As the economy faces the likelihood of a recession, it’s understandable to feel apprehensive about your business’s future. You might be wondering which expenses you can cut, where you can save money, and how you can brace yourself for the worst. However, it’s crucial not to let fear dictate your actions, particularly when it comes to your marketing efforts and website improvements.

 During times of economic uncertainty, many businesses are tempted to abandon their marketing campaigns and reduce their investments in digital platforms. After all, when every dollar counts, it’s natural to focus on the bare necessities and cut back on non-essential expenses. However, this is not the time to neglect your marketing efforts.

 Marketing plays a crucial role in building and maintaining brand awareness, even during a recession. If your business disappears from the public eye, your potential customers will quickly forget about you, and your competitors will swoop in to fill the gap. Therefore, it’s essential to keep your marketing campaigns going, even if you need to adjust your strategy or allocate your budget differently.

 One of the most effective ways to continue your marketing efforts during a recession is to focus on digital platforms. With more people staying at home and spending time online, digital marketing channels such as social media, email, and search engines have become even more critical in reaching your target audience. By investing in your website and online presence, you can attract new customers, build loyalty with existing ones, and stay top-of-mind in your industry.

 Moreover, when times are tough, your website can serve as a valuable tool to help you weather the storm. By making improvements to your website’s user experience, search engine optimization, and conversion rate optimization, you can create a more engaging and seamless experience for your customers. This can help you retain more customers, generate more leads, and drive more revenue, all while strengthening your brand’s reputation and positioning for the future.

 Another benefit of investing in your marketing efforts during a recession is that it can give you a competitive advantage. While other businesses might be cutting back on their marketing spending, by continuing to invest in your campaigns, you can stand out in your industry and attract more customers. Furthermore, when the economy recovers, your business will be better positioned to capitalize on the rebound and outperform your competitors.

 Of course, it’s essential to be strategic about your marketing investments during a recession. You may need to adjust your strategy, focus on cost-effective channels, or experiment with new tactics. However, cutting back on marketing altogether is not the answer.

While it’s understandable to feel hesitant about investing in marketing and website improvements during a recession, cutting back on these areas can be a significant risk to your business. By continuing to invest in your marketing campaigns and digital platforms, you can stay visible to your target audience, generate more leads and revenue, and set yourself up for success in the long run. Additionally, by using this time to strengthen your online presence and build a loyal customer base, you can position your business to outperform your competitors when the economy recovers.

Currently, Individuals Are Dedicating More Time To Social Media Platforms.

Picture this – with the current situation, the world has become more socially connected than ever before. A recent study showcased a significant upsurge in social media activity, and it’s not hard to understand why. With remote work becoming the new norm, individuals are turning to social media to keep in touch with their loved ones and stay updated on the latest news and trends.

But what does this mean for your brand’s social media marketing efforts? Well, this is an excellent opportunity for you to ramp up your efforts and make a lasting impact. With so many people glued to their screens, the attention span is in abundance. So, why not capitalize on this unique opportunity and grab the attention of your target audience?

 Social media giants like Facebook and Instagram have become high-value platforms for sharing your brand messaging. With people actively discussing current events and debating politics on Facebook, and sharing their daily lives and inspirations on Instagram, it’s the perfect chance to capture their interest and create an impact.

 So, if you’re already running social media campaigns, now is the time to double down on your efforts. With competition potentially slowing down, you have a greater chance to stand out and get noticed. And if you’re not already utilizing social media, it’s never too late to start. Join the conversation and make your presence felt. The world is watching, and this is your opportunity to make a difference.

Creating A List Could Be A More Effortless Task Than Ever Before

In these uncertain times, people are seeking inspiration and solutions to help them navigate through the challenges they face. We all long for the day when we can socialize and live our lives as we used to. This is a perfect opportunity for businesses to create content that inspires their audience and helps them to look forward to brighter days ahead.

