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Ubersuggest & AnswerThePublic: Up Your SEO Game
Search listening is going to get you ahead in the SEO game.
Hear me out.
Google averages 3.5 billion searches a day. Of those searches, 16 to 20% have never been seen before.
Each search is like an opportunity to pick a customer’s brain. What they think about your brand, offerings, and industry—it’s all calculated in real time. If you lean in to hear what they have to say, you’ll get thorough answers.
But don’t believe it because I said it.
Believe it because when someone has a question or thought, and a person tells them to “just Google it,” Google’s exactly where they go.
By listening to search engines like Google, AnswerThePublic generates every helpful phrase and query people are asking related to your keyword research.
This tool offers a goldmine of customer insight to create game-changing, useful content.
You know—the good stuff. The stuff your customers actually want to see.
So, today I am going to show you how to use AnswerThePublic.
Pairing this keyword ideation tool with Ubersuggest will kick your SEO strategy into fifth gear.
What is AnswerThePublic?
AnswerThePublic is a keyword ideation tool.
As the name suggests, you can use these keywords to create content that answers the questions people are asking search engines.
Not only is it super easy to use, but it reveals search topics you probably weren’t thinking of.
Say you compete in the speakers and headphones market. Off the top of your head, you wouldn’t be able to guess what everyone wants to know about speakers and headphones.
If you pop “earbuds” into AnswerThePublic, you’ll eliminate the guesswork and see exactly what related terms and queries people are searching.
The results tell you what type of content to create based on the questions your audience is asking.
You gain your audience’s trust by providing answers to the questions they’re asking. They’ll know you want to keep them informed and depend on you as a reliable source.
This is how you can get them to know your brand and offerings through AnswerThePublic.
Let’s dive into how to use AnswerThePublic so you can uncover untapped keyword ideas and topics in your niche.
How to Use AnswerThePublic: An Example
Let’s head to AnswerThePublic.
The first step is to enter the keyword for your research.
Remember the earbuds example? Let’s stick with that.
I’ll enter “best earbuds.”
The next step is to choose your location and language from the options provided. Then hit the search button.
Of the 370 results found, you can analyze them by category or download them.
Remember, you won’t have to use all the search results AnswerThePublic generates. Focus on the results you know you and your team can execute well.
Sharing these results with your team makes for a healthy brainstorming session.
The report divides the 370 results into five categories:
- Questions
- Prepositions
- Comparisons
- Alphabetical
- Related
The report’s “Questions” section has the following subcategories: what, how, can, when, who, why, which, will, where, and are.
You’ll notice there are many differences between the questions people are asking.
No matter the keyword variations they’re typing in, the public’s aim is clear: Solve this problem for us.
You get to be their solution.
Give your readers a sense of your expertise and speak to their issues by addressing their queries in your blog posts.
You’ll build brand credibility by answering the questions on their mind.
As with “Questions,” AnswerThePublic splits “Prepositions” into these subcategories: for, can, with, without, near, to, and is.
These will come in handy to store in your long-tail keyword files.
With the search I did, there are at least 55 opportunities to rank for keywords related to “best earbuds.”
Use these ideas to create content that boosts your domain authority.
After a quick review, you’ll know which ones you want to start with. You can save others that’ll require more research for later.
Now, you can get your content batched out with room to pivot as new things hit the market.
The “Comparison” suggestions get really niche specific with sub-categories of versus/vs, and, like, and or.
These will help you stand out among competitors.
It’s likely no one has answered these for your target market, so now you can.
For example, you can bring a unique perspective to “best earbuds that match my skin tone.”
Position yourself as the best for these products by publishing persuasive content.
To give you a visual, Beats by Dre recently collaborated with Kim Kardashian to create earbuds that match your skin tone.
No one else has done this on the speaker and headphones market. Plus, it gives a discrete look that feels ultra-stylish. That is how the brand set itself apart and roped in a big-time celebrity who aligns with fashion.
The “Alphabetical” lists offer added informational value for your audience.
You can keep these safe in your notes. From the lists, you pick the ones you know can deliver serious ROI.
As you know, SEO will be your best friend to get in front of this audience. Making a list of 10 or more keywords helps you quickly decide what your content should center around.
All other related keywords will drive readers to your content—content that speaks specifically to them. These are the individuals who are far along in the buying process or prepared to convert.
Since the potential buyer has probably ruled out several possibilities, it’s now up to you to win them over with content that is educational and convincing.
That’s how AnswerThePublic works.
Now, let’s look at how to turn all that AnswerThePublic data into success with my tool Ubersuggest.
Incorporating AnswerThePublic With Ubersuggest
Now that you’ve got the hang of AnswerThePublic, let’s fuse it with Ubersuggest.
These two tools give you a massive amount of useful data.
How do you want to use this data?
Maybe you’re stumped coming up with a new YouTube idea.
