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Tips to Make Online Reviews Work for Your Business

Many people rely on online reviews for everything from choosing a pizza parlour to hiring a plumber to install and repair the pipes in your home. In today’s digital marketing world, it is impossible to understate the impact of online reviews on your business. Recent surveys reported that 86% of virtual shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase.

When it comes to online reviews, the key phrase is “social proof.” This shows that people liked the product or service you are offering or competing with. By providing prospects with a number of social proof, customer reviews can help increase conversion and build the credibility of your company.

While customer reviews can help boost your sales, the way you utilize them can leverage your conversion-boosting potential. Here are some helpful tips on how you can empower your business using online reviews.

  • Claim Your Google My Business (GMB) Listing

While you can find customer reviews everywhere online, Google is the most popular review site. About 64% of consumers check the reviews posted on Google before visiting a business. Creating a GMB page enables you to keep track of and respond to your reviews. These reviews will be displayed in Google and Google Maps search results, which helps establish the credibility and quality of your business.

  • Encourage Customers to Leave a Review

Getting reviews from your customers helps attract new prospects. That is why you will need to create a strategy that will continuously encourage customers to leave reviews. However, recency matters to most potential customers are looking for in a review.

According to surveys, nearly 34% search for reviews that are posted between a week to a month. Consistency in getting reviews can be a powerful tool to earn the trust and confidence of your target customers.

Sending a link to your review page on GMB, Yelp, or website can make it easy for prospects to leave a review for your business. It also helps you to respond to their reviews. Customers tend to leave a review, especially if they feel appreciated.

The customer will receive a notification when you respond to their review. According to BrightLocal’s data, 20% of customers expect business owners to respond to their reviews within one day.

  • Resist Deleting Negative Reviews

The last thing you want from your customers is negative reviews. However, deleting reviews on Google is never a good idea. You might be surprised to learn that 46% of consumers do not trust businesses with a perfect five-star rating. Customers often get suspicious of businesses with too-good-to-be-true reviews. Even your most loyal customers will still want to know your potential drawbacks. Additionally, receiving a negative review helps you see how you can improve your products or services.

  • Respond Well to Negative Reviews

Many business owners may feel tempted to censor negative reviews. This dishonesty can have an unpleasant impact on your business. Never let unpleasant reviews sit there. Use it as an opportunity to respond to your customers in a polite, helpful, and constructive way. Replying to customers helps improve their satisfaction and loyalty, and even encourages them to recommend your business to other potential customers.

  • Proactively Feature and Broadcast Reviews

You can strategically display customer reviews on your website or add a headshot if possible, especially if it is written by an industry expert, a celebrity, or an influencer, so people can easily spot them.

Another way to highlight top reviews is by converting them into social ads as it draws more attention, especially on Facebook. Make sure to add the average rating badges on the footer of your website and cite reviews in your nurture emails.

Allow your website visitors to search reviews using keywords or star ratings to filter reviews. Various surveys reported that potential customers who use the search feature on a product or service page are more likely to convert at 202.9%, including people searching for 1-star reviews.

Top Digital Marketing Techniques to Learn in 2022

Every year ushers in technological innovations and new techniques in the digital market. As a company, staying on top of these changes and trends is crucial as it will determine your ability to stay relevant and engaging. With the increasingly competitive industry, quality customer interaction remains your key strategy to stand out.

You can only do so by maximizing traffic, search ranking, and conversion rate through accessible and responsive company communication lines. As search engines impose new regulations, and social media platforms create new options, being updated is vital for your next campaign ads.

So, how can you improve your digital marketing in business? Which trends should you invest in and how can you stay 2 steps ahead of your competitors. Find out the top digital marketing trends this year.

10 Top Digital Marketing Trends

Here is a quick run-through of the top digital marketing trends this 2022:

1. Metaverse

Making a big splash in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg launched this social media platform as a new way for netizens to interact and connect. Mainly using 3D holographic avatars, virtual reality, augmented reality, and video, it provides a unique online experience, where people can socialize, work, and play together from the comforts of their own homes.

