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In this age of social media dominance and instant messaging apps, email remains a reliable and effective means of communication. For businesses, mastering the art of email marketing cannot only help in staying connected with customers but also in driving sales.

The foundation of any successful email marketing campaign lies in having a quality email list. It’s not just about quantity, but about having subscribers who are genuinely interested in your products or services. Southern View Media emphasizes the importance of creating opt-in opportunities on your website, leveraging social media and using other channels to organically grow your email list.

Personalized communication is key to capturing the attention of your audience. Southern View Media suggests segmenting your email list based on customer behavior, demographics or purchase history. This allows you to send targeted and relevant content, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion. Personalization goes beyond just addressing the recipient by name; it’s about understanding their needs and preferences.

In the cluttered world of inboxes, your emails need to stand out. Engaging content and eye-catching designs are crucial elements. Business owners should create content that adds value to their subscribers’ lives. Whether it’s informative newsletters, exclusive promotions or captivating visuals, a well-crafted email can leave a lasting impression and keep your brand top-of-mind.

Time is of the essence, and automation can be a game-changer in email marketing. Automate welcome emails, follow-ups and even personalized recommendations based on user behavior. Southern View Media highlights the efficiency gains and the ability to nurture leads without constant manual intervention. Automation not only saves time but ensures timely and relevant communication.

Analytics are crucial in refining your email marketing strategy. Tracking open rates, click-through rates and conversion metrics provides valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. Regularly analyzing this data allows you to adapt your approach, optimize campaigns and continuously improve the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

With increasing concerns about data privacy, there comes a need to adhere to email marketing regulations. Respecting subscribers’ privacy and obtaining their consent builds trust. Clearly communicating your privacy policy and allowing users to easily opt-out demonstrates your commitment to ethical marketing practices.

Email remains a powerful and versatile tool for businesses. Southern View Media encourages businesses to leverage the full potential of email marketing by focusing on building quality lists, personalizing communication, creating compelling content, embracing automation, analyzing data and ensuring compliance. When used strategically, email marketing can not only help businesses stay connected with their customers but also drive sales and foster long-term relationships. It’s time to unlock the full potential of this timeless marketing channel.

This June, we ask you to join us in raising a metaphorical glass in honor of the Lanier family.

In 2018, Mr. Lanier and his wife, Teresa, founded Jubilee Youth Service and Leadership Academy (J.Y.S.L.A.). The non-profit is an affordable and high-quality mentorship and leadership program. Through J.Y.S.L.A., the Laniers hope to transform the lives of young boys along the Alabama Gulf Coast.

“We teach our cadets perseverance and how to solve problems and challenging circumstances,” Mr. Lanier said. “The results are them learning character, grit and a never-give-up attitude.”

Both Mr. and Mrs. Lanier are immensely qualified to run a youth non-profit, and are clearly committed to enriching the community. Mr. Lanier is a proud native of Mobile, Alabama. His extensive qualifications include Utah State University, the United States Army and a juvenile detention bootcamp instructor for the Boys & Girls Club. Mrs. Lanier’s background is just as impressive with 38 years of nursing experience, especially with the underprivileged population.

J.Y.S.L.A. provides a variety of experiences for young boys that they may not find anywhere else. For example, the Laniers and their volunteers host the Early Risers: Leadership & Ranger Outdoor Adventure Camp. The boys and their mentors visited the Hank Aaron Birthplace Museum in May 2021. There are still spots available for the tour of the Mobile Bay peninsula in July 2021!

If you would like to contribute to J.Y.S.L.A. and, by extension, give back to the Gulf Coast community, there are a variety of ways to do so! You can become a sponsor or make a one-time donation. If you would like to enroll your son in this unique program, visit www.jysla.org today.

Social media has gotten big. Very big. Between Facebook, Instagram and Twitter alone, literally billions of people are connecting, sharing, conversing and more. It’s great, but it does come at a cost. Businesses looking to market using these platforms are presented with a very uphill journey; a battle to gain and retain relevance amidst a giant mass of content presented to each user every single day. It can be like waving a hand-drawn poster in the air in the middle of a crowded football game: many will see it, but your arms might get pretty tired. So, it’s time to recognize a rising star in the social media world: Parler.

What is Parler?

Parler is a social media platform not unlike Facebook and Twitter in their earliest days, which can be appealing for many. Its intention is to be a smaller, more niche, content-driven platform that returns to an older form factor for a social media app. For one thing, it’s chronological. If you don’t know, most of the primary social media platforms have algorithms that determine the order of posts you should see in your timeline. This has led many to be concerned about missing content that they actually want to see.