 Whether you’re in the B2B or B2C industry or both, the principles of inbound marketing remain the same: provide value. Even in the age of social distancing, businesses can still offer a range of value to their customers and potential leads. Think of all the people who are currently working from home and could get to know your brand better.

This is the perfect time to launch that new and exciting offer, course, podcast, download, video series, webinar, or pillar page that helps your audience overcome the challenges they face. By launching valuable content, you can build your email list, social media custom audiences, podcast subscribers, video followers, and any other channel that builds a community around your brand.

 Both B2B and B2C industries are seeking hope and guidance in these uncertain times. Your business can offer unique solutions that provide the help they are seeking. By being part of the solution, you will have the opportunity to build strong relationships with your clients. When things return to normal, your business will have the social and business currency to turn that loyalty into revenue.

 Creating and sharing content, and building a contact list is just the beginning. Your business can use this time to build meaningful and long-lasting client relationships. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect with your audience, and provide them with the hope and guidance they need in these unprecedented times.

The Process Of Marketing Cannot Be Paused As It Operates Like An Engine

In times of turbulence, it’s natural to want to hit pause on marketing and wait for things to calm down. But the truth is, marketing is like an engine that never stops running, constantly building momentum with every turn. The more effort and fuel you put in, the faster and more powerful it becomes.

The key is to keep your marketing engine running even during tough times. If you suddenly stop, you risk losing the momentum you’ve built up and having to start all over again. Not to mention, your competitors may be taking advantage of the situation and gaining ground on you.

Instead, consider investing in your marketing efforts right now, so you can come out of the storm even stronger than before. Maintaining or even increasing your marketing efforts can help you stay top-of-mind with your audience and re-earn their loyalty if you’ve been out of touch.

Your marketing efforts are your brand’s best investment, especially during uncertain times. Don’t hit pause on your engine; keep it running and watch your brand thrive even amid the storm.

 Is Your CMS Prepared?

When you’re ramping up your social media presence and marketing initiatives, it’s important to assess whether your content management system (CMS) is ready to handle new clients. It might be a good idea to create a new landing page and streamline your process.

 It’s pointless to increase your marketing efforts if you’re not prepared for a surge of new leads. It’s like overfilling a bathtub with water–it’s going to overflow and cause a big mess.

Do you have the tools and resources to market to potential customers who come across your brand? A CMS platform such as HubSpot can assist you in keeping track of new visitors and starting your next email marketing campaign.

Businesses Are Undergoing A Reinvention Due To Unavoidable Circumstances.

While the current situation has negatively impacted some businesses, others are using this time to re-imagine themselves. B2C companies, such as restaurants, breweries, and retail stores, are finding innovative ways to adapt to the coronavirus. On the other hand, B2B companies, particularly those in the technology sector like Zoom, are thriving, with unprecedented demand for their services as more people work remotely.

 In this environment, it’s essential to identify how your business can add value and serve the community. How can you pivot your message to remain relevant during social distancing? Now is the time to revisit your unique value proposition and consider how you can offer something that sets your brand apart from others. How can you make your offerings safe and accessible during these challenging times? Be sure to market your new services, products, or ways of doing business so that consumers know what you’re offering.

While there is certainly negative news out there, there are also opportunities if you’re willing to look for them.

During A Recession, It Can Be A Strategic Move To Focus On Increasing Market Share.

Although it may not be pleasant to discuss, the likelihood of a recession during and after this pandemic is widely accepted. The duration of this downturn is unknown, but it is expected. During this period, your competitors may reduce their efforts, presenting an opportunity to gain an advantage. It is crucial to maintain the momentum of your marketing efforts and keep the flywheel spinning.

 Increasing marketing and advertising expenses during a recession can yield dividends. According to Forbes, there are several studies dating back almost a century that illustrate the benefits of maintaining or raising ad budgets during an economic downturn. Advertisers who did so, increased their sales and market share during and after the recession.

 There are numerous reasons to advertise during a recession. The volume of competition in a brand’s product category may decrease when competitors reduce their ad spending. Advertisers can also use this time to re-position their brand or introduce new products. It enables companies to project the impression of corporate stability during challenging times.