I can help you there.
Using the same method we used in AnswerThePublic, plug “best earbuds” into Ubersuggest.
Using the dashboard, let’s get some content ideas flowing under “Keywords” and zooming into the results under “Content Ideas.”
Now, based on the search results in Ubersuggest, we can take our results from AnswerThePublic and combine the findings.
From the high-ranking content we found with Ubersuggest and the mix of search results from AnswerThePublic, we learn two things:
- Your audience is looking for the best earbuds under “X” price point.
- Which brand(s) make the best earbuds on the market.
I think the best results from the AnswerThePublic findings will come from the “Questions” results. Pair them with the results from Ubersuggest to inform your audience.
You can combine the keyword topics and form them into a thought-provoking question you can answer with your YouTube video.
For example, “What Are the Top Best Earbuds Right Now Under $100?” is attention-grabbing.
The best part is that your audience created this question.
We take the public’s concern about affordability and address it through a visual that helps them confidently choose the best product.
Visual content is trendy right now, so communicating with your audience via YouTube is a great way to connect.
The plus to video content is that you can chop it into smaller segments and use it as short-form video content on other social channels.
Content that is informative and gets you in front of your audience is what you want.
After all, you are the subject matter expert in this industry, right?
If not, following my tips with these tools is definitely going to get you there.
Using Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic to Build Your SEO Strategy
AnswerThePublic helps you get strategically creative.
Ubersuggest takes you on a deep dive into endless keyword data opportunities.
These two together are the secret formula to your SEO strategy.
The good thing about these platforms is that they’re simple and straightforward while packing loads of data (some data you didn’t even know you needed).
Delivering results is what makes these tools stand out.
How?
Just look at the data output.
Take the data and form your keyword clusters and content topics.
Then, set up a cadence to schedule your content.
It doesn’t end there.
Keep up with SEO trends and best practices.
This is how you’ll stay up to date on your content’s success.
What your audience is talking about is what the results show.
So, follow the yellow brick road of data each tool provides, and you’ll be great and powerful in the SERPs thanks to your content.
Conclusion
With AnswerThePublic, it’s as if you’re a fly on the wall in the search queries.
Your audience gives you the answers, so listen—and then give them what they want.
Using both Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic for search listening will boost your SEO strategy.
These tools reveal unique keyword opportunities that help you quickly develop high-quality content.
Don’t just take my word for it.
Give them a try for yourself and reap the benefits.
What areas do you want to improve on search listening that AnswerThePublic can help with?
Brand Perception: What is it & How Do We Measure it
Wondering why perception is so important in marketing? This quote sums it up nicely: “Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty.” – Stephen Colbert.
You see, it doesn’t matter how good your product/service is, the value it offers, or the quality you provide. If consumers don’t perceive your brand the way you want them to, your business will struggle with loyalty and getting new customers.
Today, I’m covering brand perception in detail. What is it, and why does it matter? How do you measure it? Keep reading to find out more.
What Is Brand Perception?
In marketing, brand perception is how consumers see and feel about a company or product. It’s how customers interpret and react to messages, experiences, and interactions with a brand.
Obvious things like marketing, word-of-mouth, and customer service contribute to your brand perception, and less obvious areas like colors can also influence how customers perceive you. (I’ve written an article if you want to know the best colors for online conversions).
Brand Perception vs. Brand Equity
While both concepts are essential to businesses, they serve different purposes. As you know, brand perception helps you understand how customers see your company; in contrast, brand equity allows you to quantify the value of your business. It consists of multiple factors, like:
- Brand loyalty
- Name recognition
- Visibility
Essentially, brand equity is the difference between what a customer would pay for a generic product and what they would pay for the same product from a specific brand.
There are several ways to build equity in a brand. One is by offering high-quality products or services that customers can rely on. Another is positive customer experiences that leave people feeling good about the brand.
Creating an emotional connection with consumers can also help build equity, as people with a positive association with a brand are more likely to be loyal.
Why Do You Need Strong Brand Perception?
A brand isn’t merely a name or logo. It’s also the perception that consumers have of a company or product, and that idea can make or break a business.
Think about it – would you buy a product from a company you don’t trust? Or one whose values don’t align with your own?
Probably not.
That’s why brand perception is so important. It’s the difference between customers choosing your company over your competitors.
In addition, a strong brand perception:
- Helps build trust with your audience. We mentioned earlier how important trust is, and how it makes people more likely to do business with you.
- Lets you stand out from the competition. In a crowded marketplace, it’s important to have a unique and recognizable brand that people can easily identify and remember.
- Can lead to higher profits. Customers pay more for products and services from brands they know and trust; when you have a loyal customer base, they keep coming back, leading to even higher long-term profits.
If consumers perceive your business positively, it can put it on the map, and if you’re already established, a good impression can grow your brand exponentially.
