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We’ve all heard people try to predict what the next big social platform, chat service or phone app might be. Or which current ones are losing steam. A big question from companies new to the social media game is which platform is best for their brand. And Facebook always finds its way into the conversation, and for good reason. But before you choose whether or not to direct advertising dollars towards Facebook, or any other platform, it’s good to weigh some basic pros and cons of doing so.

The social platforms that are best for your brand can often differ depending on who you’re trying to connect with. Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter…the list can keep going, but what we know for sure is that not every platform is needed for every company. Take a look at what you want to share, and who you want to share it with, before you commit to a platform that won’t fit your needs.
That said, Facebook is not a bad bet for most companies. Although some may argue that it’s losing its place at the top, a recent survey shows that it’s still number one—and with a pretty good lead.

Social media platforms US adults currently use, March 2021

Even seeing this chart, we’d never encourage the strategy for every company to spend most of their digital marketing budget on Facebook. Really the best plan for allocation is to make a plan based on strategy and knowledge of typical audiences on each platform. Then to test that strategy with ad dollars spread amongst the chosen platforms.

The benefit of most digital channels is being able to more quickly assess and address any outcomes or outliers to the budget. Digital advertising should not be something that is left unchecked for long. If something isn’t working well, factors can be adjusted to try something new for both the communication method and platform being used.

The bottom line is, Facebook is a platform just like the rest of them. While it is often a recommended platform to advertise on, knowing your audience and objective should outweigh blindly spending a chunk of your media budget on a platform just because a survey told you so. Instead, set goals and track them properly to find the answers specific to your company and needs.

Through initial tests and tracking it can be easier to create organic content and paid media that will attract more viewers. And this can lead to more true connections and better-spent ad dollars for future campaigns.

Are you making the most of the opportunity of online marketing? With so many potential buyers actively using search engines, websites, apps and social media to decide on the best product or service, you have to be visible and provide the best experience to help them choose your brand.

Internet marketing can attract more people to your website, increase customers for your business, and enhance branding of your company and products.

One of the main ways that companies are establishing authority and gaining trust with consumers is by consistently creating valuable content through a variety of channels. This typically involves relevant industry information that provides insight or entertainment to an audience.

But like every other online strategy, content marketing has its downsides. Low quality content is the most common mistake and can affect your rankings and damage your brand. For example, content riddled with grammar and spelling errors makes you look careless and unprofessional. Providing statements without verifying the facts can make you look foolish. Remember that the content you put on your site might be the first impression a prospective client gets of your company.

Consequently, it has become common for businesses to branch out and experiment with multiple networks with the aim of reaching the maximum amount of consumers. This diversification seems to prove fruitful for many companies because it often builds brand equity by making it easier for consumers to recognize a particular brand.

A common mistake in social media marketing is thinking a large number of followers is all you need. In fact, many businesses have sprouted up offering to sell you 100 or 1000 ‘real’ friends or fans. Keep in mind that friends and fans are not enough – you need to build engagement. Friends that are purchased are often not your target demographic or are fake accounts. Neither will help you accomplish your goals.

In order to make the most of a social media marketing strategy, you need to interact with your fans and create a true community.

When people think of online marketing and the search engines, SEO is usually the first thing that comes to mind. SEO is used to create a site that the search engines will rank as one of the most relevant pages for a given term. The fact is, 95 percent of searchers click on a page that appears on the first page results for Google, Yahoo! or Bing. You can see that search rank is a big deal!

Building a solid SEO strategy consists primarily of selecting relevant keywords and providing valuable content related to those keywords. In the past, SEO was driven by factors like keyword placement, keywords density, and even how many times a keyword was used to link to that page.

Graphic designing seems irresistible for those students or beginners who have no experience at all. They shouldn’t anticipate becoming an expert designer within a month’s trial in designing. Either they can take proper advice from experienced graphic designers, or do an internship in an advertising company for 4-6 months. They need to practice more designing and grow a complete hold over it gradually. Mentioned here are 10 best helpful graphic design tips for the beginners!

