Are you looking to improve your business’s bottom line via social media in 2023? If yes, look no further than this guide to achieve your goals!


Social Media Best Practices in 2023Social Media Best Practices in 2023

Social media influences consumers in North America to purchase products or services. It is one of the most effective and inexpensive digital marketing tools. Companies can use social networking platforms to increase their online presence, reach their target audience, and attract new customers.

It also enables businesses to highlight new products and services, collects customer feedback, and build relationships via relevant, engaging, and positive experiences or content.

Social media is a popular and convenient digital marketing tool for businesses. However, many businesses in Canada, particularly small businesses, do not use social media for digital marketing.

According to Tarek Riman, a professional entrepreneur, experienced digital marketer, and skilled social media expert, businesses neglect social media because they think it is confusing, daunting, and time-consuming.

Most small businesses also do not understand how to create and implement a solid social media strategy. Tarek Riman says social media can help a company attract followers and convert them into loyal customers.

However, effective social media marketing requires companies in the U.S and Canada to connect with the right audience, establish a comprehensive strategy, and treat followers/consumers as if they were face-to-face customers.

In addition, it requires offering contests, events, and giveaways to convert social media followers into loyal and high-paying customers. So, how to do this? What are the best social media practices in 2023?

Today’s article will give you the most practical tips/tricks to streamline the entire process and make the most of your social media strategy across different platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Read on!

Define Your Goals

Define your goals using the S.M.A.R.T framework. For instance, you may want to gain 100 new followers on Facebook in one month, create at least 2-3 events that generate $500 or $1,000 in sales in the next three months, or drive 2,000 people to your website.

On the other hand, you may incorporate Twitter or Instagram in your strategy to provide optimal customer experiences and services to increase brand, product, or service awareness among your target audience. According to Tarek Riman, your goals will you to track, analyze, and evaluate your digital marketing activities.

Build Your Brand

Content is king. Right? The content, especially the graphical or visual elements you post, is crucial to establishing your brand identity and reputation on social media. For instance, you can create a logo that represents your brand. Make sure you use the same logo across social media platforms.

In addition, use the same color palette for your photos and images consistently. The purpose is to ensure your followers on social media recognize your business. Use your profile, bio, and cover photos to communicate with your target audience and tell them who you are and what your company does better than others.

You can use hashtags for search terms or keywords that highlight your business vision, mission, brand value, products, services, events, campaigns, and industry. Remember, hashtags are a powerful way to increase engagement, build awareness, and categorize visual content.

Select a Relevant Social Platform

Most businesses jump into all social media platforms. However, Tarek Riman recommends finding the network that aligns with your business and customers’ profiles. Your company has unique consumer segments with specific psychographics, demographics, and behavioral characteristics.

Therefore, you must perform thorough research to determine what social networking platforms your prospective and existing customers use. The purpose is to align your events, content, and ads. Each social media platform has its strengths and weaknesses.

For instance, Instagram is a powerful social networking platform for businesses looking to reach younger audiences via graphic-rich content, such as photos, infographics, and videos.

Likewise, Twitter is the best social media channel for businesses to provide exceptional customer service. However, Facebook is an all-inclusive social media app for starting digital marketing.

Tarek Riman recommends filling your business page, making your photos and videos look good, and using ad tools and analytics to gain insights. Once you feel comfortable with a specific social media site, you can expand and diversify to other platforms, including Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Consistency is Key

According to Tarek Riman, a successful business project requires consistency and dedication; the same principle applies to social media. I.T. requires you to commit resources and time and post messages daily and at the right time to ensure your followers see them.

Determine the best time to post by understanding the locations and demographics of your social media followers. You must track the engagement of your social media posts from time to time to gain valuable insights and use them to modify or maintain your strategy.

Remember, textual, graphical, and video posts must engage your target audience and provide them with relevant information to build relationships. Don’t forget to reply to comments, questions, concerns, or problems immediately. Use events and promotional strategies to engage your target audience.

Engage Your Target Audience

Customers want to buy products or services that positively impact their lives. Communicate with your followers and tell them about your business story, share your company values, and highlight the positive impact of buying products or services from your business.

Tarek Riman recommends posting behind-the-scenes photos to communicate your business passion. You can pose questions to your target audience or customers and inspire them to participate in conversations.

Post videos of your events, campaigns, and videos to tell your business story. Fill in your posts with relevant content, photos, and videos that express the foundation of your business and your reason for selling products and services. Let us now discuss how to make the most of social networking sites for marketing purposes.

Facebook

Facebook is the most powerful and widely used social networking site. It can help your business spread the word about your brand, products, or services and provide information about your business to persuade your target audience and educate and entertain them. Here are a few best practices to consider when using Facebook.

Optimize Your Posts

Optimize your post according to Facebook’s algorithm. Determine the anatomy of your Facebook posts and analyze whether your target audience uses the web or mobile app. Riman says most people use mobile devices to access Facebook.

Therefore, you must optimize your post for smartphone users and display your posts using the correct dimensions. Likewise, post graphical content with the right font and size so your target audience can read it easily.

Post Content Daily

Although you may find it challenging to post content daily, it is worth your time. People make more friends and “Like” pages daily, meaning if you fail to post content daily, you may not stand out from the competition.

Tarek Riman says posting at least 3-5 times a day is enough for businesses to engage consumers. Riman recommends checking Facebook insights to analyze when the right time is to post content on Facebook.

Likewise, you can see when your target audience is online. Thus, you can post at optimal times; once in the morning, in the afternoon, and the evening.

Talk to Your Audience

Have you ever wondered why it is called social media? Social media is social, meaning you must communicate with your target audience and connect with them to resolve their issues and get positive responses. Tarek Riman recommends:

  • Asking questions
  • Posting helpful tips
  • Linking to blog posts
  • Encouraging your audience to like and share
  • Tagging users on other business pages
  • Highlighting relevant posts
  • Using hashtags
  • Sharing
    • Infographics
    • News articles
    • Images
    • Videos
    • How-to blog posts
    • Brand stories
    • Quotes
    • Stats and facts

Add a Call-to-Action (C.T.A.)

Adding a C.T.A. to your posts is essential to drive traffic to your website or encourage consumers to act and buy your product or service. A CTA is an integral part of your Facebook posts. However, it would help if you did not overuse it.

Riman recommends following the 80-20 rule. 80% of your Facebook content is educational, and 20% is promotional (this is where you add a C.T.A.). So, make sure you use the C.T.A.s properly.

Use Facebook Analytics

Facebook Analytics is a powerful tool that gives you an overall picture of your page interactions. You can look for content, engagement, and other trends and keep posting more content your target audience likes and shares.

Instagram

Instagram is another powerful marketing tool for businesses to drive brand awareness, build and track engagement/interaction, and increase sales. It is an excellent platform for companies to find customers and leverage valuable insights to develop a tailored marketing strategy. Here are a few best practices to ace Instagram.

Promote Your Profile

According to Tarek Riman, promoting your Instagram profile is an excellent way to drive more people to your business. You can use other marketing platforms to drive traffic to your Instagram.