And as this medium has been projected to grow for the upcoming decade, it’s best to invest in it now, when ad space is still affordable. This will give you the first-mover advantage, and allow you to offer a new kind of medium for your customers to engage with your company.

2. Accessibility

Inclusivity is key in today’s market. No customer wants to feel neglected and left out. So, even though you’re targeting a specific consumer demographic, you also have to develop products that cater to other people’s needs.

It could be for differently-abled people, pregnant women, kids, and more. For your company to maximize its market reach, you need to innovate and provide product variety.

Doing so will also reflect well on your company’s reputation as it will show your customers that you genuinely care about them. To gain traction for these new products, you can consult with SEO companies for special content development.

3. Gender Sensitivity

With the positive trend towards LGBTQ+ inclusivity growing, as a company, holding on to traditional gender norms should be scrapped. Sticking to it will only project an image of backward thinking and exclusivity that your target customers may not resonate with.

Creating gender-neutral ads and campaigns will prevent alienation, and show the public that you embrace diversity. Using the correct pronouns is also advised to avoid offending your potential customers.

4. Sustainability

With consumers getting more informed about global environmental issues, a demand for better corporate practices has been growing these past years and rightfully so. Conscientious customers are more discerning when it comes to choosing the brands that reflect their eco-conscious values.

However, it is not enough to simply use these values on the surface level for clout, as customers can see through it and view it as disingenuous. So, make sure to commit to concrete decisions that benefit both the planet and your company.

5. Comprehensive Content

Image Credit: Pixabay | Pexels

Content translates best when it’s simple and comprehensive. Using overcomplicated jargon, analogies, and high-end vocabulary will only alienate your audience. With search engines filled with millions of data, being straightforward and clear will make you stand out amidst the digital noise.

Flowery prose will only take away from the point that you want to get across. So, next time, when you’re creating content for complicated topics, make sure to break it down and be comprehensive.

It would also be better if you visualize it through infographics, videos, and graphs. If you’re new to this, you can always contact SEO to help you out.

6. Social Commerce

Never underestimate the power of social media. As the main digital spaces for today’s netizens, these social media platforms will serve as the main channels for discourse and engagement.

For your company to flourish in the digital market, having a business page on major social media channels of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter are crucial. Registering your company in online shopping apps can also foster greater customer traffic.

It will serve as your company’s establishment proxy in the digital world. Paid ads, sponsorship, live streams, and more are also useful digital PR tools to promote your content and expand your market reach.

7. Buffering Your Supply Chain

Stock capacity, especially during the holidays is a problem for any company. However, if you’re a service-based company, then enough manpower should be prioritized. For the latter, aligning your available stocks with the current demand is a crucial planning pre-requisite, as any delay in delivery can lead to unsatisfied customers, which could lead to damaging the brand’s reputation.

So, to guarantee that you can always provide for replacements, returns, and broken merchandise, have a 30-day stock buffer. This way, when you experience shipment delays, you can still have a longer time window to plan out alternatives.

8. Prioritize Consumer Privacy

As Google has phased out third-party cookies to protect customer privacy, as a company, you have to think of other ways to profile your targeted audience without violating their rights. This means improved methods of data collection that value consent and anonymity. Now, this may sound like a tedious process, but CRM tools like emails, newsletters, and social media surveys can still provide quality engagement.

9. Cryptocurrency

Image Credit: Vadim Taranov | Pixabay

Cryptocurrency has rapidly gained value over the years. As customers are looking for easier ways to transact and pay for their items, this economic medium is something to look out for although its compatibility relies heavily on your company’s target audience. So, before you consider using it, try to do some market analysis first.

10. NFTs

As the mediums for interaction continue to evolve in today’s digital world, making a profit out of your content can be quite challenging. As they cannot be directly converted into cash, the value of these digital assets may seem low. However, with the rise of NFTs or non-fungible tokens, you can now utilize your online content as actual market products.

Digital marketing trends in 2022 are all about the emergence of virtual currencies, communities, and space for netizens. The rise of augmented reality has been fuelled by the recent limited physical interactions that the pandemic has caused in the past years.