Clarity in design and readability is highly important. Make sure not to restrict your designs to one font only. Try to experiment with different styles of fonts and stick to a unique font style for your current project you’re focusing. Explore different opportunities, instead of picking those dull default fonts.

In order to capture your viewer’s notice at one look, you can use a color pop technique, especially when your text amount is short and you want to make an utmost impact. High contrasting palettes like yellow and white or black, red and black along with lively background colors work fine. Also, check the cohesiveness of your design and attempt to put an ideal impression. You can take the help of Adobe Color CC online tool to pick a pleasant palette for your design.

White space is valuable in the trendy graphic designs where they showcase simplicity, and the best example is of Apple. While executing text on a big canvas, select a high-quality typeface and then centralize your type and rest of the canvas left white. Overall, the canvas would really look good.

Ensure that the quality of images remains absolutely consistent throughout your design. The quality, framing, style, proportions, and lighting of those elements should stay constant all through your design. The graphics, diagrams, images, and illustrations that you use should add a perfect meaning to your project. Try to consider Couponobox.com to save money on premium graphic design tools & applications.

If you are sketching your design, make sure to scan it on your PC; make use of a smartphone camera to do so and import the scanned sketch into the Illustrator or Photoshop directly. You can develop your design as normal now, but make sure to use the scan as a background guide.

Flat design has been very popular over the years as its design has moved from slightly bright to more classiness. You should also have a good sense of alignment and spacing while using flat design techniques where the look will come out outstanding.

Select your header carefully and apply its style. Headers are somewhat in separate positions along with different font sizes or line heights. Tools like InDesign and Photoshop hold fixed tools to make sure that your characters and paragraphs have an ideal steadiness among them. Such tools can surely save your time from constant scrolling between pages, thus emphasizing and checking to make sure that your styles are placed well.

You should also make use of italics in some of your projects to get a superb effect. They should be applied with big respect as they can pretty well balance your headers and sub-headers. Italics should be used in small sentences only. Avoid them for long sentences as they will be a disaster for your project.
9. Respect Page Balance: If you want to become an excellent graphic designer, you need to learn about symmetry and balance all through the process. Ensure that the balance should be stable as it puts an impact on your design greatly. The document you’re working on should be evenly loaded on the left and right, or upwards and downwards in specific situations.

Making use of line separation for an exact piece can fetch you a modest piece up to scratch if you are trying hard to make it seem complete. In place of a solid line, try using half lines on either side of a small text filament. Using a 3-pixel line below the header and above the sub-header, or between the image and the title, will make your work appreciable and will go a long way.
Hope the beginners can have a good idea from the above effective graphic designing tips that they can apply in their designs for websites.

WordPress has been around since 2003 and is the most popular blogging software on the market. Over the last few years, WordPress has also become the content management software of choice for non-blogging websites. Here are the top 9 reasons why WordPress is so popular and why you might want to consider switching to a WordPress platform for your company’s website.

WordPress is very easy to use and has an intuitive interface. Adding new pages, blog posts, images, etc. on a regular basis is a breeze and can be done quickly. Because the technology is so simple, the time spent on formatting is greatly reduced.

WordPress is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup. In non-geek terms, this makes Google and other search engines love WordPress.

This is why WordPress sites tend to rank higher than others in search engines.
By design, WordPress is very SEO friendly out of the box. You can also use WordPress SEO plugins to further optimize your website.

WordPress themes offer users an array of choices for fine-tuning the appearance and functions of a new site, thanks to its large and growing directory basic and premium of themes. Many of these are instantly available to a new site owner through the WordPress theme directory, and thousands more can be purchased through design marketplaces and third-party designers from around the world. Themes can be previewed live and installed at any time to change the look and layout of a WordPress site.

One of the features that make WordPress SEO ready is its structure. Clean structure websites load faster, and fast loading websites appeal to visitors.

Then, WordPress allows the creation of XML sitemaps, telling Google’s bots where your website pages are and which are worth crawling. It will save you a fortune on web design SEO services.

Managing content has never been easier, and you can simplify things even more by assigning editors, authors, administrators and limiting their freedom.

No software package is completely free from every vulnerability, of course. However, WordPress is known for being decently secure. There have been only a handful of security exploits for WordPress over the years, especially when compared to some other website management systems.

