Author: hummingbirdsouth

Your business’ website is the key to the company’s overall success in the digital era. Think of your website as a storefront window display, showcasing your products and services and promoting new deals and offers. As more and more businesses make the push towards strategic digital marketing, you need to ensure that your website is filled with up-to-date, current information and engaging content so that your website is ahead of the crowd. Your website absolutely must give both Google and your audience what they want and what they expect. The best method for accomplishing this is SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the practice of bolstering your website’s user experience and content in order to raise your ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) so that more traffic is driven towards your site. Here are a few tasks to complete in order to best optimize your website for SEO.

1. Make Sure Your Basic Information is Correct

   First off, your basic information should be consistent across all your pages and platforms. If your basic information isn’t the exact same wherever that information can be found, Google will hold it against you and consider your business more unreliable than most. This basic information is generally referred to as your NAP information (Name, Address, Phone). Your NAP information, with the addition of your email information, is what’s at the core of people’s search habits. If you have a Google My Business listing, make sure it matches that information for all of your locations exactly as it is. If people can’t find your business’ name, location and contact info, then there’s not really much of a point in Google referring your site to its audience, is there? (If you don’t have a Google My Business listing, don’t worry. We’ll go over Google My Business later in this blog.) When you clearly state who your business is, where it’s located and what it offers, search engines are much more likely to recommend it to others.

2. Analyze Your Data and Conduct Keyword Research

   Connect the dots from user behavior reports and Google Search Console traffic data to get a more complete picture of how people interact with your website and where that traffic is coming from. You can study how people behave once on your site and also analyze key metrics like the amount of sessions from a user, bounce rates, click-through rates and more. You can learn a lot about the demographics in your audience from these data points. Use your analysis to adapt to the trends that you find. Once you begin understanding how your audience comes to your site and how they interact with it, then you can start researching the most relevant keywords to your audience’s search habits. There are a plethora of tools to use to help you discover great keywords to pepper throughout your web content. It’s important in this task to try to think like how a search engine user thinks. Why would someone search for a particular word? What would they be hoping to find? Implement keywords into your headlines, subheads, title tags, meta descriptions and body copy. (However, be careful not to ‘keyword stuff’!)

3. Apply Your Research to Creating Value-Rich Content

   Poor quality, boring and uninformative content drives users away. Expanding on your data and keyword research with creative, engaging and search-relevant content is your next step to optimizing your webpage for SEO. You want to create as wide a net as possible to bring in search traffic, so create an individual web page for every product, service and location of your business. Make a comprehensive list of all aspects of your company. This will be the framework for your sitemap. Once you’ve outlined the architecture of your website, then start working on fleshing out each page with keyword-infused content. Don’t sell your audience short with nondescript, surface-level information. Google rewards sites that go into well-informed detail regarding the topics its users are searching for. The longer people stay on your site, the higher you will rank on SERPs.

4. Optimize for Local SEO

   Nearly half of all Google searches are local. People are looking for nearby solutions to their queries, so it’s vital for your SEO strategy to account for local SEO. First, you need to claim your Google My Business listing for all of your locations. Make sure that all of the NAP information is correct and consistent across all of your webpages. You’ll be able to correct and update all of your information with Google as you refine your processes and information. Next, schema markup allows Google to better match your business to local search engine users. Schema markup lets Google organize your data more efficiently and pushes that data more in relevant search results. Set your schema markup anywhere you describe your company on the website. Do this for every location on each city page. Once you’ve gotten squared away with Google, add your business to local directories. There are countless directories online for almost every industry out there. Adding your business to these directories strengthens your SEO ranking with quality backlinks. Once again, keep the information correct and consistent with what you’ve already put out there. Add a page that showcases positive reviews to boost your local SEO ranking. Google My Business once again comes into play here, as Google My Business reviews are the second-most influential ranking factor for local businesses. Finally, local SEO won’t do much if you don’t analyze local search terms and create local content. Implement other nearby locations into your keyword usage. Keep it relevant for people in your town. You know how people talk and think where you live. Use that to reach out and find your audience.