 Additionally, advertising expenses usually decrease during a recession, resulting in a buyer’s market for brands. Direct mail advertising, which provides greater short-term sales growth, has been shown to rise during a recession. When marketers reduce their ad spending, the brand’s “share of mind” with consumers diminishes, potentially resulting in lost current and future sales. An increase in “share of voice” typically leads to an increase in “share of the market,” which ultimately leads to increased profits.

 Kellog and Amazon are two well-known companies that became dominant in their respective industries by increasing their marketing during a recession. They are now essentially unstoppable.

 The Decision Is Up To You.

Determining what your brand should do during these unusual times is a decision that only you can make. There are numerous practical concerns to address, such as cash flow and financial constraints that may affect where you can allocate funds.

 Nevertheless, if it’s viable and practical to maintain or even augment your marketing efforts at this time, the benefits may be significant in the future, spanning months or even years to come.

The post Why Discontinuing Your Marketing Efforts During a Recession is a Poor Strategy appeared first on Greenhouse Design Group.

Best Day for Your Email Campaign

There are many contradictory resources, backed by extensive data or pure business logic, and each has valid and useful points. Let’s look as some of the major recommendations offered:

• Mondays: Send Email Surveys

Mondays look promising for sending out email surveys, at time when you want to get feedback from your customers and prospects. According to SurveyMonkey, the response rate on Mondays were the best for email surveys, as on average, surveys sent out on Mondays received 10% greater responses.

• Tuesdays & Thursdays: Launch Email Campaigns

Tuesdays and Thursdays are supposed to be the best days to send out email campaigns. MailChimp researched and found that Tuesdays and Thursdays are highest volume send days for email. Get Response concluded, after analyzing over 300 million messages, that emails sent on Tuesday had the highest open and click-through rates. Thursday wasn’t too far behind!

• Wednesday: Low Impact Day

Wednesday dominates the middle ground, being neither the best day nor the worst to send email marketing messages. Over 1 billion campaigns sent over a course of 11 months were analyzed to find that Wednesday sends had open rates of 20.6%, inclusive of renders on both desktop and mobile devices.

• Friday: Best Conversion Rate

Friday is a lucrative day to send your email campaigns, especially if you are in the retail industry, as it has the highest conversion rate of all the email send days.

• Weekend: Best Click-through Rate

Email open rates are the highest during the weekend, reaching a whopping 44% on Saturday, according to email statistics gathered by KISSmetrics,. Click rates, transaction and revenue rates surged upward during the weekend, reaching as high as 10% on Saturday. On the flip side, the weekend also produces the highest bounce rates and abuse reports (both at 0.11%), as most people just don’t like to be bothered on their days off.

Timing Is Key

In addition to day of week, the second factor for a good email marketing campaign is timing, knowing the best time to send in relation to when people are most likely to open and click through your email.

• Early Morning Send Times (6am-8am)

Do you like reading emails with your morning coffee? According to KISSmetrics, click rates are highest early mornings – at 6am in fact, but on the downside, bounce rates are also at their highest during this time.

• Mid-Morning Email Send Times (10am-12pm)

Many experts assume that people don’t check emails during this time because they are focused on work. But Campaigner found the best email open rate peaked at 10am and declined steadily thereafter.

• Late Afternoon Email Send Times (3pm-5 pm)

Late afternoon at work, many experience an afternoon slump, where thoughts drift to their personal situation than job related duties. KISSmetrics claims this is the reason property and financial services promotions are most opened during this timeframe.

• Evening Send Times (5pm- 7pm)

While it is a commonly held belief among marketers that employees take advantage of work-based email and internet for personal use, research has found that recipients prefer to open emails in their own time. It makes sense then that holiday and B2B promotions are most opened from 5-7pm.

• Late-Night Send Times (7pm-10pm)

According to Campaigner, messages scheduled for delivery early evening led to better email open rates. Open rates reached their height of 15.1% for message scheduled for 8pm and 11pm.