Like you promote your website via email marketing and blogging, you can use business cards, newsletters, and other social platforms to share your Instagram link and encourage users to check your profile.

Use Hashtags

Instagram is hashtag paradise. If you have a small audience, you can use hashtags to grow your audience, but you must use hashtags your audience searches for on Instagram. Using random or irrelevant hashtags won’t do anything well.

In addition, think about branded hashtags, event hashtags, campaign hashtags, industry hashtags, product hashtags, and location hashtags. The purpose is to improve the user experience.

Post relevant hashtags as the first comment on your business post. The purpose is to keep your message alive and reduce the risk of getting lost in the ocean of hashtags on Instagram.

Post Relevant Content

There is a season for everything, such as spring cleaning, Halloween, holidays, bathing-suit season, Easter, Eid, Christmas, etc. Tarek Riman recommends linking your Instagram post to a current event or seasonal trend.

Make sure you find the trends on Instagram and define or implement your strategy accordingly. Become a part of the event or conversation that aligns with your business and is relevant to your target audience.

Run Contests

Running contests is an excellent way to build and grow your audience on Instagram. The primary objective of contests on Instagram is to increase engagement. Set the rules to engage users and encourage people to follow you on Instagram.

Likewise, encourage participants to like, comment, and share your posts or use a specific hashtag. You can use user-generated content by asking your followers to submit photos and videos with a specific contest hashtag.

Twitter

One of the most significant advantages of Twitter for companies is that it enables them to share information quickly or start conversations with their followers. Your audience will find your tweets easily, but you must have educational, valuable, and promotional content that engages your target audience.

Optimize Your Tweets

According to Tarek Riman, a good tweet is between 120 and 130 characters because it leaves space for the link and at least 1-3 hashtags. In addition, if you are sharing statistical data, an article, or a quote from a brand, include that company in the tweet.

The purpose is to increase the likelihood for your followers to see, comment, and retweet your tweets. The more content you share, the more following you will gain. Thus, you can spread your brand message and engage your target audience and existing customers.

Post Visual Content

Although people don’t use photos and videos frequently on Twitter because tweets are text-based, tweets with photos and videos receive higher engagement rates. Research shows that tweets with images see 55% more engagement and lead conversions. If you want to post a photo, use the correct dimensions, such as 440 x 220 pixels.

Add Links to Tweets

Add links about 25% of the way through your tweet. Links added to the tweet receive higher click-through rates. However, it would help if you placed them at the start of the tweet because links placed at the end of a tweet have fewer engagement rates. In addition, shorten the links to ensure they appear cleaner and simple to read in a tweet.

Try Twitter Ads

Using Twitter Ads is a brilliant way to grow your followers, drive traffic to your website, and convert leads. It also increases engagement, finds leads, and turns people into loyal customers. Twitter ads are relatively less costly than other platforms. So, giving Twitter ads a try or test run is worth your time and money.

Use Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics is a powerful tool for businesses to analyze data and generate valuable insights. You can use this tool to measure the engagement and understand how to post successful tweets. Twitter analytics also tells you about your target audience’s demographics, locations, and interests.

Final Words

Social media is integral to your digital marketing strategy to promote your brand, products, and services. It can help you build a brand reputation and increase sales. However, you must develop a solid social media strategy and follow the best practices to achieve your goals.

Riman Agency has been in the digital marketing industry for many years. We have a team of social media marketing professionals with years of experience and extensive knowledge of innovative techniques and tools to develop a sophisticated and result-driven strategy for your business. Contact us today!

 

What is GA4? How does it work? What is the primary difference between GA3 and GA4? Why should you switch to GA4 now? Read Here!


Why it is Important to Switch to GA 4 Now


Why it is Important to Switch to GA 4 Now

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for marketers and companies. It monitors and analyzes website traffic and gives marketers massive amounts of information about web traffic, online users, their preferences, and ways they get to your website.

You can use Google Analytics to expand and grow your company if you run a small business or giant corporation. However, the older version of Google Analytics has a few downsides. For instance, it has limited dashboard capabilities, preventing you from customizing specific reports.

In addition, it also has missing information because it blocks cookies and switches off JavaScript to track visitors’ behavior. So, this leads to under-reporting due to inefficient data tracking.

The good news is that Google has the newer version of Google Analytics 4, also known as GA4. Today’s article will discuss GA4 and highlight reasons to make an informed decision on whether you should switch to GA4. Read on!


What is GA4?

GA4 is an analytic service that enables digital marketers and companies to measure traffic and engagement across platforms, including websites and applications. It is the newest version of Google Analytics and allows marketers and companies to track websites and apps using the same account.

In addition, it comes with cutting-edge reporting features and provides digital marketers with in-depth information and insights. GA4 has an entirely different data architecture, storage, and processing mechanisms than the previous versions.

So, it provides new ways to track, measure, and analyze traffic for years. GA4 also looks different from Universal Analytics, with a changed navigation system and user interface.

Let us discuss why you should switch to GA4, but before that, knowing the difference between GA4 and Universal Analytics is essential. The purpose is to help you make an informed decision and let you understand whether GA4 is better than Universal Analytics.


GA4 Vs. Universal Analytics

Although GA4 is similar to Universal Analytics or GA3, it has massive differences. If you have used the previous version, you will notice various changes in how the newest version looks and how the navigation works.

In addition to the user interface and navigation, GA4 has other differences from the previous version. Google makes substantial efforts to add more reporting capabilities and functionalities to GA4.

For instance, GA4 misses the bounce rate because Google has replaced it with engaging sessions. So, you won’t see the percentage or number of people leaving your website. Instead, you will see data on users who visit your website and stay on it to explore your products and services.

Therefore, the ” Engagement Rate ” is the new metric Google wants marketers and businesses to focus on is the “Engagement Rate.” Moreover, GA4 does not use “goals.” Instead, it uses events, meaning you can track events and conversions.

The good news is that you can choose events that count as conversions. Google will also track events without modifying your website’s code. GA4 also misses historical data. What does this mean?

If you have used Universal Analytics and created a GA4 property, you can’t move the historical data to that property. So, you start from scratch. However, your historical data will remain safe in Universal Analytics.

However, you have to switch to Universal Analytics to analyze the historical data. Let us now discuss the prominent features and benefits of GA4 to help you decide whether to switch from Universal Analytics to GA4.


Reasons to switch to to Switch to GA 4:

1. Access to In-Depth Metrics

GA4 is one of the most powerful analytics tools, allowing marketers, data analysts, and companies to dive into user-centric and in-depth metrics. These metrics usually focus on the Lifecycle and the user.

Besides, GA4 uses user-centric metrics, data, and dimensions using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to predict customer/buyer/users’ actions and implement more S.M.A.R.T tracking with predictive modeling or analytics.

Universal Analytics’ bounce rates have been replaced with more useful and valuable engagement metrics. For instance, when using GA4, an engaged session lasts ten seconds. It has at least one conversion event and involves two page views.