Your online business needs to have its own look. WordPress offers plenty of opportunities for customization.

In addition to plugins that can help make your site unique, there are literally thousands of templates out there that you can use for your WordPress site. Customizing a given template is relatively easy, although it does require some knowledge of CSS. If you don’t possess that knowledge, there are many talented and qualified designers who can do it for you… for a price 🙂

Mobile responsiveness is also a factor in Google rankings, so websites need to look good on any device. WordPress offers a variety of responsive theme designs, and users can also make a static site responsive with plugins and adjustments to theme files.

Since WordPress is a content management system software, it has multiple features that make publishing content easy. One of these is a “built-in” blog feature that can be accessed from any device, at any time, so that users who want to add a blog to their website don’t have to create one separately. That makes it possible even for sites unrelated to blogging to use the blog feature for adding updates or announcements.

Successful branding is about telling a story that will influence customers’ emotions – plain and simple. And, while it’s true that logo design is only a part of a company’s brand, it serves as the foundation for the entire narrative on which the brand is built.

Colors, tones, fonts – all of this is determined by the story you’re trying to tell, and your logo sets the stage for this story.

These elements will later translate from your logo onto all of your branding materials – letterheads, business cards, landing pages, you name it – creating a concrete, marketable brand identity.

A logo is a pictorial persona of a brand, and it is one of the most prominent elements for building a trustworthy relationship with the target audience. A good logo is the one that is memorable, functional for conveying the brand message, and effective for building a suitable brand association. If your logo truly reflects the brand concept and value, it can help you become a priority brand choice in the market.

Dare to be different with your logo, because your company logo tells consumers why your business is unique. Sure, maybe there are 50 other coffee shops in your city, but yours is the only one that’s committed to sustainability, and your green, earthy logo drives that message home.

A well-designed company logo can communicate everything from the company’s background (professional, relaxed, fun) to their mission (entertainment, efficiency, and innovation) through the right icon or proper font.

From time to time, a company will redesign its logo, perhaps to update their look or reflect some other corporate change. As a marketer, I get this. As a consumer, I hate it. When I’ve become accustomed to my favorite brands’ logo and they change it, I feel a little betrayed. Now I’ve got to retrain my brain to look for something new. Brand loyalty is huge and something every business needs to foster. A recognizable and familiar logo goes a long way toward building brand loyalty.

We don’t live in a monochromatic world. People are drawn to interesting designs and colors. The logo that marks your package or adorns your storefront should be designed to draw interest and pique the curiosity of your potential customers, prompting them to at least look, and hopefully purchase your product.

As the Internet becomes more prevalent in today’s society, it has become commonplace to turn to the Internet for almost every aspects of our everyday life. From shopping, finding a good restaurant, researching products, even seeking answers for everyday questions. So your presence on the web is definitely a priority. But presence is not enough – it better be looking good. Here’s Why:

You only have one chance to make a first impression. It’s pretty much similar with our everyday life, we do judge people based on their first impression. If your website is looking unprofessional or confusing, that’s the impression visitors will have of your business. So in other words, good design gives any website a stronger chance of success. There’s even a study about this from Xiamen University in China, which shows:

“Recently, studies have begun to show that aesthetic qualities such as color, graphics, and the layout of a Web site can play an important role in improving consumer shopping experiences. From a theoretical perspective, our findings not only establish consumer shopping value as a key business value of Web site aesthetics but also enrich the current knowledge on the contingent effect of Web site aesthetics for utilitarian and hedonic products. From a practical perspective, the findings provide guidance for online vendors to provide their customers with better service in the form of properly designed aesthetic Web sites.“

Having a quality web presence is essential to a successful online endeavour. Just as having a quality resume is essential for a job seeker trying to get that first interview, having a quality professional website is essential in getting that first call from a prospect. Therefore, it is essential that your website reflects who you are, your qualities and the personality of your business.