5. User Experience Will Take You Far

   How pleasant your site is for users to interact with definitely affects how a search engine will rank your business’ web pages. People nowadays expect fast, quick and easy from every site they visit. You must account for mobile site visitors in this day and age, as more and more search engine users rely on their smart devices for search queries. Google has even begun prioritizing mobile-first indexing in order to reward sites for addressing mobile UX friendliness. Responsive design matters for mobile UX. It does not take long at all for a user to get fed up with having to put up with a site not optimized for mobile use and leave. The same goes for loading speeds as well. You have basically less than three seconds (and that’s being generous!) for your page to load before a user drops your site and moves on. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is an incredibly useful tool to help you determine what you can do to quicken load times for your pages. When you make your business’ web pages fast and responsive for desktop and mobile, you’ll see the sky as the limit for your SEO rankings.

Help your business succeed by utilizing SEO to increase your profitability. Once you have your website correctly optimized with all the elements of SEO working together, consumers will be more aware of your company and the services you offer. Contact Southern View Media to find out how we can help with your business’s digital presence. For a free consultation to formulate a strategic and affordable plan, call us today at 251-583-2605 or visit www.southernviewmedia.com. We are a Google Trusted Agency and will be happy to answer your questions.

Digital marketing provides the opportunity for restaurants small or large to grow their business with any size budget. Recent studies have demonstrated that between 70%-80% of people look up a business online before visiting the store in person or making a purchase. Digital marketing can help restaurants establish a strong internet presence that will expand your business’ reach by improving customer experience and retention. But merely getting online isn’t enough to grow your business substantially, you need to have a strategy. However, if you’re like most restaurant owners, you may not have the time to personally dive deep into studying digital marketing concepts. That’s why we’ve compiled this quick breakdown of some digital marketing strategies to help your restaurant grow.

1. Reach More People with Search Engine Marketing

Over 90% of online experiences begin with the use of a search engine, with a majority of people using Google as their search engine of choice. Getting your business out where people are spending time online is your goal. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of bolstering your website’s design, content and user experience in order to improve your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). One important aspect of search engine marketing that can be quickly implemented is keyword analysis, knowing which keywords are most commonly searched for within a given topic. Integrating the right keywords throughout your web content will signal to a search engine’s crawler bots that your site is highly relevant and a good recommendation for that search engine’s user, leading to your website receiving a higher listing on a SERP. There are plenty of excellent programs and resources to determine which keywords are strongest. Local terminology is also important to factor in like if your restaurant is near a notable landmark or in a particular district of your city.

2. Start a Blog

Another strategy that complements search engine marketing is having a blog and keeping it regularly updated. For restaurant owners, blog posts can be anything from recipes to new menu additions to covering special events hosted and much more. Really, your blog can be whatever you want to write about! It’s all about giving your restaurant a brand voice and identity. You want your blog to reflect your business’ personality as closely as possible. However, we highly recommend that your blog topics focus on highly relevant keyword analysis. By writing a blog with fresh and relevant content to how people are looking up local restaurants on search engines, search engine ranking bots crawling through your site will recognize and reward the content for being a strong match for what people are searching for.

3. Highlight What Makes Your Restaurant Unique on Social Media

A lot of restaurants post the same kinds of posts on their social media pages like images of popular dishes and other specials, but what can you do to stand out from the crowd? What makes your restaurant unique? Social media that highlights what your restaurant has that nowhere else does leads to a stronger brand identity and increases customer loyalty and retention. Do you have a scenic view that can’t be beat? Take a wide photograph and use it as your Facebook Page’s cover photo. Do you have musical performers entertain customers? Post a video of the band playing a crowd favorite and ask for your followers to suggest their own. Show off your staff in appreciation posts! They’re the strongest connection your customers will have with your restaurant so you need to make the greatest impression possible. Posts that help people know the staff that will be preparing and serving their meal will strengthen the customers’ relationship with your restaurant. Knowing what makes your restaurant unique will take some study of your competition, but asking your customers what they personally enjoy the most about your business is an excellent way to get started.