GA4 metrics allow digital marketers to leverage the power of events and measure engagements. It gives you a holistic view of website visitors, actions, and behaviors. The new feature, enhanced events, enables marketers to understand how their website visitors interact with the content. So, you can use “Enhanced Events” to:

  • Scroll data
  • Download files
  • Search about your site
  • Video and graphic engagement rates

So, this advanced level of event marketing is more sophisticated because it does not require custom code or a web developer’s assistance. Therefore, you can understand how visitors/users interact with your site, the type of content that compels users to click on CTAs, and what content requires optimization.


2. Track Customer/Buyer Journey

GA4 is an excellent tool to track customer or buyer journeys. The tool does not focus on measurements like fragmentation by device or platform, such as sessions. On the other hand, it focuses on users and their interactions via events.

These events happen across the website and application. For example, you can use GA4 Lifecycle to generate reports that align with different stages of the customer journey, including:

  • Acquisition
  • Engagement
  • Interaction
  • Monetization
  • Retention
  • Loyalty

So, you can use these reports to understand the buyer’s journey. At the same time, these reports enable you to identify gaps and complications and determine opportunities via insights. Thus, you can positively change your marketing strategy and make the most of it.

3. Quick Big Query Integration

Big Query is one of the most famous data warehouses. It helps you track, manage, and analyze data and has built-in features that can improve your overall business processes. These features are:

  • Machine learning
  • Geospatial analysis
  • Business intelligence

So, you can use Big Query and SQL to answer complex questions without deploying the infrastructure management. GA4’s integration with this data warehouse allows you to analyze massive datasets quickly.

At the same time, it performs advanced analysis of large volumes of raw data from GA4 and helps you generate valuable insights via machine learning algorithms. Similarly, you can combine data with these insights from other marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. The purpose is to create a repository that gives insights into the customer/buyer journey.

4. Create Targeted Segments

GA4 enables you to create targeted segments for your digital marketing campaigns. You can create segments based on various factors, such as events and time, allowing you to group users based on interactions, events, and time. Remember, this also focuses on events and arbitrary device categories.

When you leverage the power of these measurements and analytics, you can create precise and targeted audiences with a complete picture of who is using your web pages and how they engage with your content. The purpose is to create endless possibilities and lead to more optimized conversions and sales.

Moreover, one of the most significant benefits of GA4 is that it automatically shares audiences with Google Ads. Thus, you can focus on paid advertising campaigns for website visitors who follow a specific behavior pattern.

When you have more targeted audiences, you can optimize campaigns and reach your audiences at the right time. More sophisticated marketing campaign strategies and audiences can generate higher ROIs.

5. Automatic Alerts

GA4 uses machine learning algorithms and models designed and developed by experienced professionals working in Google. Thanks to machine learning algorithms, you can receive automatic alerts when trends appear in the data. For instance, if your business sells more of a specific product, GA4 will let you know before you see an increased number of sales.

So this enables you to respond fast and contact suppliers to keep the product in stock. GA4 also helps marketers and businesses to predict behavior among specific customer groups.

For instance, the tool creates models that can measure the potential revenue of a customer group. It also calculates churn probabilities of different customer/user/visitor segments.

6. Realistic Marketing Campaigns

GA4 is one of the best ways to create realistic marketing campaigns because it helps you unify your website and app data. GA4 also provides a future-proofed solution even if you don’t have an application. However, this is valuable if you have planned to develop an app in the future.

In addition to synchronizing your website with app data and analyzing customer journeys across platforms, GA4 enables you to analyze user behavior by their position in the purchasing funnel based on factors like awareness and conversion.

A better understanding of how customers/visitors/users behave at different stages allows you to create a more sophisticated marketing strategy. For instance, if you notice that your product sales are due to a coupon or discount strategy shared on Facebook or Instagram, you can invest more on these social networking platforms.

7. Future-Proof Design and Privacy

Future-proof design is one of the most significant advantages of GA4. It focuses on user privacy because it moves away from cookie-based tracking. Therefore, switching to and using GA4 is an excellent way for marketers and businesses to streamline their data operations.

GA4 provides you with sophisticated solutions without depending on cookies. Although Google recognizes that some data gaps may occur with this approach, the company makes substantial efforts and uses accurate modeling techniques to overcome these complications.

8. Leverage the Power of Explorations

“Explorations” is one of the most powerful features offered by the newest Google Analytics. It accommodates specific goals and lets marketers create reports via data visualization and analytical techniques.

Although Universal Analytics has a similar feature, it requires marketers and businesses to pay money using Google Analytics 360 users. However, this is a free feature with GA4.

In addition, “Explorations” allow you to track content, research audiences, and optimize conversion rates to the next level. You will find ready-made “Explorations” in the template gallery. These templates/explorations can help you analyze specific marketing areas, including:

  • Funnel performance
  • User segment overlaps
  • Lead acquisition performance
  • User cohorts behavior
  • User lifetime value

Getting Started With GA4

Although switching to GA4 from the previous version of Google Analytics is daunting for many businesses and digital marketers, it is worth your time because it streamlines your online data and provides you with tools to create realistic, user-oriented, and time-bound marketing campaigns.

There are a few ways to get started with GA4. For instance, you can add GA4 to your website that you currently analyze with the older version. So, if you are familiar with the previous version, you can use this option to streamline the entire process.

Google’s setup assistance adds the GA4 property to the already existing one. Bear in mind that the older platform will collect data until July 2023. So, you can switch between the older and newer version based on your needs.

If you need help getting started, feel free to connect t@rimanagency.com

 

Final Words

Companies collect user/customer data from various channels, including websites, apps, eCommerce platforms, and social media. GA4 is a cutting-edge tool to create comprehensive customer profiles using the collected data, gain insights into users’ behaviors, and provide more personalized experiences to your customers using effective, reliable, and user-oriented marketing campaigns.

If you find it challenging to get started with GA4, you can hire Riman Agency to streamline the process. We have a team of qualified, experienced, and skilled data analysts and digital marketers with an in-depth understanding of GA4. Contact us today for more information or discuss your requirements with our professional team. Until Next Time!

The Ideal Website Building Strategy for Your BusinessWhat is a holistic digital market strategy? How do I create a successful plan? What factors should I consider? Here is what you need to know!


How to Create a Holistic Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Digital marketing plays a critical role in connecting your company with your customers. It establishes a solid business relationship with your existing and potential customers, whether on Google through PPC or SEO, social media, or email marketing.

A holistic digital marketing strategy is an integral part of your business, allowing you to cover all aspects of marketing and promotional campaigns you run to drive traffic or customers to your website or other platforms and boost revenues. Today’s article will discuss creating a holistic digital marketing strategy. Read on!

Define Business Objectives

According to Tarek Riman, a professional digital marketer, you must understand your overall business driver, whether increasing sales, gaining market share, or expanding business. Defining business objectives is critical because they let you know the difference between micro and macro conversions.

Riman says macro conversions do not exist without micro-ones or vice versa. Therefore, what your company wants to achieve is an integral part of your business goal. It also includes focusing on your company’s mission and vision.

The purpose is to link everything together and streamline the process. You can’t set up marketing objectives efficiently and quickly and continue assuming that they will act as meaningful guides to action. Riman recommends focusing on a hierarchical goal breakdown structure to link your high-level objectives to clearer daily goals.