Another thing to note about Parler is that it’s primarily unregulated. Where Facebook’s size gives it the responsibility of fact-checking and regulating information, Parler returns to the old-school days. It’s a free-for-all, user regulated with no platform intervention. Parler is also completely unmonetized, meaning it has no advertising platform and will not run ads on peoples’ timelines. Instead, Parler’s long-term goal is to give businesses options for influencer marketing, giving you the power to tap into the platforms of influential users and their platforms to market your business. 

Who Could Benefit?

Those features are big draws for users, and are a few of the reasons that in only a few months Parler has amassed over 2 million active users: certainly enough to interest a business looking to market themselves, but not so much that you have to worry about falling into the ocean of content. Parler is worth considering for businesses already doing social media marketing, as the platform itself acts a lot like Facebook, and especially those who may not be finding as much engagement as they want to see. Businesses could also seriously benefit from the chronological timeline. Without having to contend with social media algorithms that constantly change, and changing content to fit new standards that seem to emerge every day, the chronological timeline gives everyone the same fair chance of being seen on users’ timelines. In this way, there is not a huge discrepancy between user profiles and business pages, making marketing on Parler a relatively simple activity that can garner results.

Here at Southern View Media, we’re offering Parler as an optional part of our content marketing package. If you could benefit from posting your content to Parler, we’re ready to take the plunge and help you with it. If you’re interested in boosting your business on social media, be it Parler or anywhere else, call us today!

Is there a secret to growing your clientele on the web? Sure, you can upload impeccable content every day on social media platforms, but how will others who aren’t following you come about your business? The answer is simple, but versatile, and relies on digital ads to get your brand noticed and ahead compared to other competitors that might not be using this form of promotion. Digital ads are known to benefit businesses if implemented effectively, so here are some tips to help you do just that.

Reach Target Audience Faster

There is a broad range of options available for reaching your target audiences using digital ads. By narrowing your target audience reach, you can filter things such as keywords, locations or demographics to help potential customers engage with your brand and click on the ad. This way, you are able to engage with your target audience on shared interests while saving you time compared to using traditional advertising. 

Determine Display Channels

Once you have a general understanding of who your target audience is, you can determine which display channels you want to use for your digital ads. A display channel is a website that your display ad is showing up on. By arranging which channels work best or are used the most according to your audience, you become more aware of how often you can change channels as platforms evolve or establish channels that your audience prefers. This way, you are not sticking to just one marketing tool and can easily garner views by a high number of web users across various channels.

Develop ROI Through Marketing Tools 

As a business owner, it’s never a good feeling to know you had a potential customer leave your site before making a purchase. Sometimes, they may have left an item in their cart but did not proceed to the final purchasing steps. This is where integrated marketing tools such as using cookies will help retarget and remarket those leads. Digital ads will appear on the other sites they visit, making them more susceptible to clicking on the items they didn’t purchase and redirecting them back to your webpage. It’s a highly effective tactic for you, and just a gentle reminder to them that they may want to reconsider leaving your business behind.

Measure Data-Driven Results

At this point, you already have an idea of how much digital ads can help benefit your business. But how far can you go as an owner to be able to measure these data-driven results? Luckily, optimization programs that measure ad performance exist to be able to measure such results on all aspects of your digital ads such as when using ad campaigns. Engagement is also measured here, and utilizing that data to make smart decisions can boost your business overall quality score. 

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 251-583-2605 or visit www.southernviewmedia.com. We are a Google Trusted Agency and will be happy to answer your questions.

Google announced its latest algorithm update on October 24, 2019, a few days after its initial rollout had already started. The update will affect up to 10% of queries on the search engine, making BERT one of the largest updates from Google in the past five years.

 

BERT

BERT is an acronym representing “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers” (We’ll get to this in a second, in plain English) and is a “neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training.” Whew! That’s a mouthful.

 

BERT Explained

BERT’s focused on figuring out the intent of your Google searches better. Instead of looking at each search query word by word, BERT lets Google look at the entirety of the search query in order to get a more accurate idea of what the desired result is. In the past, simple words, minor modifications or discrepancies in search queries and Google Ads Keywords could substantially change the search query result from what the user wanted pulled up. BERT allows the search engine interpret the desired result from the whole query, and not get distracted by the wrong details.

 

Look at like this, when someone asks you what a seahorse looks like, do you start out by drawing each individual part separately and gluing them all together? Or do you start with the overall shape first and then fill in the details as you get to each section of the seahorse?