4. Capture People’s Attention with Video

One of the overwhelming trends of the past ten years has been the rise of video marketing online. More than half of social media users spend over an hour watching videos online, creating a great opportunity for restaurants to create content in a format more and more people are preferring to interact with on a daily basis. However, just because you post a video doesn’t mean a lot people will see it. Quality counts more than anything. People won’t consume content just because it’s content. It has to be good content. So, while handheld videos from your phone may be ok for showing a crowded night or a busy kitchen, you will want to hire a video production team to record high quality content of new dishes and products. Also take note of where your video content will be posted. The way different platforms are used affects how users consume content. For instance, short, 10- to 15-second videos go great on Snapchat and Instagram, 1- to 3-minute videos on Facebook and Twitter and longer form videos are a great length for YouTube.

5. Cross-Promote with Local Influencers & Brands

A recommendation from a trusted source can achieve leaps and bounds more for your restaurant than a typical post would. It doesn’t mean you should just wait around for one to fall in your lap. Reach out to local personalities and popular brands you might use in your recipes. Cross-promote each other on social media or in your blogs. Invite local bloggers and restaurant critics to dine with you while sampling some new dishes and talking about local matters. Record it all for a great video post. Have your guest write up a review for even further content. You’ll both benefit from emphasizing your respective place in local culture and from a widened reach through the other’s fan base and followers.

6. High-Quality Food Photography

Showing your menu selections in the best light (literally) across any marketing platforms you use will only work to bring in customers. Businesses need to use the right shooting equipment and editing programs to show off your chefs’ work when words simply won’t do justice to the presentation. If you can make people feel the way they do when they see their meal being walked out just for them when they’re sitting at their computer or are on their phone, you’re going to get people sitting at your restaurant’s tables. Use high-quality food photography for your menu, website, social media pages, Google My Business listing, emails and text campaigns. They’re your images; use them! These photos will help build your brand identity, increase your sales and customer retention, engage your audience on social media and gives you a chance to brag on your employees!

Hopefully, these six digital marketing strategies will help your restaurant thrive and grow. Remember, digital marketing can fit within any budget, so it’s always best to be making fresh and relevant content constantly. The team at Southern View Media is here to help design an effective digital marketing strategy map for your business. Helping businesses establish themselves online is what we do best.

Southern View Media is a digital marketing agency that was created to help local businesses understand the complex digital world and make educated decisions regarding their marketing. We are a balance of talent, intuition, business sense, media solutions and metrics to be a creative problem-solving machine that is fueled by client needs and driven by results, and we are ready to provide businesses with marketing and advertising services at any level. From standing out to breaking into a market we help people find you, trust you, and share you. Contact us to find out how we can help with your business’s digital presence. For a free consultation to formulate a strategic and affordable plan, call us today at 251-517-9425, email us or fill out the contact form here!

With the full calendar year wrapping up, it’s time to look at those Insights, crunch some numbers and develop the social media strategy for your brand. This will elevate engagement with your posts, widen your audience and deepen your reach into demographics. We’ve gathered a few New Year’s resolutions to help keep your vision for your social media 20/20.

Southern View Media is a digital marketing agency that was created to help local businesses understand the complex digital world and make educated decisions regarding their marketing. We are a balance of talent, intuition, business sense, media solutions and metrics to be a creative problem-solving machine that is fueled by client needs and driven by results, and we are ready to provide businesses with marketing and advertising services at any level. From standing out to breaking into a market we help people find you, trust you, and share you.

Contact us to find out how we can help with your business’s digital presence. For a free consultation to formulate a strategic and affordable plan, call us today at 251-517-9425, email us or fill out the contact form here!

One of the main questions we’re asked at Southern View Media regarding social media strategy is: How often should I post on my social media platforms? There are a lot of different specific answers to this question, but the overall general answer is, “As often as you can keep posting quality content consistently over time.”

Quality and consistency matter more than posting frequency. It is important to keep these factors in mind when developing your social media strategy, no matter the platform. However, as social media companies have grown and differentiated from each other in their purpose and use, so have their algorithms when it comes to filling users’ feeds. So there really are certain numbers of times you should post your consistently high quality content depending on the platform. But it’s not all as complicated as you think. Thankfully, social media pages do not have to post content now as often as you may have heard.

Larger pages, like those for billion-dollar corporations, may be able to get away with more posts because of their larger follower counts. Their quantity of posts gets spread out via the algorithm so that no one user is overloaded with posts from the same mega-corporation, unless that user actively engages with those brands on a consistent basis.