Business marketing objectives can tell you about the direction in which your marketing and business activities move, but this requires thorough planning, development, and implementation. Goals guide your day-to-day marketing activities and streamline the entire process. Consider the following factors when defining objectives:

  • Begin with a broad design and keep all goals in the hierarchy
  • Encourage your employees to understand the objectives
  • Develop realistic objectives and use resources appropriately
  • Analyze your company’s external opportunities, threats, and constraints
  • Consider the creative conception strategies
  • Consider the cost of each activity you want to carry out
  • Reconsider and redefine our objectives from time to time

Perform Market Analysis

According to Tarek Riman, performing marketing analysis is integral to creating a sophisticated digital marketing strategy for your business. So, move beyond the fundamental concepts covered in SWOT or PESTEL analyses to understand your market and define your target audience.

When working on this holistic digital marketing strategy phase, you must collect valuable feedback and analyze it to generate broad insights into your target market. Make sure you focus on:

  • Age range
  • Likes and dislikes
  • Kind of brand they like
  • Types of pages they follow on social media

When you move beyond the traditional approach and develop more in-depth marketing insights, you can better select your marketing mix and use the budget appropriately. For example, you can reduce costs and spend money on relevant marketing channels.

Remember, extensive market analysis is daunting and time-consuming. However, it can help you gain an in-depth understanding and knowledge of your target audience. Riman Agency can carry out the process via thorough market analysis to help you define your target audience and its characteristics.

Create Audience Personas

An audience persona is a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal client or customer. Because personas allow businesses to view their products or services from their perspective, building a perfect customer persona can help you target your audience and improve your methods to solve their problems.

However, you can build the best customer personas on actual research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. The problem is that following this approach takes time, resources, and money.

Sometimes, companies don’t have enough time, resources, and money to conduct surveys, research, and interviews with their target audiences. However, you can gain valuable insights from small-scale research.

For example, you can pull together a small focus group or interview a few customers. On the other hand, if you think this is impossible, you can follow a fictional approach to creating buyers’ personas.

According to Tarek Riman, author of bestselling digital marketing books, a company must focus on accuracy and precision when following a fictional approach and use information about consumers from previous research studies, web analytics, or email queries.

In addition, an audience persona allows you to act more strategically with your digital marketing methods and execution. It enables you to customize your business or marketing messages to your target audience and streamline communication strategies.

Tarek Riman recommends starting with 2-3 buyer personas. However, if you need more, feel free to create them. Some businesses create 15-20 buyer personas with different characteristics and choose the one that best fits their needs and consumers’ requirements. Consider the following:

  • Who?
    • Background
    • Job
    • Career
    • Martial status
    • Demographic data
      • Age
      • Gender
      • Location
      • Income
    • What?
      • Goals
        • Primary and secondary goals
        • Concerns and challenges
        • Solutions to overcome challenges
      • Why?
        • Realistic goals
          • For example, I am a father with two young children. I want to learn French while living in Montreal, but I find it challenging to spare time. So, I need a flexible schedule to balance my family and work life.
        • Common Objectives:
          • Why would this person purchase or not purchase my online French language course or training program?
        • How?
          • Marketing messaging
            • Describe your business solutions to the persona, such as “Flexible at home French language tuition in Montreal.”
          • Elevator Pitch
            • Sell your persona on your business solution to their problems
            • “Our company provides flexibility that fits your work and family life schedule. We aim to provide course options that best fit your needs.”

Carry Out Customer Segmentation Process

Carrying out customer segmentation is the next step after you have created and used your audience persona knowledge. The purpose is to take the information forward and start to categorically answer different questions, including:

  • What does my target audience want from my business?
  • What are their specific needs?
  • What do I want my target audience to do?
  • What are my goals onsite?
  • What type of content will give them the correct information?
  • What content will convince them to go through the buyer’s journey?
  • How can I convert visitors into customers?
  • What does success look like to me?
  • What are my digital marketing key performance indicators?

 

Like the persona research, you will have numerous customer segments. Each segment will have a unique profile, needs, and desires. Tarek Riman gives an example of how to segment your audience.

Audience Category Market Segment Profile Audience Needs My Goals Converting Content Key Performance Indicators or KPIs
Is my target audience a person, small or large organization, community, startup company, public, or private sector?

 

If the audience category is a person, is it a teenager, young adult, woman, girl, or older adult? What characteristics set each market segment apart?

What features make each segment unique?

 

What is my target audience looking for, and what solution do they need from my company? What are my goals based on the audience’s needs?

Do my goals align with their problems?

Do the solutions I provide solve their issues?

 

What content can convince each segment that my product or service is a reliable solution for their problems? Micro and Macro conversions

 

Competitor Analysis is Key

The advantages of conducting competitor analysis are apparent. As a business owner, you don’t want to miss things or processes your competitors do that may cause a threat to your company and steal traffic or conversions from you. In addition, there are a few critical learning you can take, such as:

  • What are my competitors doing?
  • Can I replicate a competitor’s strategy?
  • Do they have a highly engaged audience on social media?
  • How do they engage users on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter?
  • Is their website intuitive and easy to use?
  • How do they display information and content?

Performing competitor analysis allows you to understand your competitors, their digital marketing strategies or methods that lead to success, and critical factors, such as:

  • Annual reports depending on the company’s size
  • Companies’ profiles and product information
  • Product or service categories
  • Published media articles
  • Press releases
  • Customer reviews
  • Website information
  • Social media platforms
  • PPC activities
  • Keywords
  • Search engine rankings

Your first step in a competitor analysis starts as if you were a prospective customer and run a few tests searching for common or popular keywords. Determine what the market or industry leader does and how it differs from your approach.

Likewise, who appears on top of Google or other search engines’ rankings? Who appears first in the PPC positions? Do I get confused with ads after leaving my competitors’ websites? Answering these questions will give you essential information and insights.

Content Strategy

Content marketing is an integral component of your holistic digital marketing strategy for your business. It creates and shares premium-quality, relevant, and engaging content to attract and convert users into customers.

A solid content strategy involves conversations between your business and customers via brand stories. The primary objective of content marketing strategy is to build a long-lasting relationships with existing and potential customers.

You can achieve your goals by providing your customers with valuable content that improves trust, awareness, and engagement through different channels in the digital marketing mix.

For instance, a content strategy that primarily depends on AdWords PPC and displays ads to drive more traffic will see poorer performance and increase your website’s bounce rates.

The good news is that organic traffic from Google and other search engines can balance this approach. For example, visitors who organically make their way to your website through search queries or interest can yield better results. However, organic traffic requires a solid search engine optimization strategy. Tarek Riman recommends:

  • Relevant approaches or tactics in your digital marketing strategy:
    • SEO
    • PPC
    • Affiliates
    • Display Ads
    • PR
    • Social media marketing
  • Content strategy
    • Conversion rate optimization
    • Lead generation
    • Landing page optimization
    • Product page SEO
    • A/B testing
  • Email marketing
    • Newsletters
    • Promotional emails

Digital Assets Analysis

Grouping your digital assets into the paid, earned, and owned categories is the best way to streamline the analysis. Paid media means you pay money to advertise your ads on third-party platforms.