 

Examples

In the first example provided, Google illustrates how a small mistake like using the wrong preposition would affect the algorithm’s interpretation of traveling to the US vs from the US.

In the second example provided, Google used to autocorrect “stand a lot” to “stand-alone” missing the overall intent of the search query, which wanted Google to focus on the physical demands of the job. Now, BERT helps Google interpret the query along the user’s line of thinking: the physical demands of working as an esthetician.

How BERT Will Affect Your SEO

Make sure you watch your traffic for any changes over the next several weeks. This algorithm is not going to punish anyone, thankfully. This update is only meant to better interpret desired search query results from the query itself.

 

The best way to come out on top of the BERT update? Know the questions and reasoning behind your target audience’s search queries. Then, create your content based on the goal of answering as many of these questions as possible.

 

Good content in this case comes in the form of well-written, long-form guides and blogs that sufficiently answer the questions your audience has, and even questions they haven’t thought up yet!

 

If you’re traffic is decreasing because of the BERT rollout, here are a few pointers to get your traffic trending back in the right direction.

 

1. Pinpoint the search queries or keywords that make your traffic drop. There are several programs like Search Console that let you run a comparison report of your queries.
2. Find out what’s ranking now. Is it a different form of content than what you’re publishing? Does it approach a topic from a new angle or perspective? Does slightly different wording create a whole new question?
3. Slightly change your content. You don’t want to ditch your whole brand identity, but tweaking your content just so to reflect popular trends can open up new possibilities to match popular queries.
4. Ask Google what it wants! Google is constantly letting creators know what content performs best.

 

So there you have it! Google’s BERT update is its latest, and one of the largest of the past five years. It’s purpose is to better understand search intent, not to penalize anyone from doing anything a certain way, so there’s no need to rush and upend your content plans and strategies. All you have to do is pay attention to your traffic over the next few weeks and adapt to what you’re seeing. We’re excited to see how our SEO improves!

 

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 251-583-2605 or visit www.southernviewmedia.com. We are a Google Trusted Agency and will be happy to answer your questions.

When it comes to building a brand, it’s both an art and a science. Seriously, it’s way more complex than one may begin to imagine. For some companies, their brand is based entirely on the “feel” of things: the way they look and sound, their design and hype and so on. Then there are other brands who have absolutely none of these things. These brands are almost borderline unprofessional, yet they have millions of views per month and extremely loyal customers. Plus, one must consider the ever-fluctuating nature of the Internet and throw that into their brand’s equation. Thus, many brands are left searching for the correct path to build a presence online, even though there is no one set standard. If you are searching for how to build your brand with digital marketing, Southern View Media is here to help.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Social Media Basket

Yes, 10 years ago Facebook was all the rage. If you didn’t have a Facebook, did you even exist? Now, there are multiple social media channels that are available for businesses to use and engage with consumers. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest are just a few platforms that can be utilized instead of social media trailblazers like Facebook and YouTube. One of the hardest things about building a brand is knowing what works for you today may not work tomorrow—and that’s okay! Try not to become reliant on one social media platform or obsess over one method in particular. The beauty of digital marketing is that it is a freeform science and there are many tools available to experiment with!

Educate Yourself

Anyone who wants to build a brand online should educate themselves in how the structure of today’s Internet works to help brands get their message out. Part of this means learning about different ways to gain exposure, sell your products, build an email list, buy traffic and more. Once you realize all of the different methods that go into brand building, you will gain insight on how to utilize these tools to build your own. 

Invest Heavily in One to Two Strengths

While you may think it’s best to be everywhere, that’s actually not the greatest strategy. You don’t need to have a presence on every single platform. Instead, invest your time and effort in one or two things that work best for your brand and prove the method is effective. Don’t make your life harder by being on Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest before you even have the follower count to make that sort of exhaustion worth it. Instead, choose the platforms that are proving to be worth the effort and let the rest go.

Consistency is Key

This should go without having to be said, but consistency is key. As we all know, there is SO much content available to viewers at all times. However, all brands should keep in mind that being consistent in quality content makes the most difference in the long haul. Don’t change your logo or branding colors that often. Keep copy short and concise. Decide where your logo looks best in all materials and leave it there. Your campaigns require consistency between pieces. Otherwise, you’re building neither brand equity, loyalty or establishing your brand as an expert, all of which come with consistency in digital marketing.

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 251-583-2605 or visit www.southernviewmedia.com. We are a Google Trusted Agency and will be happy to answer your questions.