• Midnight Hour

Thank heavens that email marketers can schedule emails in advance, because research at Experian shows that sending emails from midnight to 4am, has the highest response rate in all areas. By sending in the middle of the night or early in the morning, you’re at the top of the inbox and people may be more willing to read your entire email and even click through to learn more.

For every marketer, finding a time that works best for your audience is a matter of trial and error. A number of experts recommend staying consistent with the timing so recipients know when to expect your email. This will definitely have an impact on the open, click-through and conversion rates

Five Steps to Finding the Best Time/Day to Send Your Emails

• Step 1: Know Your Audience

Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and think about who they really are and what their email reading habits are to find the best time to send out marketing emails.

• Step 2: Analyze Your Past Email Send Results

In email marketing, revisiting and analyzing past send reports is key to uncovering patterns and a lot of useful data that can determine the days and times of the most successful campaigns.

• Step 3: Mobile Email Users Vs. Desktop Email Users

61% of consumers now read at least some of their emails on a mobile device, so it is very important to know what device your customers are using, and to make sure you have a mobile email marketing strategy in place, too.

• Step 4: Consider Your Message – B2B Vs. B2C

Message is king. Depending on the marketing message being sent and its focus area, the send days and times will change. Email marketing for business products may best be sent out within the average business work week, while if you are promoting recreational activities, you may opt for late night and weekend sends.

• Step 5: Test Your Email Marketing

It is important to consider your audience in your email marketing and the best way to do so is by testing. Try A/B split testing by sending the same campaign out to your list on various days and times. Then analyze and compare the results of multiple campaign sends to find the most advantageous time and date for your email marketing strategy.

Email marketing continues to be an incredibly effective marketing tool. It pays to experiment and learn what is best for your business, in terms of messaging and timing of your email sends. Best of luck reaching ever higher levels of success!

The post Best Time for Your Email Marketing Campaign appeared first on Greenhouse Design Group.

Google and other search engines deal with billions of websites daily. For example, the Google index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes, with well over a million computing hours required to build it. Let’s look at how major search engines index, analyze, and then rank a site.

What Is Web Indexing?

Just like books are registered in libraries under main categories, sub-categories and further alphabetized by authors titles and more, the web too is a continuously growing virtual library with billions of webpage’s and blogs but without a central filing system. The search engines are the index to this library and registering of a webpage or blog is known as indexing. A web index is a database of all the stuff on the Internet, so that search engines know where this information is, and can help searchers find it. Search engines gathers information about the pages during the crawl process and then create a large index of all the pages on all the websites that they are aware of. If your site is on that database, only then can it show up in search results.

The search process is really complex. But putting it simply, during a search on the Google search engine, the algorithms look up the search terms in the index, which includes information about words and their location, to find the appropriate pages. Essentially search engines do two major things to your site: crawling and indexing. Crawling is when a bot fetches a webpage to analyze its contents in order to inform search result details, rank pages, and follow links to discover new pages. Indexing refers to the process when a search engine stores a website’s URL and any relevant information in its database to serve as a search result.

How Do Search Engines Index The Internet?

Search engines such as Google use  spiders that are bits of computer code to crawl from site to site in order to gather a web of information that is stored in the index and this process is known as fetching. The web spider follows the chain of links to crawl from a website to the next, constantly indexing its information. Spiders index the most important information first including- URLs, title tags and metadata containing keywords. Spiders are always on the lookout for new page on an existing site, modifications to an existing webpage or an entirely new site or blog.

The spider processes the text on the page along with the location on page including the search terms. When anyone looks for information related to the same keywords in the search engine, the search engines algorithm goes to work deciding where to rank that page among all the other pages related to those keywords. For Google, besides keywords, there are 200 other factors that are also important in deciding the fate of your page rankings, including quality inbound links, social signals and valid code on all your pages.

Benefits Of Search Engine Indexing

So why do you need to get your site optimized to be crawled by spiders and how can it benefit your site?