Likewise, earned media means when people share your content, use word-of-mouth marketing, and discuss your brand, products, or services. Remember, “earned” can either positively or negatively influence your brand because the results depend on your target audience and customers.

Moreover, owned media is a platform or asset you own, create, manage, or control. Having a brand website or blog is a typical example of owned media. Social media channels are also examples of owned media. Popular channels include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The following table will clarify the concept of these three categories:

Paid Earned Owned
PPC

Social media ads

Display ads

Content promotion

Paid influencers

Organic traffic

Reviews

Likes and shares

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Final Words

No business can survive without a solid digital marketing strategy because we live in a fast-paced technology world that requires every company to improve its online presence. Digital marketing increases your brand identity, recognition, and reputation and drives traffic to your website and other platforms.

It promotes your products or services, increases sales, and generates higher returns on investments (ROIs). However, many companies, including small-medium enterprises and giant corporations, find it challenging to streamline their digital marketing strategy or create a holistic plan.

Riman Agency has been in the digital marketing industry for many years. We have a team of professionals with years of experience, extensive/up-to-date knowledge, and skills to create a holistic approach that covers all aspects of digital marketing and improves your business’s bottom line. Contact us today! t@rimanagency.com

What is the best website-building strategy for your business? How to create a solid plan? Here is everything you need to know!


The Ideal Website Building Strategy for Your Business

How to create a website that works for your business and not the other way around.

The primary purpose of developing a website strategy is to combine your business objectives with site design. According to Tarek Riman, a professional digital marketer and experienced entrepreneur, website design aims to make it look pretty with a usable and accessible interface.

A business or company needs a solid website strategy to achieve its goals. At Riman Agency, our professional team defines this as an essential step for any online venture. Whether you want to replace an existing site or create a new one from scratch does not matter.

Riman Agency has carried out various website building and strategy development projects. According to Tarek Riman, a website strategy is a step-by-step process that requires thorough planning and preparation. Riman says a website strategy much include:

  • Proper definition and description of your goals
  • Detailed market study and audience identification
  • Apply branding techniques and adapt digital tools
  • Planning website launch, measuring results, and continuous improvement

Today’s article will give you a step-by-step approach to developing a sophisticated website strategy for your business and improving your company’s bottom line. So, follow the steps/tips/tricks below to streamline the entire process. Read on!

Define Your Objectives

What are your company goals? Most businesses are not all clear about what they want to accomplish. Likewise, you can’t start working on your business website until you get everything down in writing. Therefore, defining your objectives is crucial before working on your website.

  • What is your business model?
  • What type of products or services do you sell?
  • What prices have you set for your products/services?

On the other hand, what is the purpose of building a website if you don’t sell products or services? Is it about providing information to your target audience? Is it an information resource? Are you looking to build a loyal audience for blog posts?

When you answer these questions, you can define your business objectives and use the information to build your website accordingly. Here are a few good examples of objectives for a website strategy.

  • I want users to subscribe to an email list, so I can covert leads
  • I want to sell products or services via the website
  • I want to reach a broader audience and let them learn about my business
  • I want my target audience to find specific information reliably and quickly
  • I want customers to call a number or use other forms of contact
  • I want to improve my business’s online presence via a sophisticated site

Identify Your Target Audience

Who are your customers? Knowing your target audience is critical to providing it with the information and experience they are looking for online. If your site does not look like it will deliver what your target audience wants within the first few seconds, you will lose them. For example, they will go to another website and never return.

According to Tarek Riman, knowing your target audience defines how your site will look and function. Numerous demographic factors play a crucial role in influencing a website design. These include age, gender, profession, location, etc. Tarek Riman recommends considering the following questions:

  • Who is my business website for, or who is my target audience?
  • How do users expect to interact with my website?
  • Do people spend time on my existing website?
  • Do they quickly access information and move on?
  • Will my target audience respond better to text, images, or video?
  • Will they arrive from Google or other platforms?
  • How can I make customers keep coming back?
  • How can I convince my target audience to purchase products/services?
  • What does research into demographic data tell me?

Align it with Your Brand

Riman Agency is one of the most reputable web development companies. Our professional team has created hundreds of successful business websites. The primary reason is that our team aligns the website with a client’s brand.

For example, we put much thought into the colors, typefaces, iconography, logo, writing style, fonts, etc. When working on a business website strategy and planning, you must consider branding a primary factor.

For example, At Riman Agency, we convert CMYK color values to RGB to digitize branding. At the same time, we transform fonts into valid formats/web fonts or buy new licenses. Likewise, we create a responsive logo and sub variants for small spaces, screens, and social media.

At Riman Agency, our professional team follows a step-by-step process to create a web-style guide and document everything before building a business website. The purpose is to align your brand style and corporate values with your business website.

Focus on a Goal-Driven Design

Understanding your business goals and your target audience are crucial steps to building a website strategy. However, how do you convince your target audience to reach your goals?

According to Tarek Riman, if you don’t tell or convince your audience what you want them to do, you can’t expect them to do it. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of subscribers to the email list, you can add a prominent area to your website and offer a free downloadable item in exchange for emails.

Remember, this is your call-to-action or CTA because you tell visitors to take the following step/action. For instance, users can click this button to download the resource/file/material.

According to Tarek Riman, a successful website-building strategy guides its users to the prominent areas, allowing them to take the next step or click a CTA button. Your principal business objectives define your call-to-action or CTA. Your design, layout, and content must fit around this because it directs the visitors into performing a specific action.

Tarek Riman says CTAs are calls to a phone number, clicks to a button, purchases of an app, like on social media pages, etc. It depends on your business goals, meaning how you define your strategy.

Website Navigation

Working on an attractive and functional business website is not good if the essential information, knowledge, and data people are looking for are not on the forefront or are behind a maze of navigational menus.

Even if you create an attractive website, not focusing on the navigational menu can prevent you from achieving your goals. So, focusing on this critical factor is essential to streamlining the entire process.

If your company is a “personal brand, such as you are the face of your business and your visitors decide to become your clients because you are a famous person, make sure you don’t hide CTAs below a give paragraph life story.

According to Tarek Riman, let the visitors find your CTA. If they can do this without knowing whose website they are on or what the website is about, you have made it easy enough. So, congratulations, you have the best navigation to provide customers with the best user experience.

Moreover, if you hose blog posts, which can change a visitor’s life, ensure they reach those articles with a few clicks, or they will never see them. Remember, two clicks are crucial, and three clicks are too much for visitors.

Therefore, consider arranging your website content with lots of information or services into summarized or bite-sized chunks. You can do this by creating a homepage or landing page.

Thus, visitors or customers will skim over the information quickly, allowing them to decide what action to take or where to go next. For instance, if you offer two or three services, you can place them on the homepage using high-graphics content and let users click through to see more info or make a purchase.

In various website development projects that Riman Agency delivers, our professional team uses cutting-edge techniques to streamline the component-based design process. The purpose is to make the homepage of your website more navigational, allowing users to easily access the main parts/components.