Let’s use Apple as an example.
Although it’s had its ups and downs, customers’ brand perception of Apple is largely positive. Additionally, it has a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 72. The NPS measures customer experience and potential business growth by using a simple one-ten scale:
Why the love for Apple? Well, it:
- doesn’t just sell tech products. It sells experiences and products that customers love.
- offers amazing products that millions of us want to own.
- provides exceptional customer service by offering full support so you can get the best out of your products.
All these factors give buyers confidence and, you’ve guessed it, give Apple a great brand perception.
On the other hand, what about Meta (formerly Facebook)? According to branding expert Rebecca Biestman, Facebook can’t repair its brand perception simply by changing its name.
Scandals like Cambridge Analytica significantly wounded the company’s reputation, and its user base is set to decline for the first time ever; although there are multiple factors behind Facebook’s falling user numbers, brand perception is among them.
Now that you see how consumers’ brand perception can influence your business’s fortunes, let’s discuss how you measure it.
How Do You Measure Brand Perception?
Fortunately, measuring brand perception is not as complicated as you may think. Below are some of the easiest ways to understand how buyers and prospects view you.
Customer Outreach
Email lists, online review platforms, and social media make reaching out to your customers easier than ever. Want to know what your buyers think of your product or service? Or how to make them better? Send them a survey and ask them what you could do to improve.
Brand Perception Surveys
If you’re a larger company with a decent budget, consider brand perception surveys or focus groups.
For more general answers on what your buyers value, you could ask them things like:
- How important is it for you that a brand aligns with your personal values?
- How much does a brand’s reputation affect your decision to purchase its products or services?
- How much does customer service influence your perception of our brand?
These questions can give you a better idea of what customers look for in a business and provide valuable and actionable feedback. For instance, if you believe you provide great customer service but your customers believe you could be more responsive, you can introduce measures to improve response times.
Then you might ask them questions like this:
- Does our brand make you feel more confident or stylish? Explain why.
- To what extent do you feel like you are a part of the brand’s community or “tribe”?
- Would you recommend our brand to your friends or family?
- Have you ever been disappointed by your experience with our brand? Why?
- What emotions do you associate with our brand?
- Describe our brand in three words.
- What are your favorite products/services and why?
Of course, the type of questions you ask depends on what you want to achieve. Here are some tips for creating a brand perception survey:
1. Decide what you want to measure. Do you want to know how customers feel about your brand overall? Or are you looking for feedback on specific products or services? Determine what you want to learn from the survey to create suitable questions.
2. Keep the questions focused. Too many questions can overwhelm respondents and make it difficult to get useful data. Stick to around 10-15 questions that are relevant to your goals for the survey.
3. Make sure the questions are clear and easy to understand. Use simple language and avoid jargon.
4. Ask open-ended questions to get detailed answers rather than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses.
Use Social Media
Yes, you can spend your time looking through your Twitter feeds and relevant tags, but you may find automating the task with social listening tools more efficient.
Social listening tools can track and measure brand perception across social media channels. By analyzing online conversations, businesses can get insights into how customers perceive your brand, what customers are saying, and what areas need improvement.
Many different social listening tools are available, each with unique features and benefits. Some of the most popular include Hootsuite Insights, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker.
Brand Audits
A brand audit is a detailed analysis of how customers and other stakeholders perceive a company’s brand, allowing businesses to identify areas where the brand is strong and where it needs improvement.
An audit usually involves:
- Conducting surveys and focus groups with customers and other stakeholders.
- Analyzing media coverage, social media activity, and other data sources.
You can then use this information to create a detailed report to help you understand your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.
Brand audits can be important for businesses looking to improve their brand perception. By understanding how customers and others perceive the company, businesses can make changes to improve their image.
In addition, brand audits help you understand:
- Consumer ratings of your brand and why your buyers/prospects view you that way.
- How you compare with your top competitors.
- How your customers would describe your brand; this helps you understand if your messaging is right.
- Your brand trajectory or where your customers see your business going.
Finally, check online review sites to see what your buyers are saying about their experience and address any shortcomings you discover.
Best Practices For Improving Brand Perception
There are some best practices every business can introduce to enhance its brand reputation. Here are some of them.
First, start with the basics. Ensure you deliver high-quality products and services and always exceed/manage customer expectations.
Next, use effective marketing to improve brand perception by communicating the right message/image about your company to the right audience. You can do this by using customer avatars or buyer personas to understand your ideal customers and the type of content that most likely resonates with them.
Then, focus on the customer journey. Complete customer journey mapping to see the purchasing process from your customer’s perspective. Doing this helps ensure each interaction along the customer journey leaves a positive impression.
Use Social Media to Your Advantage
I’ve already discussed social listening, but responding to what your consumers say is every bit as vital. It doesn’t matter if a buyer’s experience is positive or negative; they’re only too happy to share their views on social media. While you can’t do much about this, you can at least ensure you’re fast to respond and offer your customer a positive outcome.
