your customer service line, but rather have their questions answered right on your site. While FAQ pages can be a good resource, it takes more than that to keep them interested and satisfied.

How To Create A Good Customer Experience Strategy

man holding tablet that says rate your experience

Once you start thinking about customer experience on your website, LTTR can help you develop a good strategy that will help turn visitors into happy customers.

The best strategies come from understanding who those customers/clients/patients are and what they are looking to get from you. Customer and employee feedback is a great way to gain this understanding. LTTR offers reputation monitoring and management services that can help you stay better connected to your customers. We can help train you or your staff to become better at responding to both positive and negative reviews. This can improve your ratings and encourage more positive customer feedback.

It is important to invest in improving your technology and business processes. Though automating helps a lot, you must be careful never to lose you personal touch. LTTR can help streamline business processes on your website, while still allowing your business’ personality to shine.

Identify the personality of your brand:

Identifying the personality of your brand is important to help build customer loyalty and brand awareness. When coupled with solid marketing strategies, you can start seeing more visitors and higher conversion rates. Identifying the personality of your brand takes some research and creativity. Ask yourself questions about your business, such as what makes it special and what you want your customers to think of you.

By answering these questions, and putting thought into finding a unifying theme to describe the products or services you sell, you’ll be able to figure out what makes your business special. This helps you better communicate your ideals and makes it easier for customers to identify with the brand.

When you have a strong brand identity you increase your chances of running a successful marketing campaign. LTTR can help you develop your brand identity and create a pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign to go along with it. We are a certified Google partner and know what it takes to stand out in a crowded market.

Pay attention to load times:

A slow loading site can result in catastrophic results for your revenue. With so much focus on immediacy, impressing your customers only takes a few seconds and even a small delay can cause users to abandon your website or shopping cart in a heartbeat!

According to statistics collected by top web marketing experts, 47% of customers expect websites to load in less than 2 seconds and around 40% of them will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

LTTR has an expert team of web developers that can build or rebuild your website for maximum speed and efficiency. We can help speed up your load times through a series of techniques, such as reducing the number of HTTP requests that your site makes. We can also help you optimize your site with our technical SEO. This helps reduce load time and can improve your ranking on search engines.

Focus on great design:

Content and design may be the most important things when creating a successful website. LTTR has an expert team of content writers, graphic designers, and web designers who can give your site a look that will wow your customers.

When you start thinking about customer experience on your website, you must provide an attractive and functional design that keeps users latched on to your site. According to Adobe, 38% of people will leave your site if the layout is unattractive.

Woman pushing a glass button for testing UX parameters. User experience concept

We can help you create a layout that is easy to load, has a modern and sleek look, and includes elements meant to enhance the customer’s experience when navigating through your site.

A great website design should provide a good frame for the content and encourage people to shop and compare your products and services. We can help you do this while making your site’s navigation comfortable and easy.

Keeping a smooth and simple design with lots of categories and proper organization, will make it easier for consumers to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Create high quality, long-form content:

The best thing about long form content is that it provides users with more information, which in turn, translates into higher value. Great quality content answers all of your customers’ questions and gives them reasons to trust you and acquire your products. LTTR can create content that will be one of your greatest allies when it comes to providing a great customer experience on your website.

We can create “How-to” tutorials, white papers, product guidebooks or comparison guides, and anything that comes to mind that might keep customers interested and make them ready to buy.

We don’t just focus on text. We can add extra resources, such as video, images, audio files, and infographics to make your site more interactive and interesting to visitors. Long form content gives you a chance to add a higher number of backlinks, which help you look better in the eyes of search engine rankings.

Tell your customers exactly how your product or service can make a difference in their lives and see how this translates into more shares, more visibility, and of course, more sales!

With great content that is interesting and valuable, not only will users find you more trustworthy, but Google may also reward you with a better ranking by regarding you as an authority in your field.

When you start thinking about customer experience on your website, you’ll find yourself one step ahead of most of your competitors. Success is not just a matter of selling great products and offering a good after-sales service, but also providing a great online experience. This will ensure your customers will want to return to your site and recommend it to others.

Contact Look to the Right today!

If you want to improve the customer experience on your website, contact LTTR today. We have the knowledge and expertise to help increase conversions and keep your customers coming back. Our professional team is highly trained in all areas of internet marketing and SEO. Feel free to ask us any questions on how to improve your customers’ experience.