Measure the Results

Your business website may look fantastic, but its functionality is critical. You have launched your business website and are excited to see the results. You want to get those extra subscriptions, drive traffic, convert more leads into sales, and increase revenues.

However, how do you know your website performs well? In that case, Tarek Riman, the founder of Riman Agency, recommends planning for measuring the results and creating a strategy for the changes you will make to fine-tune its success.

Moreover, if your new business website is a replacement for an outdated site, you might already have historical data and metrics. These metrics can tell which parts of your business website performed and what areas need improvement.

For example, tools like Google Analytics provide companies with a lot of information about popular pages, peak visit times, visitors’ demographics, and crucial traffic sources.

Therefore, Tarek Riman suggests configuring Google Analytics according to your goals and marketing strategies. The purpose is to get detailed information related to sales funnels.

On the other hand, if you have a new website for a new company or project, you must start recording and measuring metrics, working out patterns, and conducting testing. Remember, A/B testing, also known as split testing, is an integral part of measuring results.

You can conduct this test to measure the results and compare them to see how your website performed and how well it is doing now. Some businesses carry out split testing regularly, and based on the results; they make a change every month.

However, this depends on how your website has performed. So, the time interval you set for result measurements depends on your business goals. You can make changes to your website bi-monthly if it does not perform according to your expectations.

On the other hand, you can test the results bi-annually if it has performed well for the last five months but failed to produce positive results in the previous month. Therefore, this depends on the positivity and negativity of the results.


Final Words

Although launching a business website is exciting, it is daunting and time-consuming. You rely on guesswork if you have not developed a website-building strategy. So, this can lead to severe consequences and prevent you from improving your business’s bottom line.

An attractive and functional website is like a storefront that drives people to the store. However, if you have a poorly designed storefront, most customers will go away and visit another shop.

The same goes for your business website. If you don’t know how to do the job professionally, reliably, and cost-effectively, you can hire an experienced web development company like Riman Agency.

Riman Agency has designed this guide to help companies get into the right frame of mind. Today’s post will help you think deeply about what you need, what your target audience or customers do, and how you want to achieve your goals. Contact Riman Agency for more information or discuss your requirements with our professional team for a solid website-building strategy.


Connect with me if you want to develop your business site: t@rimanagency.com

5 Must-Read Digital Marketing Books for Beginners

We are currently experiencing technology moving faster than it ever has before and with this current phenomenon comes some changes. The technological change applies to almost every field possible. One field, in particular, that is seeing some big changes in the marketing department. More specifically, In the sense that companies are starting to notice the importance of having a strong digital marketing team. The power of analytics, social media, SEO (search engine optimization)  and SEM (search engine marketing), for example, is something that companies cannot simply ignore anymore. Digital marketing is an up and coming profession and now is your chance to get ahead of the crowd and start to gain some knowledge on the field. Below we will list our five favourite digital marketing books you can get today to start you off. These books are all from people with experience in the field, focusing on different things to make a successful digital marketer, so you are in good hands. Whether you are a newcomer or an experienced professional looking to digitally upscale yourselves, look no further and help yourself get informed with these 5 great books.

 

  1. The SEO Way: A beginners guide to search engine optimization by Tarek Riman

Tarek has a plethora of experience within the digital marketing world and has worked with many different businesses varying from small companies to fortune 500’s. His book is meant for you to be able to actually understand SEO and be able to apply it to the situations you are faced with on an average day. The SEO Way is thoughtfully designed to help a majority of people, whether you are a student, a startup, beginner or even a marketing professional. The book highlights the power of SEO and how to wield it and use it correctly. It is an essential manual for anyone looking to grow their SEO prowess and more importantly how to maintain it.  The book offers authentic and unique first-hand experiences and practices that are currently being done out there in the real world, which makes it a truly authentic read.

Get it at https://www.amazon.ca/SEO-Way-Beginners-Search-Optimization/dp/1073695166/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+seo+way&qid=1586997147&sr=8-1

  1. Digital Marketing for Beginners 2020 by Chandler Miller & Donald Preace

As stated in the title of the book, Oliver provides a great all-around introduction to Digital Marketing. It offers an entry-level overview experience for those who are looking to get into digital marketing but don’t know where to start. It really highlights what exactly a digital marketer does and how you have to think to be a successful one. The book also includes tips and tricks to effectively grow a personal or business brand digitally. They also go over different platforms you can/should use to maximize your chances of success which should give beginners a good grasp on how to start your journey on the digital marketing path.

Get it at:https://www.amazon.ca/DIGITAL-MARKETING-BEGINNERS-2020-ANALYTICS/dp/1086530403/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1586997168&sr=8-1

 

  1. Faster, Smarter, Louder by Aaron Agius & Gián Clancey

Faster, Smarter, Louder really stresses the importance of a marriage between a strong business and an equally strong presence on social media. This duo has seen some big success in their lives and are leaders in the digital marketing world. Like Tarek’s book, this book really likes to emphasize that as much as you can put efforts into Adwords and SEO for example that you really need to provide your clients with a human approach to provide them a unique, valuable and effective product. This way of business really takes it back to the roots of the business and explains how having a strong reputation and credibility really drives in online traffic. Just like most users trust Google as our main search engines, Aaron and Gián believe that an audience works psychologically and uses what is practical for them. They truly believe that being authentic is the key to success. This is a smart book to pick up to really tune in on what your customers are looking for when it comes to choosing a product.

Get it at https://www.amazon.ca/Faster-Smarter-Louder-Attention-Digital/dp/154451185X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1586997192&sr=8-1

  1. Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer

As social media is an integral part of the whole digital marketing blueprint it naturally comes with its fair share of negative comments. It doesn’t matter how good your service or product may be, there will always be people who complain for a various amount of reasons. The book describes how to best deal with the complaints using real-life case studies and Jay’s personal experiences. Jay keeps his book entertaining and truly educational to those looking to improve their social media game. The books meat and potatoes are really on how to use these negative complaints to your advantage and to not just ignore them just because they are negative. Especially with the world we live in where we can receive negative complaints anywhere and anytime, it is an important book to have in your library because of impactful negative comments can be to any business, and being able to deal with them correctly is half the battle.

Get it at: https://www.amazon.ca/Hug-Your-Haters-Complaints-Customers/dp/1101980672/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1586997222&sr=8-1

  1. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk

Continuing on the focus of social media and general content this book follows a simple boxing technique that you should use when creating and putting out content for your audience. In this context Jab Jab Jab right hook basically means to drip out easily readable small content so people stay engaged (jabs) and then deliver with a big post (the right hook) to tie it all together with ideally your customer completing a sale. The book tries to steer people who view social media as a way of distribution instead of the ability to create a story that creates better engagement and conversations with consumers. The book adheres to the saying that “less is more” which is especially true when it comes to social media. As every business’s goal is to make a profit Gary smartly helps you out in advising you in the importance of creating engaging content that is different and more relevant than your competition. This book is an accessible tool that can help any digital marketer out when it comes to how to organize effective social media posts that will outclass your competition.