Now, on to the really useful stuff for small, medium and large local businesses, like how often to post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

 

Facebook

Most studies concur that posting on Facebook once per day is the most successful rate for your business’ main social media page. Studies have also found that if your page has under 10,000 fans or followers on Facebook and you post more than once per day, you will witness a drop in half of your post engagements. The minimum of posts to post on Facebook is generally agreed upon at three posts per week. The best time to post doesn’t matter as much now as it did in the past, as Facebook’s updated algorithm factors the time of posting much less heavily in filling your News Feed. Check your followers time of activity in your Insights and adjust from there.

 

Twitter

With 500 million tweets per day in 2019, the lifespan of a tweet might be the shortest in all social media. Usually, the lifespan of a tweet is well under an hour. So with that in mind, Twitter requires an active hand to stay relevant. At a minimum, tweet twice a day, with a preferred goal of 15 tweets per day and a max amount of 30 times a day. We recommend sprinkling tweets throughout the day using a decent post scheduler.

 

Pinterest

The benefits of posting Pins on this platform start to diminish the closer you get to posting 30 Pins a day. Follower growth has been a little hard to achieve on this platform the past several years, but posting around 11 Pins a day keeps your account active enough that your follower count should continue to see marked growth.

 

Instagram

The fastest-growing social media platform actively recommends at a minimum one post per day, with two as a suggestion and three tops. Posting around the three-hour blocks on weekdays usually gives your posts the best chance for the most engagement and larger reach, so pay attention to whether your followers are morning people or night owls.

 

LinkedIn

This is by far the easiest scheduling strategy to remember: at least two posts a week, with no more than one post per day. The morning offers your post its best chance to reach the optimum numbers of users on the business networking platform. Blog posts are excellent opportunities to establish your brand as a longform expert in your field, but don’t overdo it on LinkedIn. It’s used less often throughout the day than all the other social platforms.

 

YouTube

Your main focus with developing your YouTube channel should be consistency. You should create a specific posting schedule, post that schedule onto your YouTube account, pace yourself and make and save those YouTube videos and have them ready to upload when you need them on your schedule. YouTube’s best times to upload are between Noon and 3pm on Thursdays and Fridays. Avoid Mondays and Tuesdays like the plague. They are YouTube’s worst days to upload for views and engagement.

 

Well there you have it! A comprehensive posting strategy for the major social media platforms. Remember, every account is different and user patterns change all the time, along with each platform’s algorithms. So stay vigilant, follow Southern View Media on our social platforms or visit SouthernViewMedia.com for more insights, tips and updates. We put you online so you don’t get left behind.

Instagram is constantly developing new modifications, changes, features and updates to their algorithm on the photo and video sharing app throughout the year. The company also posts tips and notes on how to best alter your use of the app to get the best results. This blog will cover updates and notes on how to best implement hashtags in your posts, what’s happening to Likes, what you can expect from an updated algorithm and how best to get verified on the app.

 

Hashtags

Hashtags are an effective way of categorizing your posts, videos and pictures. However, in the past, hashtags have gotten out of hand. Hashtags allow posts to be collected into vast libraries of posts tagged with the same hashtag, creating a folio of similar subjects to explore for inspiration and ideas. Unfortunately, this system was abused via spam to insert off-topic ads and promotions in categories they had no business being in, so Instagram has issued a few recommendations.

-The IG team doesn’t recommend using more than TEN hashtags. The sweet spot is usually in the spectrum of three to five hashtags per post.

-Hashtags need to be highly relevant to the content of the post. If it’s not in the post, don’t mention it. Concentrate on what the content of the post is about, not the overarching continuity of your profile. If all of your posts have the same hashtags, it becomes incredibly redundant.

-Post your hashtags in your caption. Don’t clutter your post with a comment of hashtags.

-A block of 30 hashtags (especially when put in a comment) sends the message that it could be “spam” according to the IG team. Nobody reads them all anyway.

 

Likes

Likes on Instagram have become a commodity of their own in the 21st century self branding ecosystem. Now, Instagram is slowly rolling out updates that hide any one profile’s post likes from being seen by visitors to their pages or posts.