Long Tail Keywords For Dummies

Posted on September 28, 2018September 16, 2020

Most SEO articles and tips focus solely on “keywords”. However, we will focus on long tail keywords which actually may have more opportunity to attract your target audience at a low cost.

Long tail keywords are generally comprised of three or more words in order to make the search much more specific. Even though short term keywords make for larger search volumes, much of their search results get taken away by large websites of the niche. Long tail keywords lead to more specific searches, which means that those who encounter your content through a long tail search will be truly interested in what your website is offering specifically to them.

For example, if your website specializes in selling music instruments in Raleigh, North Carolina, using the short term keyword “electric guitar” won’t be enough because typing those words into Google will generate thousands of results, of which the first few pages may be full of top niche and big established retailer websites.

Someone actually looking to buy an electric guitar may not just type in that short keyword. Wanting to be more specific, this person may use terms such as “electric guitar with flames in raleigh nc”. Right there at the top of those search results is where you want your website to be.

When it comes to long tail keywords, it’s all about quality over quantity.

Why You Should Focus On Long Term Keywords

If you’re still not convinced, here’s a wider list of benefits to using long term keywords.

Get higher rankings on search engines. Since the top websites for your niche may get the first spots of searches, you need to get more specific and target those in the less searched terms category. You will face less competition by not having to fight with more established/big box retailer websites. Using long tail keywords strategically allows you to aim for higher rankings in a shorter period of time while attracting and building the audience you’re aiming for.
Get better SEO benefits. Long tail keywords help search engines recommend your content to the right audience.
Improve CRO for your e-commerce. Long tail keywords are a great strategy for e-commerce websites to improve their conversion rates. Like the example we made earlier, people who search for “electric guitar with flames in raleigh nc” may be much more likely to make a purchase than those simply searching for “electric guitars”.
Long tail keywords are easier to include naturally into your content which makes it look less like you’re trying to sell something and more like you’re actually handing out useful information to your audience.

How To Use Long Tail Keywords:

The first thing you want to do is find the right long term keywords for you. This process consists of in depth keyword research over long periods of time. There are many paid & free tools in the SEO world, some from Google and other sources.

Once you have your long tail keywords, you can start creating content and including them in your existing content, starting with your URL and page/post titles. They can also be included in your paragraph leadings, body, as well as any internal links to your own related content and external links. You can even include them in images and meta descriptions!

Finally, don’t forget to track your long tail keywords performance so you can be certain you’re on the right track and are getting the most benefit out of your efforts.

Cutting the Cable Cord; The Future is Video Advertising

Posted on December 28, 2015September 18, 2020

It is becoming increasingly difficult to reach younger audiences via television advertising, and soon from now – it may be nearly impossible. Forrester Research predicts that 50% of all TV viewers under age 32 will not subscribe to a traditional pay TV service by the time 2025 rolls around. Currently, “cord-nevers” (people who have never subscribed to a paid cable TV service) comprise 18% of the U.S. population. And while the majority of cord-nevers are ages 32 and older, roughly 7% of cord-nevers are people ages 18-31. [source]

image by tomislavmedak on flickr cc

Increasing Engagement with Video Advertising

Cable TV subscriptions may be on the decline, but perhaps not surprisingly, time on YouTube jumped 44% according to Nielsen’s Google-commissioned analysis, primarily due to mobile viewership. [source] With this information, brands and ad agencies are being forced to re-think their media strategies. The following are some of the things that they need to take into consideration.

#1 – Combine TV & YouTube

Google performed a study of 3,000 U.S. campaigns and looked at how total reach of millennials would be impacted if campaigns had replaced some of their TV advertising with YouTube ads. They found that without spending an extra dollar, 46% of campaigns would have benefited from a TV and YouTube combo, with an average increase in millennials reached of 42% compared to TV alone.

#2 – Use YouTube to Grow Engagement for Your Brand

Studies show that including “TrueView” ads on your YouTube videos can increase the likelihood of the viewer taking action. In fact, of those who watch at least 30 seconds or more of a TrueView ad are 23X more likely to visit and/or subscribe to that brand channel, watch additional videos by that brand and/or share the video(s). Marketers should pay attention to what their target audience’s needs are, and engage them in the micro-moments that matter.