Get it at https://www.amazon.ca/Jab-Right-Hook-Story-Social/dp/006227306X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1586997235&sr=8-1

What makes a quality website? What brings quality results?

Whenever I start working with a client, I can almost guarantee that the biggest hurdle standing between them and the results they want, is the quality of their website.

The conversation usually starts by “Tarek, we did SEO and it didn’t work, We did SEM and it didn’t work, we did social media and that didn’t work, can you help?”

My answer is almost always, I need to have a bigger picture, I need to understand what you have done, audit your campaigns, your site, user behaviour, speed, performance. After I do so 90% of the time I come back with an action plan, and almost always on the top of the list is the website.

I start the conversation, by saying that we can’t fix an issue by throwing money on it, we need to address it heads on, and this is what I usually do.

As a web developer and a marketer myself, I am able to link the marketing with development aspects of websites, which tends to be very helpful for the client, in phases of redesign, development, etc…

After running into this situation with multiple clients, I realized that it is best to put together 10 points that clients should remember when building a site, migrating a site, or redesigning one.

  1. Speed and performance matter, they matter not only from a user experience standpoint but also from an SEO standpoint.
  2. User flow is extremely important, a website should be easy to navigate and easy to flow through. Make sure that you are interlinking properly on the site, make sure that all the pages that you want your visitors to see are one click away.
  3. Content is very important, avoid having weak and thin content pages. You are here to make an impression and show value and the best way you can do so is by providing an abundant amount of content. Fact: the number of words on the highest-ranking pages on Google is 2000+.
  4. Websites are like cars, and are like our bodies, if we don’t constantly maintain them they will get broken, and eventually out of service. Always maintain your site. I tend to update and fix my client’s websites on a biweekly basis.
  5. Constantly update the content, having fresh content is valuable for users and search engines. The fresher your content the higher your chance of ranking and converting.
  6. Time on site is very important, when you are building your site always ask yourself if you would read the page you are creating, ask yourself if you would stay on the site for more than 2 minutes if you saw it for the first time.
  7. Value, always think value. If you are not answering a client’s question or bringing them value, then why would they trust you. I insist on embedding Q&As and FAQs on almost every page of my client’s site, which allows them to should up on top of search results.
  8. Get a good server, all my client’s sites are on dedicated servers. The advantages are massive, from speed to security to performance and peace of mind.
  9. Security matters more than ever, always watch your site’s security and performance, always update your site. This is important now more than ever. I tend to run security updates every week for all the sites I manage.
  10. Think holistic, never think that social media alone works or SEO alone works. Marketing is holistic, make sure that you are doing your best and driving traffic from all fronts.

I hope this list will help you in updating our site and improving its performance on all fronts.

If you have questions or are interested in learning more, let’s have a chat. t@rimanagency.com

12 things to do after launching a new page on your site.

Page Launch Checklist

New pages come with new errors. Every time you launch a new page there are some issues that you didn’t plan for before launch that might end up being costly by the time they are public.

As I have launched 1000s of pages in the past, I aggregated a list of steps that you should be taken after adding a page to a site. This list will help you save time, money and effort as it addresses every aspect of a page from design, to SEO, to analytics and social media.

  • Review page for UX/UI issues

    • visit your site from your tablet, PC and Mobile, navigate the page as a normal user and see if there is anything that is out of place.
    • Images, videos, and audio files are in the correct places, formatted and working on all devices.
  • Check page for responsiveness issues

    • You can do that by visiting the site on multiple devices.
    • or you can use a tool such as  https://responsivedesignchecker.com/ that will allow you to test the style & look and feel of your site across different devices and browsers.
    • Check if the page is mobile-friendly – https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly that will let you know if the page is loading properly on mobile devices and if there any design or code issues that you need to address.
  • Test the page out on Google Analytics, make sure that the tracking code has been added to the page.

    • You can either use view source and see if the code is added there.
    • You can also visit the page, and check real-time reports in Google Analytics to see if traffic is coming in.
  • Check page for loading performance issues – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

    • This will allow you to see if your page is loading properly and fast enough across different devices, and it will provide you with different recommendations that will help improve the performance, some of the recommendations will be related to compressing code or images.
  • Double-Check Your Images

    • Check to see if they are loading properly across devices.
    • Check to see if you added the proper Title & Alt tags.
  • Double-Check Your Content is Optimized for SEO

    • Measure keyword density.
    • Check the content size.
    • Check if the content has high readability.
    • Check to see if you are using the right keywords.
    • Check to see if you are using an optimized title tag.
    • Check to see if you are using an optimized description tag.
    • Low Text-to-HTML Ratio
    • Make sure that the page has enough content (Avoid having a thin content page)
  • Double-check there are no technical SEO issues on the page

    • Make sure that the page is indexable.
    • Check the robot meta tag on the page.
    • Check to see if the page is added to the sitemap.
    • Check if the pages are using schema markup
    • Check to see if the page has the right rel=canonical
    • Make sure page is secure – running on HTTPS
    • Ensure that Open Graph and Twitter Card are debugging properly.
    • Make sure that you are using the proper language declaration – the proper hreflang.
    • Make sure that the page has no AMP errors.
  • Test form and links if any.

  • Test external links

    • Make sure external links are opening in a new window
    • Make sure external links are set to “Nofollow” if nessessary.
    • Check for broken links.
  • Test internal links

    • Click on each link and see if they are leading to the proper page they are meant to go to.
    • Ensure that you are using the right anchor text.
    • Check for broken links.
  • Make sure the text is accurate and error-free.

    • Check for spelling and grammar mistakes.
    • Make sure that you are using one language consistently.
  • Create a backup

 

Always remember that we can’t predict everything, and there are some items that are not on this list that you might run into.

That said, this is a great starting point to ensure that your new page will perform well across different devices, channels, and browsers for both users and search engines.


Learn more about how code can affect your SEO.

Learn about how digital marketing can expand your business in 2021.

So many businesses are slowly focusing on the digital aspect of their business, recognizing the opportunities that come with having a strong online presence. Big or small, digital marketing can have a big impact on your business if executed correctly, which is why I am here to help. Fundamentally, there’s a lot more to Digital Marketing than just search, in fact, Digital marketing is an ever-evolving mix of different digital channels that you can use to promote and drive value to your business. While most people think of SEO and SEM when it comes to digital marketing, and while yes, they are a big part of it, there are also other crucial channels to look at when trying to optimize and prepare your business to excel in the online world.

  1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The process of aligning the various elements of your site (tags, content, data, information, links, etc.) with the best practices of search engines, so that you can rank as high as possible in search engine results.
  2. SEM (Search Engine Marketing): The process of implementing search and display campaigns on advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Bing Ads, with the aim of creating relevant traffic and awareness for your brand and website.
  3. Social Media Marketing: The process of marketing your brand and website on social channels to create awareness, loyalty, retention, traffic and conversions.
    • Most common social channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
  4. Email Marketing: The process of collecting email subscribers, then creating and sending email campaigns intended to grow brand awareness and sell more products and services, or otherwise convert subscribers such as encouraging event sign-ups, content downloads, etc.
    • Common email marketing platforms: Mailchimp, Constant Contact, GetResponse, SendinBlue (this is a highly saturated market, and there are many to choose from)
  5. Content Marketing: The process of creating and sharing videos, articles, images and other forms of digital content.
  6. Local Marketing: The process of marketing your product or service to specific geographical locations or neighbourhoods.
  7. Landing Page Marketing: The process of creating highly targeted landing pages and directing traffic to said pages based on a set of predetermined criteria. The main goal of these pages is to get visitors to stay longer on your site and convert (buy, signup, etc.)
    • Landing page marketing is also known as CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization.