Giving swift responses and addressing issues is more likely to improve your brand perception and get you noticed by potential buyers.
Don’t Underdeliver
Does your product do what it says on the label? Making bold claims in your advertising that you can’t deliver is guaranteed to underwhelm and frustrate your customers.
However, don’t just focus on your product descriptions, features, and benefits. Check your images, too. For instance, does your imaging suggest your product comes with accessories when it doesn’t?
Take Feedback On Board
You’ll never perceive your product or service the same way as your customers. Your buyers and prospects can often give you insights and suggestions you’ve never even dreamed of.
Whether it comes from social media, surveys, reviews, or niche-related forums, understanding your customer’s pain points helps you develop and refine products/services to meet their needs.
Train Your Staff
Training your staff ensures they feel empowered to answer consumer/leads questions accurately. When your staff are knowledgeable, it inspires confidence among buyers and enhances your brand perception.
Examples of Brand Perception Success
Changing times and consumer demand often mean companies must reposition themselves if they want to influence customers’ views.
Let’s look at two examples of brand perception.
Zoom
At first glance, Zoom might look like an overnight success, but that’s not the case. Eric Yuan founded Zoom in 2011. It had a public launch in 2013, with a mission of ‘making video communications frictionless and secure’.
However, it wasn’t until 2020 that it became more mainstream. As its popularity soared, the brand perception changed. ‘Zoom fatigue’ became a thing. Some employees spending lengthy periods on the app complained of exhaustion from the extra cognitive demands of video conferencing, irritability, and muscle tension.
Then, later, Zoom’s growth started to flatline.
Zoom’s answer to this problem? It repositioned itself to change users’ brand perception.
It launched a ‘How the World Connects’ campaign and expanded away from video with the Zoom phone. Online, the company stressed its highly successful track record, highlighting how half a million businesses use Zoom, including:
- 70 percent of the Fortune 100
- Over half of the Fortune 500
- 85 percent of the Forbes Cloud 100, the world’s top private cloud companies
That’s before you get to the ton of top finance, healthcare, and educational facilities that use Zoom and how the app helps them. For example, Zoom provides secure communications for hybrid working and allows better collaboration between teams. It sounds like a real success story, doesn’t it? And perhaps one you want to be part of.
Chipotle
Here’s a great example of how marketing can change brand perception.
Think of Chipotle, and the first thing that comes to mind is fast food. However, the company wanted to win new customers for its ‘Lifestyle Bowls Range’ for those following vegetarian, vegan, and keto diets.
To achieve this, Chipotle needed to change its brand perception and reposition itself as a healthier alternative. By working with a marketing agency, Chipotle highlighted the use of its natural, fresh ingredients in its made-to-order takeaway meals.
The agency:
- Divided potential consumers into different tribes like ‘Fitness Fanatics’ and ‘US Health & Nutrition’.
- Used the insights gathered from the different tribes to reach these audiences with targeted traffic and awareness campaigns.
- Applied geo-targeting to attract customers to new restaurants.
The results were impressive by anyone’s standards, leading to 10.7 million impressions and potentially 2.5 million new customers. In addition, click-through rates (CTRs) exceed standard benchmarks, averaging 1.24 percent.
This case study highlights the importance of:
- Tailoring your message to your target audience and mindset segmentation.
- Using bespoke segmentation analysis to create hyper-relevant and audience-centered campaigns instead of relying on generic advertising.
- Analyzing your audience to discover new target markets and ensure your new brand voice stands out.
If you want to change your brand perception or move into new market sectors, taking these measures can supercharge the impact of your advertising campaigns.
FAQs
What is an Example of Brand Perception?
Apple has an excellent brand perception, built on having high-quality products that are easy to use. Its positive brand perception has helped Apple become one of the most successful companies in the world.
How Do You Create a Brand Perception?
Brand perception starts with knowing your audience and understanding what they want and need. From there, you can create messaging and visuals that resonate with them.
How Do You Measure Brand Perception?
You can measure brand perception through audits, surveys, social listening, and reading reviews.
What Factors Influence Brand Perception?
Numerous factors influence brand perception, like your marketing, word of mouth, customer service, and color scheme.
What Is The Importance of Brand Perception?
Brand perception is essential to your business. The better consumers perceive your products/service, the more loyal your customers are likely to be, and you can charge a premium for your products.
Why Is Perception Important in Marketing?
Perception is important in marketing because it helps you understand how customers see your brand. This understanding is valuable when deciding how to position your brand and what messages to communicate to your target audience.
What Is the Difference Between Brand Perception and Brand Equity?
Brand equity is the value of a brand based on customer perceptions and associations. Brand perception is how customers perceive a brand in the present moment.