Websites that are not well designed tend to perform poorly and have sub-optimal Google Analytics metrics (e.g. high bounce rates, low time on site, low pages per visit and low conversions). This means people tend to stay longer on a better quality websites. If your website design is responsive/mobile friendly, it means you will have even more audience. Even Google states that responsive web design is its recommended mobile configuration, and even goes so far as to refer to responsive web design as the industry best practice.

Our goal is to aid you in developing a more successful web presence. We will equip you to better reach your audience. The more educated you are in your approach the more likely you will be to succeed in your efforts. And ultimately, the more successful you will be in making your business stand out in your unique marketplace.

Think about shopping routines in daily life: When you go for grocery shopping, what products do you buy and what clothes do you wear? What brand does your laptop belong to? There may be a lot of products you just buy because they are the cheapest ones or the easiest ones to get.

You don´t have any connection to these products, literally, you don´t care at all. They are just in your shopping cart because of a lucky, random accident. And probably you´ll never buy them again. On the other side, there might be some products you are really passionate about. For example, there is only a specific coffee you drink or a certain laptop you use and you would never replace it with a different provider.

There is one simple answer: BRANDING. Companies knowing about the importance of branding and investing in their branding strategy are more successful than their competitors. The perfect example to show the relationship between branding and success of a company is Apple. Steve Jobs managed to make his products the most wanted in generation y. And the key to his success is his branding strategy.

If you think about Apple, its connection with its consumers has gone way beyond the emotional-it is connecting with their minds. Before a new product is even released, apple addicts are filled with a desire to obtain the newest product, lining up twelve hours before the opening in front of an apple store to be the first ones buying the latest I Phone. Apple consumers have learned that if they want the newest Apple product, they have to be present when the door opens, or they are forced to wait for weeks. Their minds are filled with Apple, leaving no space for thoughts about other competitive brands.

As shown in the example, branding is as vital to the success of a business as having a vision for the future, or having quality employees. It is the essential foundation for a profitable operation. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers. That means customers that are willing to repeat purchases and making the company profitable in a long term perspective. It makes loyal customers, advocates, even addicts, out of those who buy.

Branding is about creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers’ minds. Instead of activating buyers through marketing campaigns and “forcing” them to buy a product, branding is both preceding and underlying marketing activities. To become a memorable identity in the subconscious of the consumer’s mind, the company needs to establish a personal and emotional connection.

Therefore a brand needs to have an identity, a story to tell and above all, representing a lifestyle with certain values and beliefs customers can relate to. A brand should express the essential truth or value of an organization or the product. It helps the customers to define who they are. From this foundation establishes the emotional attachment to the customer.

The brand elements tell a story about the quality, reliability, innovation and lifestyle of the brand and represent the brand identity. When creating elements like the name, logo or slogan of a brand, a lot of factors are influencing the quality of brand elements. Further elements are for example graphics, shapes, architecture, photography, colors and icon sets.

Establishing a consistent theme, through design templates and standards for your marketing materials, e.g. by using the same color scheme and logo placement, is essential to make the brand successful. The brand equity also depends on memorability, meaningfulness and likeability of the elements. To make sure your brand elements appear aesthetically to your customers and are adaptable and flexible as well, it is important to integrate experts in the developing process of your brand.

The logo is your medium creating the first visual impression, telling the customer “This is what I am, this is what I stand for. If you like me, buy me and be part of my lifestyle.”

When implementing a brand, it comes to brand guidelines. Guidelines help employees, ad agencies and business partners to gain a deeper understanding of the brand philosophy and make clear how your logo is protected and can be used. While consistency is one of the most important things to take care of while creating the brand elements, market research has to be done before starting the creative process. Without a strategic brand analysis, it is impossible to gain business insight or knowledge about your customers. And of course, it is necessary to know about the competitors’ brand strategy.

Some businesses are still resistant to have a mobile-friendly website, either because they lack the resources or don’t see the value. If you are one of them – well, think again. It is clear that mobile-friendly websites are going to increase exponentially in the years to come. Why though?