#3 – Boost ROI by Increasing Views of Past Video Content

According to Google, viral content on sites like YouTube have a longer shelf life than the 15-30-second commercials you see on TV. Branded videos on YouTube have a long shelf-life, earning views for months, if not years. Those who employ the use of TrueView on newly posted videos see significant upticks in views for past content – by up to 500%!

image by Marco Arment on flickr cc

17 Interesting YouTube Statistics

There are at least 400 hours worth of video uploaded to YouTube every single minute. [via]
Only 5% of the videos posted to YouTube are driving most of the views. [via]
58M videos (5%) of YouTube videos are responsible for 95% of views on the site. [via]
YouTube was founded in February 2005. [via]
Slogan from 2005 – 2012 was “Broadcast Yourself”. [via]
YouTube’s founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, were all early employees of PayPal. [via]
The first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site. [via]
In 2014 YouTube said that 300 hours of new videos were uploaded to the site every minute,[20] three times more than one year earlier and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the U.S. [via]
The site has 800 million unique users a month. [via]
In October 2006, Google Inc. bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. The deal was finalized in November 2006. [via]
Once users are on YouTube, they are spending more time per session watching videos. [via]
On mobile, the average viewing session is now more than 40 minutes, up more than 50% y/y. [via]
The number of hours people spent watching videos on mobile is up 100% y/y. [via]
More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices. [via]
YouTube’s mobile revenue is up 2x y/y. [via]
YouTube has over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views. [via]
YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S. [via]

Cutting the Cord, Prepping for a Cable-Free Future

While we can’t predict the future outright, all signs seem to point to one in which we access video content from multi-channel mobile devices. What has your business done to prepare? If you need help putting together a comprehensive Viral marketing campaign that gets RESULTS, contact Look to the Right today: (919) 926-8733.

How Luxury Brands Use Social Media to Reach Consumers

Posted on December 23, 2015September 16, 2020

Owning luxury items is like being part of an elite club where only a select number of people may gain access. While today’s luxury brands want to maintain this status, more brands are attempting to strike a balance between exclusivity versus inclusivity.

image by ...love Maegan on flickr cc

The The Digital Age & Luxury Brands

While some luxury brands have embraced the Digital Age, the vast majority have yet to do so, despite an ever increasing focus on digital marketing and advertising. According to L2, a company based in New York that tracks the digital impact of brands:

Online sales still represent just 6 percent of luxury companies’ total revenues. And roughly 10 companies, including Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors, dominate this digital world, generating a combined 65 percent of all traffic to websites associated with the luxury industry. [source]

Online consumers are wired in a different way. José de Cabo, co-founder and COO of Olapic, cites that today’s consumers are “used to seeing authenticity online.” Luxury brands would be wise to take note and back efforts that help build stronger connections with these consumers.

Better Digital Presence = Better Sales

By widening the net and tapping into the rich (no pun intended) possibilities that the Digital Age has to offer, luxury brands can revamp their digital marketing efforts to build deeper relationships and brand loyalty with existing customers, and find creative, innovative ways to engage new consumers.

Using Social Media for Sales:

Social media, while popular, is still a largely untapped area for most brands and businesses. In order to better navigate this space, brands must know where their customers spend the most time online, and what social media outlets they use with the greatest frequency. To accomplish this, some luxury brands hire agencies whose responsibility it is to research and identify where their product(s) show up online.

Example:

José de Cabo and his team work on behalf of several luxury brands. Part of their responsibility is to search the most popular social media sites to look for any and all photos taken by individuals where the brand is featured. So, Person ‘A’ may have a luxury handbag that they just got. Person ‘A’ posts a picture of the handbag to their Instagram account. The brand sees this and, in turn, features Person ‘A’ on their social media.

Alternatively, luxury brands may also use social media (like the above example) to feature it as part of a larger marketing initiative – either digital or traditional.

image by 八木 Ricardo 清介 on flickr cc

Wider Audience Reach

Many luxury brands recognize that when it comes to exclusivity and inclusivity, the two are not mutually exclusive – especially when talking about using social media to leverage a brand.