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Conclusion
Let’s return to my original point: perception is everything. It doesn’t matter if the image customers have of your business is accurate or not; it only matters what their perceptions are.
The truth is that companies sometimes perceive themselves differently than their customers or prospects, which can make it difficult to attract new buyers.
Poor brand perception can hamper growth, limit customer loyalty, and ultimately means you don’t reach your core audience.
However, businesses can make better decisions about their marketing efforts by understanding brand perception and how to measure it. Additionally, companies can identify trends and adjust accordingly by tracking brand perception over time.
What brand perception are you trying to craft for your business?
SEO vs PPC: Pros, Cons, & Everything In Between
“Which is better, SEO vs PPC?”
If there’s one question I get asked more than any other, this is it.
Everyone wants to know who wins in the battle and where they should spend their marketing dollars. And everyone hates when I tell them there isn’t an easy answer.
Like everything else, it depends.
Neither SEO nor PPC is fundamentally better than the other. As you’ll discover in this article, each tactic has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
What is almost always true is that SEO and PPC work better together. Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it. In this article, I will:
- Guide you through the positives and negatives of both digital marketing strategies
- Show how each of them supports your business
- Show you how PPC and SEO work together
Ready? Then let’s look at my favorite digital marketing strategy first.
How SEO Supports Your Business
If you need a search engine optimization primer, read my guide to SEO before going any further. If you don’t, you should already have a pretty solid understanding of how ranking on a search engine’s result pages can generate awesome traffic that grows your business.
Almost any business can benefit from the free traffic that search engines like Google send their way, but that’s not to say SEO should definitely be the be-all-end-all when it comes to marketing strategies. As you’ll read below, while there are plenty of benefits of SEO, there are also a couple of drawbacks to be aware of.
Pros of SEO
It’s cost-effective. SEO can be one of the cheapest forms of marketing and an incredibly cost-effective way of growing your brand. You don’t have to pay to receive organic traffic, and you can do much of the work yourself. But even using an SEO agency is much more cost-effective than PPC.
It delivers long-term results. If you do SEO correctly, your efforts can pay dividends for years to come. Not only will you avoid Google penalties, but SEO also has a habit of compounding. The top pages get more backlinks by virtue of being the top-ranked pages on Google. In turn, that makes them even more likely to continue ranking high in the future.
It targets every part of your funnel. Consumers are using Google at every stage of the buyer’s journey. That makes SEO one of the few digital marketing strategies to target every part of the sales funnel. Use SEO to engage customers early in their journey, and you should be able to significantly decrease acquisition costs.
Great brand awareness and trust. The more you appear on Google, the more consumers will trust your brand. And unlike PPC, you don’t have to spend a fortune to dominate the search results. With a focus on content marketing, you can become the go-to resource for your industry, appearing for every relevant keyword and positioning your brand as the trusted authority.
Cons of SEO
It takes time. Your SEO efforts aren’t going to drive instant results. It can take between six months and a year to see significant traction. As you can see from the graph below from content marketing agency Grow & Convert, there is a direct correlation between the length of engagement and the number of first-page rankings. Results can occur faster, but SEO may not be your best bet if you need to drive traffic now. That doesn’t mean you should avoid it, however. The sooner you start with SEO, the quicker you’ll see the kind of long-term results I described above.
You need to keep investing. While you can stop all SEO efforts and continue to see excellent results, I wouldn’t recommend it. In order to keep competing with the top brands, you’ll need to continue to publish new content, update existing articles and stay on top of the latest advice from Google.
You must be precise. You can’t half-heartedly work on SEO. Because Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms and penalizing sites that use black and gray hat optimization techniques, you need to do SEO the right way. Trying to cheat the system and get quick wins will only see you end up with a penalty. And once you get penalized by Google, it’s far from easy to recover.
It requires a high level of skill. While anyone can do the work of an SEO in theory, being successful is another thing entirely. Not only is there a lot to know because of the complex nature of Google’s algorithm, but the work can be incredibly time-consuming. So even if you follow my advice, you may not necessarily have the resources to create content, optimize your on-page elements and build links. That’s why most people will look to hire an SEO consultant or an SEO agency, instead of doing the work themselves.
How PPC Supports Your Businesses
PPC stands for Pay Per Click Marketing. It is the practice of using paid advertising on search engines like Google and Bing to drive targeted traffic to your website. If you need more information on the basics of PPC, check out my overview of PPC before reading on.
As you can see from the screenshot above, PPC gives you the opportunity to appear at the very top of search engines. I’ll show you below just how powerful that can be. But don’t think that kind of placement comes for free. Among the biggest cons of PPC is the price you have to pay.
Let’s dig into those pros and cons further.