According to studies, about 40% of the people who have a mobile phone use it for going online, and half of them will go online at least once every day. As of June 2013, there was a seismic shift in shopping trends: the online shopping champions were – you guessed it – mobile devices (imagine how it is now, in 2020). They officially passed desktop PCs and laptops. People want information and services, and they want them fast. With the advancement in technology, it is possible for them to access this information and the services through their cell phones, and clearly they prefer that way. Those companies that have not yet adapted to mobile may miss this opportunity to attract customers.

Yup, you heard it well. They even penalize websites in mobile search that are not mobile-friendly to ensure that websites which are mobile-friendly rank higher and provide mobile searchers with better user experience. Google’s goal is to increase search traffic, including mobile search traffic, and you can use that to your benefit by jumping on board. Below is a quote from Google’s blog post regarding this update:

We’re boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.

Know the numbers — Google updates its algorithm over 500 times a year and uses over 200 ranking signals. But when it comes to search engines, you got to ace the race. We often focus on the algorithm that we forget all this effort serves a single purpose: Satisfy the user.

There is a danger of SEO practitioners to become overly focused on SEO. Sure, it’s important – but so is the user experience. It’s quite common for websites to be so focused on other aspects of SEO that the user experience is poor.

For example, we are familiar with the mantra “content is king”, therefore make tons of great content and visitors will come. But unfortunately, it’s a rather outdated statement. Today great content is just not enough — Satisfaction is an actual ranking factor, and it doesn’t come solely from the relevant content but also the Website Interface and User Experience.

It’s easy to emphasize a keyword. It’s much more difficult to stop visitors from clicking the back button on your website when they don’t find what they’re looking for. Satisfaction is very difficult to deal with — perhaps that’s why Google and other search engines place so much attention on it.

Bounce rate, time on site and returning visitors are User Experience metrics.

There are still some SEO marketers who do not believe in User Experience. But when we are talking about user experience, we are talking about how fast the pages load, how easy it is for visitors to navigate around your website and to find what they are looking for, how easy on the eye your website design is, amongst other factors.

Practically if you do these, you are improving user experience. And guess what, the number one reason why everyone is not improving User Experience is that apparently it’s expensive to hire a UX designer. But hear this out:

“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design“ — Dr Ralf Speth, CEO Jaguar.

The UX begins when the user clicks on your website. If they have to wait ten seconds or more for your site to load, they will leave your site. Site speed has long been a factor in SEO rankings, but it also provides users with the first impression of your site.

The bottom line is that longer load times directly affect your conversions and ultimately your bottom line as a result. According to a study done by Kissmetrics, every second past the ideal loading time of three seconds costs you a 7% reduction in sales!

Part of what defines a high-quality UX is how quickly and easily visitors can access various parts of your site. The best way to ensure is this is through the use of effectively designed menus and submenus. As a rule of thumb, make sure it doesn’t take more than two clicks for visitors to find anything on your site. One-click for the category, and one for the post or page. Anything more and you risk overcomplicating the process.

In April 2015, Google released a new algorithm update that focused on sites that were mobile responsive. This term refers to a website’s ability to display itself in a readable format on both a desktop and a mobile device. If it looks great on one but looks poor on another, then Google’s update tanked their search rankings.

So it became clearer that Google is all about a high-quality UX. Since most people are now browsing the web on mobile devices, this kind of approach was logical. People should be able to have the same level of quality on their mobile devices, especially since they use them primarily.

Stephen Levy’s excellent book In the Plex describes how Google engineers figured out how to improve search results by mining their user behavior data:

…Google could see how satisfied users were …The best sign of their happiness was the ‘long click’ – this occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query. But unhappy users were unhappy in their own ways, most telling was the ‘short clicks’ where a user followed a link and immediately returned to try again. “If people type something and then go and change their query, you could tell they aren’t happy,” says Patel. “If they go to the next page of results, it’s a sign they’re not happy.”

There are two types of SEOs: those that try to satisfy robots, and those that satisfy users.

The robot-focused SEOs build pages with just the right keywords and title tags, hoping to attract the bots on relevancy. I say “try” to satisfy robots, because search engines are actually watching the users. If the users aren’t happy, neither are the bots.

The user-focused SEOs work with the same keywords and title tag, but then they go one step further and ask their users to try the site. After that, they do whatever it takes to make their users happy.