With that said, these trends can be quite complex, so proper digital market training is necessary for you to use them efficiently in your campaigns.

What You Should Know About Hiring An SEO Toronto Digital Marketing Agency

Hiring an SEO Toronto digital marketing agency to help grow your business can take a lot of research and legwork on your part. But here are some tips you should consider when looking for a good, reputable marketing firm.

The best way to get an immediate feel for whether or not an SEO Toronto digital marketing agency can benefit you is to be upfront and candid about what your business is and what its goals and objectives are. You don’t want to just be generic about this information, you want to let the marketing agency know exactly what it is you’re expecting from them.

You should discuss with them what marketing platforms they use and whether or not they can work for your business. In hiring a good digital marketing agency, you may need to adapt to some changes in how your marketing is done, but you should never hire an SEO Toronto agency who doesn’t understand your company’s direction.

Find Out About Their Communication Structure

The best way to work with an SEO Toronto digital marketing company is to have constant open lines of communication. You’ll want to know if they have a contact person or department that you can reach 24/7 in case you have concerns about how your marketing campaigns are going. You may also want a digital marketing company that does online reviews or conference meetings on a monthly or yearly basis to see if everything is performing up to standard. Never hire a company that doesn’t keep you in the loop.

Let Them Know If You Have Any Third Parties That Might Be Involved In This

If you work with a technical team whose tasks may overlap with those of a marketing team, you should discuss this with the marketing agency you plan to hire. It’s important that you don’t run into a potential conflict of interest, or conflicting jobs when working with your marketing agency. You may even want to see if the marketing agency offers any evaluation services just to make sure you have all your t’s crossed and i’s dotted.

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9 SEO secrets every business should know

Debunk The Most Common Local SEO Myths

The 5 most common SEO myths exposed

SEO may seem as a foreign term to some people, mostly amateurs. We have come across people who have the weirdest myths about using SEO, some to an extent of believing it doesn’t work. Over the years, SEO has changed with several updates rolled out each year. For this reason, we have decided to expose the most common misconceptions about SEO.

  1. SEO can be done in one click

The truth is anything that can be done in just one click is probably a slow brewing scam. To achieve good SEO, webmasters have to dedicate their time, money, and effort because working on SEO means keeping up with; technological changes, looming competition, and constant updates. The site therefore needs to be managed and monitored closely by professionals in SEO.

  1. The more the backlinks, the better the SEO results

Cramming up a website with backlinks may have been a solution around six years ago. But today, the type and quality of links is what matters. Search engines change their algorithms so often that backlinks are no longer valued as before. In fact backlinks that are from non-authoritative or spammy sites can be penalized. Webmasters should create a site with an appealing design, great content, and user friendly; this will help in creating natural backlinks and its relevance. Sites involved in linking schemes such as paid links, mass linking, and anchor text rich links are automatically devalued by search engines.

  1. Optimizing for local search is not important

The opposite is actually true and here’s how: Take for instance one runs a restaurant in their local and they have just created a website for the business, they need to reach people near them and here is where local SEO plays part. It leads people in the locality to this particular business. Search engines consequently chip in more efforts in improving their local search results proven by the release of Google’s new Pigeon algorithm that improves how the search engine treats local search rankings.

  1. Content is everything

Great content is good and yes it is a part of SEO, however, it is not good enough. Webmasters can update their site with new content regularly but if they ignore other SEO factors, very few site visitors will return for a second time hence increasing the site’s bounce rate. Content becomes effective when it is helpful to your audience. In fact, in LinkedIn Technology Marketing Company’s report, 58% of people says that audience relevance contributes to online marketing success.

Building up a complete SEO plan and having a holistic approach that intertwines with the content quality, contributes more in creating a top ranking site. Remember in SEO, quality is better than quantity hence avoid spam content at all costs.

  1. Meta tags help with ranking

Meta tags are tiny pieces of code that give search engines a list of keywords and description on a site. Search engines got smarter meaning they will analyze the site on their own and therefore Meta tags do not affect ranking in any way.

There are several more other SEO myths than the ones we have mentioned however, these are the most common misconceptions people have about SEO.