-Update is in 5-6 countries right now.

-A lot of IG employees have been testing it out personally for the past eight months, and prefer the app without seeing others’ Like totals.

-Likes will NOT disappear altogether. They will just disappear from being visible to people other than you.

-You can still see your posts’ Likes on the app’s backend (and share with brands if you’re a creator) if you choose to.

 

The Algorithm

Instagram’s algorithm determines the nature and order of your Instagram feed based on your interests and interactions. A few notes on the update:

-The algorithm will never go back to being chronological.

-The time of day you post doesn’t really matter, despite Insights marking out when your followers are active.

-Even if your audience is more “active” during the day, it does not mean that your posts will have a better chance of being seen.

-The way your content gets seen is controlled by whether or not your followers are engaging with your post. In order to see the content you want first and foremost, you absolutely HAVE to engage with it by liking and commenting on the posts and accounts you like the most, and vice versa for your own content. It signals to Instagram that you would like to prioritize that account over your other follows.

-So moving forward, your profile’s posts need to garner more likes and comments so your content will appear at the top of everyone’s feeds as one of their priorities.

 

Verification

Getting your profile verified on Instagram can do wonders for your follower count and post interactions. However, users have been having issues with receiving notice on successful verification for their profiles. Instagram has passed along a few points about the process.

-The only way to get verified is by using the public verification form where you can apply through the app.

-The decision will show up in the “Activity” tab, which can get buried under every notification in the tab unfortunately.

-If you haven’t heard back re: verification after a while, you likely weren’t approved or it was buried under “Activity” notifications.

-A lot of the verification decision is based on what Instagram calls the “notability” factor: press coverage, mentions, top results on Google, etc.

 

There you have it! Instagram is one of the more quick to adapt social media apps and they are constantly tweaking updates here and there. We hope this rundown has helped. Keep an eye out for future Southern View Media discussions on updates to our favorite apps!

 

Are you looking to get help with your Instagram? Contact us for a free consultation to formulate a strategic and affordable plan, call us today at 251-583-2605 or visit www.southernviewmedia.com. Thanks to @lindsaysilbs for sharing this awesome information with us! We love her Instagram Intel!

Digital Takeover

The floodgates have opened when considering the amount of advertising that is on the Internet. Over half the population (55%) of the world uses the Internet on a regular basis. Advertisers have followed audiences into the digital realm and now over $240 billion of all ad money is spent digitally marketing on the Internet’s 1.94 billion websites. With over 7 billion Google searches performed each day and ecommerce rapidly gaining ground in overall retail sales, Search Engine Optimization is absolutely critical for any business’ digital marketing strategy. It’s where the people and the money is, and where your business should be, too.

Mobile’s Edge Has Been Noticed

The landscape of digital marketing changes rapidly, with many new elements being introduced every year and immediately having an impact. One of the major shifts in Internet use this decade is the rise of mobile devices. Mobile traffic has surpassed that of desktop computers, with 48.2% of all online traffic coming from mobile and tablet devices. Google and other major search engines have started to reorientate their whole operation to reflect this new trend in data consumption. Businesses need to reflect Google’s changes in their own digital marketing strategies.

All Signs Point to SEO

One strategy that has come into even more prominence with the rise of mobile devices and search engine’s subsequent adjustments to better present data for mobile consumers is Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of your business’ web traffic by improving the visibility of your business’ website on search engines. SEO is an Internet marketing strategy that your business should consider because it is an efficient method for positioning your brand as an authority that will be highly recommended to web users searching for information relevant to what your business does.

Why Choose SEO as a Digital Strategy?

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO takes into account how search engines operate, their behavior-determining, computer-programmed algorithms, what people terms and keywords people search for and which search engines are the most popular. Peak optimization is achieved through editing and adding site content, increasing backlinks, modifying HTML and another coding to both increases a site’s relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. A website will receive higher traffic because a search engine ranks a site higher in the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then be converted into customers and put revenue in businesses’ pockets.