Attracts Traffic

Having your site indexed by spiders from search engines can increase traffic to your website. When the pages on your site are listed with search engines, it increases the chance of your webpages being displayed in the search results every time a potential customer looks up for some related information in the search engine. With proper search engine indexing, you can expect not just your site but also your webpages to be listed within a stipulated period, which can lead to more people finding their way to your site.

Improves Search Rankings

If your site is well optimized and has informative content related to your industry, with relevant keywords, proper title and descriptions detailing your business then you will definitely see your site rank higher in the SERPs.

Higher Return-On-Investment

Indexing allows you to list webpages and subpages with search engines and directories to improve your chance of attracting the right type of customers to your site. It is possible to target a specific category of customers for the product/services related to your business. Rearranging the site structure and linking the pages properly for indexing helps spiders locate your site easily. When the end user can find the information they are looking for more easily, it improves your site usability. You can track everything from the source of the traffic, leads flowing through the site and even detect demographic information and metrics of engagement to reach the target audience that are looking for your service or products. This in turn boosts your business ROI.

Conclusion

Besides getting their website indexed by Google, businesses should also look at implementing SEO techniques in order to increase their presence on the internet. Indexation is just the beginning. A site optimized for the search engines is more likely to drive more traffic to its website and in turn improve brand awareness.

The post Search Indexing: Get Spiders To Notice Your Website appeared first on Greenhouse Design Group.

Here are four surefire ways to improve landing pages and increase your search marketing conversion rate exponentially.

1. Use Simple And Easy-to-Fill-out Forms

While it would be nice to get the full details of a potential lead upon first engagement, ease into getting their personal details through progressive profiling later. There is indeed a fine line between asking too many questions in your form fields and getting only the necessary information that is needed right now for your database! Try and keep your mandatory form fields to a minimum, such as first name, last name, email address, company name, and job title, to increase the number of people taking the time to complete it. You can also include optional fields like phone number, address, etc. to gather richer customer data, without losing as many leads. After all marketers must try qualify each registrant by collecting sufficient data.

Do test various form placements (upper right corner, page center, and left side bar) on the landing page to find out what B2B audiences respond more favorably to. Finally, test different form titles, or headlines, to zero in on the one best communicating the benefits associated with completing the form.

2. Include An Effective Call-to-Action (CTA) Button

Ditch the generic and boring “Click Here” for something that communicates the benefit or value-exchange of your offer. Be clear about what you really want people to do? Tell them with action oriented words (RSVP, Download, Register) to get an immediate reaction. Whatever you do, stick to one top priority action you want a prospect to take on the site and be authentic about your offer. Provide them with clear and action steps to the conversion path.

3. Be Consistent In Your Campaign

It is vital to make sure that the messaging and information is consistent all through the sales funnel of a marketing campaign, including your search marketing landing pages. Any inconsistency in the facts you present on your landing pages and your site can lead to trust issues among potential clients. Make sure the facts and numbers in your copy are consistent.

Make sure your user experience is consistent too. Consistency brings with it a sense of comfort for those visiting your landing page. Your landing pages should reflect the same voice and direction as your business site. They should exhibit the same brand logo, color, font and language standards as the main site. Landing pages that are aligned with the brand enhances credibility and improves customer loyalty. Make incremental changes to your landing pages instead of introducing everything all at once or it can overwhelm your visitors and cause drop-offs.

4. Show Benefits, Not Features

Convey how your product or service can benefit the user instead of focusing on why it is the best in the market. The landing page should speak to the needs of the user and what your product, service, contest or coupon can offer them in terms of value. The list of benefits and unique selling points should be consistent through your online advertising and promotions too. Make sure that the words and images on your landing page communicate your value proposition.

Guide Visitors To Your Site

Optimizing your landing page can be the real differentiator between losing and acquiring new prospects. Hosting well-optimized landing pages on your site can help draw leads in and nurture them further along the marketing funnel all the way to the close.

The post 4 Actionable Tips To Optimize Your Landing Pages appeared first on Greenhouse Design Group.