Pros of PPC
It delivers instant results. PPC is possibly the only digital marketing strategy where you can see results the same day you launch a campaign. The same certainly can’t be said for SEO. Of course, you’ll need to pay a lot to achieve fast results, and you’ll still need to create a great landing page, but it’s certainly possible to see a return on your investment within a week. You can scale results quickly, too. If your ads and landing pages convert, then acquiring more visitors is usually just a case of spending more money on ads.
It offers exceptional visibility. PPC ads are the first thing users see on desktop and mobile searches. Better yet, Google now makes it far less obvious that the top results are paid ads. In some cases, there can be as many as four paid ad spots before the organic results, as well as shopping ads. PPC ads also let you highlight key business information like your phone number and site links in a way that SEO doesn’t.
You get high-intent clicks. Most of the users clicking on your PPC ads will be close to making a purchase. That’s because most PPC ads only target high-intent commercial keywords. As a result, conversation rates are much higher for PPC than SEO. It also means it’s much easier to track to what extent PPC ads drive revenue.
Great data. You will generate a serious amount of data when you run a PPC campaign. You’ll see which ads work, which keywords drive the most traffic, and which landing pages convert best. That makes it easy to optimize your campaigns to increase return on ad spend while decreasing costs. It will also give you data you can use to improve your SEO and other digital marketing campaigns.
Cons of PPC
You have to pay to play. Unlike SEO, which can drive traffic for little to no money, you will need to have a pretty significant marketing budget to see results with PPC marketing. When we talk about industry-specific cost-per-click, it gets even higher, especially when talking about the legal and medical worlds. That’s fine as long as your ads are good, your landing pages convert, and you see a return on your ad spend. But that’s not always the case. Often, you can blow through hundreds or even thousands of dollars before achieving a positive ROI. As you can see, PPC cost per clicks can get pretty expensive.
Constant investment is required. Not only do you need to pay to play, but you also need to keep spending money to drive results. Your traffic and sales stop the moment you turn ads off. That makes it all too easy to become reliant on PPC. It is essential to balance your efforts with SEO and other digital marketing strategies.
There’s a learning curve. While it may seem easy to create an ad and put together a budget, optimizing your PPC campaign takes a lot of skill and knowledge. For one, Google and Bing’s platforms can be tricky for beginner marketers to get their heads around. But you also need to understand how optimizing your bids works, what negative keywords to add, and how to best optimize your landing page. None of these things are simple without the help of a PPC agency.
PPC ads can get stale. You need to constantly refresh your ads to keep them engaging. Any form of paid advertising, PPC or otherwise, can suffer when users become ad-blind. That’s when users notice they are reading an ad and scroll past it without engaging. That means PPC campaigns require more than just an ongoing budget. You need to commit to testing out new ads and landing pages if you want to continue driving sales.
SEO and PPC: How They Work Together
In reality, you shouldn’t be choosing between SEO and PPC. You should do both. PPC is great for achieving quick wins and driving high-intent traffic. SEO is a long-term game, but it should be a much more effective strategy after a year or two. You can rank for dozens of keywords with a single article, unlike PPC, where you can only target one.
What’s more, SEO and PPC are even more effective when you combine them together. Just check out the three strategies below for proof.
Crowd the SERPs on Branded Searches
You always want to appear at the top of the SERPs for your branded terms, right? Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible without combining SEO and PPC. Because companies will often create paid ads for their competitors’ branded keywords, you need to be creating PPC ads for your brand terms, too.
In doing so, you’ll own the first page for your terms and significantly boost brand awareness.
Don’t worry; you won’t have to spend a fortune on these ads. Because your landing page will be highly relevant to the search term, the cost of your ad appearing in the first paid ad position will be significantly less than what it will cost your competitors.
Move Expensive PPC Keywords to SEO
Run a PPC campaign for long enough, and you’ll soon find one or more expensive PPC ads that get a reasonable amount of clicks but almost no conversions. These keywords are a colossal waste of money.
This usually happens when these keywords lack commercial intent or target users at the start of the buyer’s journey.
That doesn’t mean it’s a bad keyword, though. Instead of giving up on it completely, use SEO to target it with an article instead. In doing so, you can introduce your brand to consumers earlier in the buyer’s journey and get the chance to grab their email address with a lead magnet. And because the data shows users click on your ad, you know they will probably click on an organic search result with the same angle, too.
Match Organic Results With PPC Ads
One final way to integrate SEO and PPC is to match your PPC ads to the SEO results. When you start doing both SEO and PPC, you’ll notice that a lot of the time, PPC ads don’t align with organic results.
This is particularly common on non-transactional comparison queries that occur in the middle of the buyer’s journey. Customers aren’t looking to buy at this point. They are looking for the best solution.
While the organic search results are filled with comparison posts, many PPC ads will only focus on one product. Search for “best CRM” and you’ll see a great example of this. The ads are all focused on single products, but the top organic result is a comparison post.
Here’s how you can win big in these cases. Rather than match your PPC ads to existing ads, match your ad to the searcher’s intent.