Trust and Credibility

SEO builds up trust and credibility for your brand. Google will analyze your site based on its standards for web site quality and place it in its corresponding ranking on its search results pages. Because Google is such a behemoth of the Internet, it’s standards are used to unofficially determine the standards for the rest of the Internet. For instance, Google’s rankings reflect a pleasant user experience and strong, relevant information from backlinks. High-quality backlinks reinforce your brand’s trustworthiness by linking your page to other strong web pages. The more strong backlinks you have, the better your information and the higher your rank on Google search results. Users see your high ranking and automatically know that your site is legitimate because of Google’s standards.

Smooth User Experience

Google has learned to analyze the experienced user’s go through looking for the information they’re searching for. If it takes a lot of clicks to find that information, Google will reflect this inefficiency with a lower search ranking. Customers know what they want and know how long it should take them to find it. The right SEO leverages this to work in a brand’s favor.

Local SEO Strengthens Your Site in a Local Market

Local SEO helps your company stand out in local searches. With the rise of mobile traffic, local SEO means increased engagement, traffic and conversions for local small and mid-sized businesses. It’s absolutely necessary for local businesses to employ SEO because it optimizes a business’ digital presence for a specific area. Brands must be visible in places where people need them to make a worthy connection. Local SEO enhances visibility and lets potential customers find the answers, and the businesses providing those answers.

And, Finally, SEO is Cheap!

SEO budgets are as flexible as the businesses managing them. SEO is a long-term investment that will improve with more time, effort and attention put into it. While the cost of SEO is cheap, the payoffs are tremendous and can lift your business into a new phase of brand recognition, trustworthiness and local visibility.

Video Marketing is soaring towards becoming the strongest marketing trend of 2019. Video Content is getting the attention of all the major social and tech media giants because of media consumption trends by the general population, because creating video content has gotten cheaper and offers a greater ROI and because new video format allows for many different placements for ads. If your business or brand has not bought into video marketing yet, maybe these reasons will convince you to start recording and sharing!

 

More People are on Mobile and Streaming Than Ever Before

The rise of mobile data consumption is the overarching media trend of the past decade. Mobile traffic has now surpassed that of desktop computers, with 48.2% of all Internet traffic coming from mobile users. The display format of mobile devices naturally trends towards playing videos horizontally, matching up very closely to film and video’s preferred 1.85:1 or 2.39:1 aspect ratios. US consumers are watching videos more than ever before, and streaming accounts for 15% of their 40 hours a week spent watching videos digitally. More people are cutting the cord with cable providers, preferring the content online in skinny bundling packages like Spotify Hulu. Audiences are no longer watching commercial rotations on cable and broadcast en masse like they were just 5 or 10 years ago.

 

More and More Social and Tech Brands are Concentrating on Video

The giants, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have been closely monitoring how their users have been consuming data in this new digital age and have appropriately implemented changes in their platforms to reflect data consumption habits. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly stated the futures of Facebook and Instagram is in video, and that he will spend as much as he needs to accelerate the move. His plans focus on initiatives like Facebook Watch, and native ads playing before, during and after video streams. Facebook encourages brands to post videos around three minutes in length based on their studies on audience viewing habits, for example. Instagram is following its parent company, naturally, expanding beyond its original still image format with minute-long video posts and the longer IGTV video format. Twitter even relented and now allows videos to be posted along with tweet captions. Amazon is barreling along with its streaming services for Amazon Prime members. And, most impressively, Google has announced that it will have its AI programs search for video snippets relevant to search queries and will autoplay them on that query’s results page.

 

 

Video is Cheaper to Create Now, Ad Spend is Performing Better Than Expected

For a long time, it was hard to make interesting videos quickly, cheaply and efficiently. Creating videos took too long, the tools were hard to learn and everything and everyone involved were too expensive. Nowadays, everyone can record videos and edit them with ease if they have a smartphone. So we now have a situation where across the field, online video is getting better at an amazing rate. And going hand-in-hand with this information is the return on investment now enjoyed by marketers on digital video. Digital video is costing less to produce, generates more interest in a brand, product or service and is more effective at conversions than non-video advertising. People watching video are more likely to act. Viewers retain the information from videos much better than receiving it via text. For example, marketers using digital video had their revenue grow 49% faster than those who didn’t.