Example:

Calvin Klein (CK) is a popular luxury brand. CK turned to celebrity, Justin Bieber, to help with their marketing efforts. How? Bieber has a significantly larger following on Instagram (49.8 million followers) compared to CK (3.1 million). By making Justin Bieber a spokesmodel for the Calvin Klein brand, Calvin Klein also widens its consumer base, potentially opening it up to a new demographic.

Even though luxury brands want to maintain some exclusivity, by broadening the scope of their digital marketing campaigns and casting a wider net, they can still maintain their exclusive status while increasing brand awareness and product sales.

Mobile Online Shopping During the Holidays

Posted on December 17, 2015October 6, 2020

The face of holiday shopping has changed, evolved. While there are still those who love the rush of the holiday season and will jam the roads to hit all of the brick and mortar locations – there is an ever increasing number of us who are opting to shop from our mobile devices instead.

In fact, the most recent statistics point to the fact that more than 50% of holiday shoppers admit that they are planning to do their holiday shopping online, from their smartphones. According to Google, at least “30% of all online shopping purchases are now happening on mobile phones.” Combine this with the fact that the number of people who are actually using their smartphones to make purchases has gone up more than 63% compared to 2014!

photo by Meno Istorija on flickr cc

Statistics About Mobile Shopping

We thought we’d kick off this final stretch into the holidays with some interesting/fun statistics:

In 2014, Cyber Monday became the biggest U.S. online shopping day ever with more than 2 billion U.S. dollars in online spending. [statista]
In 2013, in the United States, 50% of respondents completed more than half of their Christmas shopping online. [https://econsultancy.com/reports/christmas-2013-online-shopping-survey-report]
Online e-commerce sales on Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day in 2015 reached record spending levels, thanks to more shoppers forgoing crowds in stores to shop at home. Together, shoppers spent $4.45 billion online on Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day, according to data released by Adobe. [Fortune]
Shopping-related searches on mobile have grown more than 120% year-over-year. [Google]
In 2015, after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, smartphones remained the shopper’s device of choice. Smartphones accounted for 44 percent of all online traffic, more than three times that of tablets at 14.1 percent. Smartphones surpassed tablets in sales, driving 18.6 percent of online sales (up 65.7 percent over 2014) versus tablets at 17.7 percent. [IBM]

As cited by Gregory Karp of the Chicago Tribune,

Mobile options are helping make Christmas shopping a digital experience. Nearly 90 percent of shoppers are planning to go online at some point during the upcoming holiday weekend, according to a Deloitte survey.
“The digital influence is likely to touch nearly every moment in the shopper’s journey this holiday season,” said Rod Sides, retail and distribution practice leader at Deloitte.

Popular Items People Bought During the Holidays At…

Popular retailers now have mobile apps in which they entice online shoppers with special deals and incentives (as if online shopping wasn’t convenient enough!).

We’ve put together a brief list of some of the most popular items online shoppers purchased from leading brands in the past. Some of the following data was taken directly from information provided by the retailer. Take a look. What do you think will be the hottest items purchased in 2015?

Walmart.com

The following data was taken directly from Walmart’s 2015 Top Black Friday Deals list [http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2015/11/12/walmarts-black-friday-2015-in-three-words-deals-availability-simplicity]:

Televisions ex: 40” Class HDTV for $149 (special buy)
Fitness Wearables ex: Fitbit Flex Wristband for $59 ($40 savings)
Video games many starting at $8 as well as NBA2K16, Madden ’16 andFIFA ’16 for Xbox One for $27 each ($32.88 savings)
Video Game Console bundles including a PlayStation 4 Uncharted Bundle for $299 ($50 savings)
DVDs and Blu-ray movies many starting at $1.96
Home appliances for $9.72 each including an Oster 8-Speed Blender, Crock-Pot Stainless 5-Qt. Slow Cooker and 12-cup Programmable Black & Decker Coffee Maker
Toys ex: a Star Wars Lightsaber for $5 ($3.94 savings)
Hotel Style Cotton-Rich 850-Thread Count Sheet Set for $25 (special buy)
Children’s licensed sleepwear starting at $4.75 (special buy)

eBay

The following list of items was borrowed from BGR:

65-inch Samsung Smart 4K TV (save $1,200)
55-inch Samsung Smart 4K 3D TV (save $1,800)
Canon EOS 6D DSLR (save $700)
128GB iPhone 6s (save $30)
G Nexus 5X 16GB (Factory GSM Unlocked) Android Smartphone (save $10)
11.6-inch MacBook Air (save $170)
64GB iPhone 6s (save $30)
16GB iPhone 6s (save $20)
64GB iPad mini 4 (save $40)
iPad Air 2 (save $140)
GoPro Hero4 camera (save $100)
Fitbit Charge HR Wireless Activity Wristband (save $30)

Amazon.com

The following are some of the top Black Friday deals for 2015 from Amazon.com, according to Kiplinger:

Amazon Fire Tablet 7-Inch Display with Wi-Fi (8GB), $35
AmazonBasics Portable Bluetooth Speaker, $40
Assorted toys (get 40% or more off on select items)
Beats by Dre Studio 2.0 Wired Over Ear Headphones, $181
Toshiba Satellite C55-C5241 15.6-Inch Laptop Intel Core i5 8GB, $430

A ‘Mobile’ State of Mind

Posted on December 14, 2015September 16, 2020

By 2019, it is estimated that there will be 5.2 billion global mobile users, up from 4.3 billion in 2014 [source]. As a business, if you’re website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re doing a disservice to your consumers; but most of all – you are doing a great disservice to yourself. If you’re a marketer and you don’t have some sort of well thought-out mobile marketing strategy, you’re doing a disservice to your clients.

So, why mobile friendly? Why mobile marketing? Why does it matter?

image by lukew on flickr cc

Why Mobile Friendly Websites Matter for Consumers

With the average adult attention span competing with that of a goldfish, businesses need to take a hard look at the mobile friendliness of their website(s). While roughly 68% of companies have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy, consider the following statistics, which were recently outlined by Greg Miles of SocialMediaToday:

80% of internet users own a smartphone.
57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.
83% of mobile users say that a seamless experience across all devices is very important.

Experience matters just as much as the information, services, and/or products that your business provides. When you consider the very real possibility that someone is viewing your website from a mobile device, it becomes extremely important (if not imperative) that your website measures up.

Making your website mobile-friendly is no small feat, however. Things to keep in mind include:

Responsive web design
Click-to-Call phone numbers
Accessibility across multiple mobile devices
Layout/Graphic design elements
Content layout (because it will display differently on mobile devices vs. desktop)
Other features
And more

In the interest of saving time and error(s), this is why it may be best to hire a professional Internet marketing company to handle the transition to mobile-friendly. After you’re set up, you can take it and run from there, adjusting things as you go.

Reasons Why Mobile is Better for Marketers

#1 – Mobile marketing allows you to more accurately reach your target audience.

Many cell phone carriers have some sort of geographic awareness, allowing you to know the who, what, where and when’s as it pertains to consumer behavior. Of course, the one thing to keep in mind here is that the mobile device user has to grant location access permission, which would then allow you access to most of this information.

#2 – Mobile devices are prevalent and used frequently.

The majority of mobile users are on their mobile devices ALL OF THE TIME. According to Frank Powell of Mobile Marketer,

Most mobile phone users are within an arm’s reach of their devices over 90 percent of waking hours, including times when other media are not available. With mobile phone penetration near 90 percent for U.S. adults, conversations are possible all the time with everyone.

In other words, there is no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of being able to reach your target consumers any time, any day.

#3 – Mobile marketing is easily integrated into other marketing efforts.

The information gleaned from mobile marketing campaigns is useful in all other marketing efforts – whether you’re involved in print advertising, television, radio, or organic content marketing. Because you are able to access specific information as it relates to your audience, this proves useful when putting together other marketing efforts.

#4 – Mobile marketing allows for more time sensitive interactions.

Because of the omnipresence of mobile, you can (quite literally) reach out to your target audience at the times when it matters most. Time sensitive interactions like these can also allow you to have more meaningful conversations, making it more likely that a prospect will convert.

#5 – Mobile marketing is more personal.

Because mobile devices are considered personal to the consumer, it is imperative that the marketer establishes/builds trust with prospects before embarking in a full fledged mobile marketing campaign.

Nielsen Data: How Mobile & Tablet Devices Compare While Watching TV

Interested in seeing just how important a role mobile devices play in our lives today? Take a look at the following information, gathered by Nielsen:

QUESTIONS?

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Category Archives: Marketing