Instead of creating an ad solely focused on your product, create an ad and landing page that compares the best products in your industry. In doing so, users will be much more likely to click on your ad.
SEO vs PPC Frequently Asked Questions
How is ranking different when comparing PPC vs SEO?
PPC ads appear at the top of search engines ahead of SEO results. Paid ads are ranked depending on relevance, budget, and landing page quality. SEO results are ranked on over 200 factors.
How does PPC affect SEO?
You can use PPC ads to discover untapped and valuable keywords. PPC also supports your SEO efforts and helps you own the first page of results.
Is PPC better than SEO?
Neither PPC nor SEO is better than the other. They each have their own advantages and disadvantages. That being said, they always work best when used together.
What is one key difference between SEO and PPC?
The biggest difference between SEO and PPC is the cost. Traffic from SEO is free, while you need to pay to have a PPC ad appear in search engines.
SEO vs PPC Conclusion
You can use both SEO and PPC to grow your business. SEO will take time, but it is an incredibly cost-effective strategy in the long run. PPC will give you the customers you need now, even if you have to pay for the results.
That’s why I always recommend marketers don’t choose between them. Do both, and make sure you are using both strategies together to drive even more conversions.
Get started with SEO and PPC today by diving into keyword research before creating your first PPC campaign and an SEO strategy.
Which marketing strategy are you most excited about? Do you prioritize one over the other?
Launch Your Startup: 7 Essential Steps, Tips, Strategies, & Ideas
Everyone has ideas. Some of them may be worth running with, while others are probably not so good.
However, even if your project looks awesome on paper, there’s a big difference between that and creating a successful startup company.
Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?
If your answer is yes, then you need a detailed guide on how to start a startup.
For those of you who haven’t launched a business before, it can sound like an intimidating task.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that getting your startup off the ground is an easy mission.
It takes hard work, dedication, money, some sleepless nights, and, yes, some failures before you succeed.
Nearly 20 percent of businesses fail in the first year, and just because you make it beyond 12 months doesn’t mean your startup is going to continue to thrive.
According to government stats, 30.6 percent of businesses fail after their second year, 49.7 percent fail after five years, and 65.6 percent fail after their tenth year.
Once you get your company off the ground, it doesn’t get any easier: you need to work just as hard to keep it going each year.
With that said, it’s useful to have a guide and a set of instructions to follow to learn how to launch a startup.
When I write about launching a startup, I’m talking from personal experience. I’ve created several startup companies like Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and NP Digital.
I’m happy to share my knowledge and experience to help make things a little easier and less stressful for you as you go through this process.
Realistically, it takes hundreds of stages to launch your company, but I’ve narrowed down the top 7 steps into a blueprint for you to follow if you want to learn how to start a startup and learn how to create and develop your own business.
In the following article, I outline and discuss each step in detail so you have a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
Let’s begin with the basics.
1. Create a Business Plan
Have you heard the saying ‘if you fail to plan, you plan to fail?’ That was the thinking of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.
Well, research appears to back that up. Study after study shows that businesses with a plan are more likely to succeed. In addition, you can find many articles spelling out the importance of a business plan.
However, the Small Business Development Center at Duquesne University explains it most succinctly:
“A business plan is a very important and strategic tool for entrepreneurs. A good business plan not only helps entrepreneurs focus on the specific steps necessary for them to make business ideas succeed, but it also helps them to achieve short-term and long-term objectives.”
It’s pretty straightforward, really. Having an idea is one thing, but having a legitimate business plan is another story.
A proper business plan gives you a significant advantage, but what should you include in a business plan? It helps if you think of it as a written description of your company’s future. Basically, you outline what you want to do and how you plan to do it.
Typically, these plans outline the first three to five years of your business strategy and detail your business’s purpose and aims. Ideally, your document should outline your business goals, strategies, and your plans for achieving them.
Here are the key steps to writing a successful business plan:
- Outline your business goals
- Describe your target market
- Explain your product or service
- Detail your marketing and sales strategies
- Write down your financial projections and detail the funding
- Summarize your overall strategy
If you need some help with your plan, the Small Business Administration has an easy-to-follow guide, along with some templates.
2. Secure Appropriate Funding
Without adequate funding, your business won’t launch or stay afloat long-term. According to Statista, in 2021, there were nearly 840,000 businesses that had been in operation for less than a year. Many of these startups won’t survive because they underestimate the cost of doing business.
Perhaps you’re wondering what level of financing you need? When it comes to raising cash, there’s no magic number that applies to all businesses. The startup costs vary from industry to industry, so your company may require more or less funding depending on the situation.
Costs also vary depending on whether you’re a brick-and-mortar store, e-commerce enterprise, or service business. If you’re unsure how much you might need, try the SBA’S startup cost templates to get a better idea.