While these are not the only ways to grow your business online, they are a gold standard that should be practiced with every business. The channels help build a foundation for your business to not only survive online but to thrive in it and sail the waters efficiently.


 

Google Analytics Most Important Metrics

Google Analytics (GA) is one of the most powerful tools a business can adopt, and one of the few exceptions to the “you get what you pay for” rule. It’s incredible how much valuable data you can get from a free tool. Valuable and actionable data.

However, the sheer volume of data and metrics available can feel daunting to people who aren’t familiar with analytics. What’s most important? What should you focus on? What should you tackle first? Every business is different, with different goals and markets, so what you focus on will depend on that. But, there are several metrics that can provide great value to virtually every business.

Whether your aim is to improve your search engine rankings, keep people on your site longer, increase onsite conversions, raise brand awareness, etc., these five Google Analytics metrics should be featured on every business’s GA dashboard:

Guy Typing on his mac book

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

 

Here is the list of the most important Google Analytics Metrics:

Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of visitors who arrive on your site, then leave (i.e. close their browser window or tab, or navigate to another website) without accessing any other pages within your site.

Through GA, you can check the bounce rate of your site overall, as well as the bounce rate of individual pages. Checking the stats of individual pages gives you a good picture of your most engaging content and the content that most often leads to people dropping off. For pages where people stay and decide to explore more, you’ll want to boost visibility of those pages, use them as landing pages and try to create similar (but not duplicate) content on other pages.

For pages where people are dropping off, you’ll want to investigate how to improve those pages to reduce bounce rate, and potentially reduce their visibility by no longer using them as key landing pages while you’re working on improvements.

Time on Site

There are two reasons to watch this metric closely. First, search engines are giving more and more weight to ‘time on site’ as an indicator of the value and/or credibility of a page or overall website. It’s a good measurement because people spend more time with content that’s engaging, educational, useful or entertaining. Search engines like Google want to provide users with good content, so it makes sense that they’d rely on behavioural metrics like this one.

The second reason is that it’s an indicator to you of how engaging and useful people find your content. If people are just clicking through pages then dropping off, your content isn’t doing its job. But if they’re spending time with it, it means you’re doing something right.

Again, you’ll want to look at the overall time on site, but mainly focus on individual pages to see which ones are really striking a chord with your audience and which ones could do with some strategic optimization.

Pages Per Visit

Pages per visit is another indicator of engagement, but can also tell you if your site is easy to navigate, which matters to both your visitors and search engine spiders.

If you have a consistently low pages-per-visit rate, one of the first things you want to investigate is your site’s navigation. Are the links or menu items easy to find? Are the links actually working? Are they rendering properly across all browsers and devices, including mobile? Investigate all of this and consider getting someone unfamiliar with your site to give it a try and provide feedback.

If your navigation is visible and accessible, but you’re still seeing a low pages-per-visit rate, then it’s time to look at your content. Look at what they’re seeing first, where they go from there and where they’re dropping off to determine what might need to be optimized.

Conversion Rate

What does “conversion” mean? It will differ from business to business, project to project. It could be a sale, sign up, registration, download… whatever you want people to do on your site, that’s your conversion. Many businesses have several variations of conversions, including macro and micro conversions. For example, a sale or registration could be a macro conversion, whereas a newsletter signup or ebook download might be considered a micro-conversion.

Conversions matter because they’re kind of the whole point of your website. They’re what keep you in business! This is another instance where you will want to drill it down to individual pages to determine the type of content that is most likely to convert, and for which of your conversion types, and what content does not convert well.

Visits and Returning Visits

Person looking at Google Analytics on their phone

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

In GA, new visits are people who have never visited your site before, whereas a return visitor is just that – someone who has been to your site before and is now coming back. Google Analytics does set a two year expiry, so if someone visited your site more than two years ago and is now returning, they will be counted as a new visitor.

You want to watch these metrics because a steady stream of new visitors means any marketing investments or search engine optimizations you’ve been making are paying off (in this case, you’ll want to look at where those visits are coming from to determine which of your investments are working and which are not). If you aren’t seeing noticeable spikes in new visits to coincide with campaigns, that’s an indicator that something has gone wrong. Either the content isn’t engaging enough, or there could be a technical issue like a broken link. This needs to be investigated ASAP.

Returning visits are yet another indicator of how engaging your content is to your audience. If people aren’t coming back, it could indicate an issue with your content, service or products. In this case, you’ll also want to look at where visitors are coming from. For example, are you investing in advertising that brings a lot of initial visits, but not quality visitors that come back again and again? What areas are driving traffic that converts to returning visitors? Invest in more of that and reconsider investments that aren’t driving quality traffic your way.

Takeaway

Never before in history have marketers, business owners and entrepreneurs had such a wealth of data available right at their fingertips. That brings a lot of advantages, but also this whole new problem of too much data to know what to do with it all! Instead of trying to analyze and act on all of it at once, aim to focus on a few key areas to start. Analyze reports, tweak your content and strategies, test, measure, analyze and update over and over again to continually improve your efforts, keep things fresh, respond to the market and grow your business.

 

Learn how to setup Google Analytics here. 

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Google Analytics Permissions Guide

Google Analytics structure is important when it comes to giving permissions and delegating rights to teams and individuals. For example, you may want to permit some people to view reports, but not make changes within the Google Analytics platform, whereas you may want to grant someone else permission to edit dashboards and create filters. The structure is a key part of that.

You can delegate four types of permissions in GA. Permissions can be granted at any level of the GA structure (Account, Property and View). Permission types include:

Manage Users (Permission): This allows someone to remove and add user access to the account.

This is a dangerous right to hand off, especially given the fact that if you grant this level of permission, you might be kicked off the account yourself. Ideally, only one person should be able to add and remove users. This way, you have better control over who has access, and what level of access they have, to your incredibly valuable data.

Edit (Permission): This allows someone to edit accounts, properties and views, filter data, and create goals. The only thing they can’t do is manage users. This permission level is ideal for Analytics experts.

Collaborate (Permission): This allows someone to edit shared dashboards or add annotations. This permission level is ideal for marketers, social media managers, and campaign managers.

Read & Analyze (Permission): This is a read-only level. It allows someone to read and view reports, but they cannot make any changes. This permission level is ideal for CEOs, managers, etc.

Note:

It is important to note that while you can grant permission at either the account, property or view level, that permission is hierarchical. That means, if you grant someone permission at the property level, they will automatically have access at the view level as well. Grant it at the account level, and they automatically have it at the property and view levels.

List of permissions in Google Analytics

 

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