 

Video Changes with the Times, and Often Reflects Progress Easiest

It seems like the days of your typical 15-second and 30-second pre-roll spots are a thing of the past. Marketers have gotten extremely creative in where video can be placed, creating more opportunities for brands and services than ever before. Video can be put wherever there are eyes on screens. Now it’s no strange thing to see an ad play natively before a video stream, mid-stream or after. Instagram has video ads between users’ Stories, YouTube offers its TrueView streaming ads and Twitter plays videos between every couple of tweets.

 

Video is Able to Tell and Show a Story in Vastly Different Formats

As mentioned earlier, people retain information much easier via video than any other format. Makes you wonder why I’m writing this all down then, huh? While blogs definitely have their purpose and benefits, video is easier and quicker to consume. Your message is more likely to be heard and understood the way you meant it to. Your message can now be told via 10-second stories on Facebook and Instagram. You can host live video sessions like a Q&A or an Ask Me Anything. 360-Degree and VR videos allow you to transport audiences into immersive settings and scenes. And people are wanting to learn more about products and brands in paid video classes and tutorial videos. The way you want your video to share your message is now only limited to your imagination!

In the past several years, we’ve gone through a behavioral shift in how we interact with the internet in our day-to-day lives. Over 78% of Americans use the Internet and there are over a million new internet users logging online for the first time every day. Our time is spent balancing being present in the digital world and the physical one. Our eyes and time are directed towards screens more often than not. Marketing reflected this change in where people’s attention was held. Since then digital marketing underwent seismic changes, culminating in mobile Internet usage finally surpassing that of desktop computers for the first time last year. With the Internet being available in people’s pockets for most of the past decade, several forms of digital marketing became critical for a business’ success.

 

Social Media

 

Social media is instrumental in developing a brand. Each post creates depth, personality and opportunity for businesses to interact with current and potential customers and clients. There are plenty of social media platforms to facilitate these interactions like Facebook and Twitter. However, Instagram and LinkedIn are two social media sites on the rise with their unique applications for marketing, sales and brand development. A majority of people use social media to reference and brief themselves on a brand they’re interested in, with businesses not active on social media losing credibility.

 

Google Ads

 

Google Ads is the tech giant’s online advertising platform where advertisers allow Google’s servers to place brief advertisements, offers, product listings, etc. for key search words people are entering in segmented market shares. These bids successfully place a business’ ad in a place where their target audience is looking. It’s a brilliant method of making sure your dollars are spent to place ads in relevant locations. And Google Ads is extremely cost-efficient, with bids costing pennies and your budget is determined only by your business.

 

Website

 

Your website is your business’ chance to present itself in the best light possible. It’s an opportunity to create a unique identity for your brand, inform visitors about your business, position your brand as an expert in its field and finally convert visitors into returning clients and customers. Consumers hold businesses that have websites with short loading times, a pleasant color scheme and intuitive interfaces in the highest regard.

 

Digital Display Ads

 

Digital display ads is the new term to identify what used to be called banner ads, or the small ads that take up the empty space on a business’ webpage. They’re a form of pay-per-click advertising and don’t just come in banner shape and size anymore. While paid search ads appear on a search engine like Google’s results pages, display ads appear on the sites that are shown in those results pages. These web pages are ones relevant to your product or service, and a more effective placement for your ad. For digital display advertising on the Google Display Network, display ads appear on various types of websites like blogs, news organization pages, Gmail, YouTube and others. A digital display ads effectiveness is measured in impressions and clicks, telling you how many people have seen and interacted with your digital display ad.

 

SEO

 

Search Engine Optimization is the process of strengthening the quality and increasing the quantity of your website’s Internet traffic by increasing its visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s an improvement of free, organic results. SEO involves modifying a site’s code, adding content like a blog with backlinks and other adjustments in UX to improve the site’s rankings. A significant portion of SEO also involves integrating key search terms into your page’s copy to increase its relevance in search engines’ ranking algorithms. SEO requires an extensive knowledge of many areas in digital marketing in order to be successful, but offers a high return on your investment.

 

If you need help with promotions or advertising, contact Southern View Media to find out how we can help with your business’s marketing goals. For a free consultation to formulate a strategic and affordable plan, call us today at 251-583-2605 or visit www.SouthernViewMedia.com. We are a Google Trusted Agency and will be happy to answer your questions.