by Marianna Muscat | Apr 15, 2020 | Facebook, Social Media Marketing
According to Facebook, they have more than two billion users and more than 140 million businesses use their apps to connect with customers. Social selling via social media platforms such as Facebook is a growth opportunity for South African businesses.
Video eCommerce
As part of its on-platform purchase option strategy, Facebook acquired a video commerce start-up. A modern twist on the original home shopping network, this video commerce business is focused on enabling users to make direct product purchases via videos being broadcast live. After all, everyone with a mobile phone watches videos.
On-Platform Purchasing
Facebook has been building an on-platform cryptocurrency, aiming to facilitate fee-free fund transfers within its network. Once people are moving money around within the Facebook system, it will be so much easier for them to make on-platform purchases. Facebook is also expanding to Facebook Pay and WhatsApp Pay, with Instagram most probably the next platform for eCommerce expansion.
To expand its on-platform purchase options, Facebook also acquired an app with more than 2 million users, focused on the Indian marketplace, connecting sellers with customers through WhatsApp. Users in Thailand consider the use of live video a more effective way of presenting products and facilitating consumer queries in real-time. So, East Asian markets such as Thailand seem to be the next region for Facebook’s online shopping push.
Emerging Markets
Emerging markets have billions of users, and if Facebook can expand the utility of its platforms into shopping and payments where users pay bills or use the platform as a bank, these everyday actions can become critical for Facebook. Potentially making Facebook an essential app for many users in emerging markets within Asia, South America and Africa, including South Africa.
WSI OMS can help your business expand its social selling abilities on various social media platforms, including Facebook. Create a personal, effective social media presence to engage with customers online. Contact us if you want to change your business with social selling.
by Marianna Muscat | Apr 13, 2020 | SEO, Social Media Marketing
If you are posting video content on YouTube as part of your content marketing strategy, you will obviously want those videos to be seen by as many potential customers as possible. However, just like you need to put effort into SEO to see an improvement in your website rankings, you will need to do the same in order to rank well on YouTube. Below, we discuss three useful tips to help you generate the results that you want.
Keyword Research
You can already see how similar SEO for YouTube is to regular website SEO – it also begins with thorough keyword research. You need to ascertain what people are typing into the YouTube search bar when they are looking for video content like yours. Find keyword ideas simply by using YouTube’s Search Suggest feature. For instance, if you are creating videos about content marketing, start by typing in ‘content marketing’ and watch as the suggestions pop up, like ‘content marketing strategy’ and ‘content marketing 2020’.
Choosing the Best Keyword
Do not just opt for the first relevant keyword that YouTube’s Search Suggest feature recommends, especially if your channel does not have many subscribers. In order to see a jump in rankings, you should start by targeting popular keywords that are also low competition keywords. How do you find this out? Type the keyword in question into the Google search bar as follows: “your keyword:youtube*”. Right at the top of the results, you will be able to see how many YouTube videos are currently optimised for that keyword. Ideally, you only want to target a keyword that has a result of five or fewer digits.
Keep Viewers Watching
High retention or how long you can keep viewers watching a particular video, is a massive SEO ranking factor for YouTube. So, in other words, focus on creating content that is both relevant, interesting and shareable!
Need help maximizing SEO for YouTube? Specializing in SEO and link building strategy, WSI OMS is the digital marketing agency that you can count on! Contact us today for more details.
by Marianna Muscat | Apr 8, 2020 | SEO
SEO (search engine optimisation) is a key part of any digital marketing campaign to guarantee potential clients find you and your website on the internet. To get more traffic to your website, you must boost your search engine rankings. One way to do this is by gaining backlinks for credible industry websites. Earning backlinks can be challenging, and requires networking, content marketing and utilising the right tools. Here are four ways to get more hyperlinks pointing to your website and boost your SEO in 2020.
1. Create Link Round-Up Posts
Everyone wants expert tips and opinions on succeeding in our career or business. Publishing expert content round-up posts on your website not only provides useful information, but experts you mention will often re-share or even link back to the post from their sites.
2. Connect With Clients
Connect with clients who have a digital presence and well-established website. Then get your guest post published on their website. This is a win for everyone as they get free quality content and you get backlinks from their website.
3. Connect With Experts on Facebook Groups
Join the Facebook groups in your industry to connect with bloggers or marketers. Add value to the group by sharing relevant industry trends and insight. If you share your content, it must be highly relevant to the audience of the Facebook group.
4. Post Case Studies and Industry Statistics
Content creators often link to research-backed case studies and statistics. Case studies create more visibility within a specific section of an industry, and you will have a better chance of others linking back to it if your blog post is filled with original, data-driven insights that include case studies.
WSI OMS offers link building services within the search engine optimisation service. For more information on SEO, contact us today.
by Marianna Muscat | Mar 24, 2020 | E-mail Marketing
Client engagement is an important aspect of digital marketing. However, there is just not enough time to interact personally with every customer. So, to be not only effective in your client-engagement strategy, but also cost-effective, marketing automation would seem to be the logical answer. However, a couple of common reservations are that marketing automation is impersonal and takes away from your personal interactions with clients. Yet, if done right, marketing automation can include all the touch points and interactions that allow people to know you, trust you and ultimately build your brand.
In other words, if you want to boost your bottom line, then you need to invest in marketing. You can’t sit back and hope that people will magically find your business. Fortunately, marketing automation makes it easy to engage with clients in a meaningful way without losing precious time needed elsewhere in the business. Here are some easy ways to incorporate marketing automation into your engagement strategy.
Personalised Emails Can Nurture Valuable Relationships
You can set up your email marketing to blast out quick and simple emails, or you can create a complex set of emails that need to be delivered to recipients in a specific sequence based on pre-defined triggers and behaviours. The better you get with email marketing, the more personalisation you can add to them. Consider the impact of sending personalised promotions or following up with customers who have abandoned their shopping carts. It can work wonders for your business.
Go Mobile
You can create a consistent experience with your brand through mobile apps and mobile marketing. Everything from push notifications to delivering the right message at the right time can be used to create a seamless experience with your business.
Schedule Content and Make it Shareable
You can automate all of the following:
- Schedule posts in advance,
- Create polls and other content that people like to engage with, and
- Include share buttons on all your website content to allow your website visitors to share their content with friends effortlessly.
Need professional help? Contact WSI OMS for assistance on marketing automation.
by Marianna Muscat | Mar 17, 2020 | SEO
If you want to improve your SEO services, you need to understand what makes Google tick. And, the answer is amazing user experiences. In essence, Google is a service provider, and it wants to remain at the top of the industry by providing its users with the best experience possible.
The main takeaway is that Google values the user’s experience. So, how do you go about improving the user experience on your website? It all starts with technical SEO. There are two parts to technical SEO that you need to understand:
- There are high-impact technical issues, and
- There are low-impact technical issues.
According to HubSpot, a 1-second delay in website loading speed can reduce conversions by 7%. Increasing your website loading speed can increase conversions. Mozilla Firefox reduced their average loading time by 2,2 seconds, which increased their downloads by 15,4%. That is a massive increase for a website like Firefox, which gets a ton of downloads already.
At the very minimum, you should get your website’s loading speed to 3 seconds or less. The first thing you should do is benchmark your site’s loading speed. You can go to tools.pingdom.com and enter your URL. It is a good idea to run your site through Pingdom from at least three different locations so that you can get an average loading speed.
There are countless resources online on how to improve your website’s loading speed. But, if there is one thing that determines how quickly your website loads, it is your web hosting. You can make all kinds of micro-changes to try to improve your website’s loading speed, but nothing will make a bigger difference than your web host.
You might be familiar with areas of SEO such as responsive website design, optimisation and link-building. But, did you know you can improve on your business marketing strategy by focusing on the experience your website users have. For more information on improving the user experience and other areas of SEO services, follow our blog today.