Once you’ve got a clearer picture of the costs, where do you get the funding? These days, most startups get their funding from:
- Online startup loans, which you can apply for online and pay back over time, with interest.
- SBA microloans, providing up to $50,000 in loans for start-up businesses. The main advantage is the lower interest rates.
- Lines of credit, which is a type of loan available in both secured and unsecured formats.
- Invoice factoring/financing, a process in which a business sells its invoices to a third party, at a discount.
- Friends/family/personal loans, which are unsecured loans.
- Business loans, which you pay back over an agreed period.
- Angel investors, who have considerable wealth and give seed funding to start-up businesses.
- Crowdfunding, where you raise money from a group of investors online.
Let’s circle back to our business plan for a minute.
All business plans contain a financial plan. This usually includes a:
- Balance sheet, which displays your business’s assets, liabilities, and owner’s equity of the company.
- Sales forecast, which predicts future sales.
- Profit and loss statement, which details your earning and spending patterns. This figure helps calculate your net income.
- Cash-flow statement, or financial statement detailing how much your business has spent and generated.
You use these financial statements to determine how much funding you need to launch successfully. Additionally, you may discover that the number is significantly higher than you originally anticipated.
For example, I’m sure you’ve heard someone say, “That would make a great app,” or “I should make an app for this.”
Do you know how much it costs to make an app? Depending on the complexity, you’re looking at anything between $40,000 – $300,000, and that’s just to make it.
It doesn’t include the cost of running it or customer acquisition costs.
This is the point I’m making: to secure the appropriate funding, you need to find out how much money you need.
To find this number, you must research and predict realistic financials in your business plan.
Let’s say you discover that your startup needs $100,000 to get off the ground.
What if you don’t have $100,000?
You’ve got some options, like bank loans and commercial lenders, and that’s the way many small businesses go. With this said, banks are less likely to give large amounts of money to new companies with no income or assets to default on, which may make it hard for your typical startup to get the funding they need.
Don’t worry, your dream isn’t dead yet. You can find investors. They could be:
- Friends
- Family
- Angel investors
- Venture capitalists
- Crowdfunding
However, whichever method you use, proceed carefully because you don’t want to start giving away significant equity in your company before you launch.
Then, if you get lucky and find a potential investor, you need to know how to pitch your idea quickly and effectively. Here are some tips to help you do that:
- Memorize your financial numbers; ensure you know them inside out.
- Refer to your business plan and ensure your financial figures cover the costs.
- Make sure your business plan is presentable so you can give potential investors a copy.
- Practice and perfect your pitch.
One more thing: It’s imperative that your business plan has a proper executive summary to entice busy investors.
Once you secure the appropriate funding, you can proceed to the next step of how to start a startup business: finding the right people.
3. Surround Yourself With the Right People
No one makes it on their own. William Proctor might not have been a high-profile, successful businessman if he hadn’t met James Gamble.
Where would we go for advice if Larry Page hadn’t met Sergey Brin? Not Google, that’s for sure.
Then what if Ben Cohen never met Jerry Greenfield? We would’ve been denied one of the world’s most famous ice cream brands.
Even if you’ve already got a co-founder in place, you need some core staff.
Where do you start? According to Business News Daily, there are eight people your startup needs:
- CEO and COO. Between them, they develop a vision and put it into action.
- Product Manager, who is responsible for taking a product from its development stages and onto the market.
- Chief Technology Officer, who works with executive members to oversee the technical side of a business.
- Chief Marketing Officer, whose job involves creating a marketing strategy and executing it.
- Sales Manager, for managing customer relationships, selling products/service, and motivating the team.
- Chief Finance Officer, who manages the financial planning and decisions for a company.
- Business Development Officer. This is a varied role that involves drawing up a business plan, establishing funding, and building customer/relationship funding.
- Customer Service Officer, who assists customers with their questions, any complaints, and providing product information.
However, your business structure depends on the industry, so look at the above as definitive.
When you’re just starting up, hiring an entire team often isn’t realistic, and you find yourself wearing several business hats. That’s OK, to an extent. Just remember to play to your strengths and outsource if you can’t afford to recruit.
That said, there are some experts you should consider essential, including a:
- Lawyer
- Accountant
- Financial advisor
Unless you’re an expert in law, finances, and accounting, these three people can help save your business some money in the long run.
They can explain the legal requirements and tax obligations based on how you structure your business. For example, it could be a:
- Sole proprietorship
- Partnership
- Corporation
- Limited liability company
While your lawyer, accountant, and financial advisors are not necessarily employees on your payroll, they are still important people to surround yourself with.
Finally, for this section, don’t forget the fundamentals for starting any company:
- Register your business name.
- Get a federal ID number from the IRS. The IRS lets you submit your business information online to get your employer identification number (EIN).
- Get insured: Shop around and find an insurance agent who can get you plenty of coverage at an affordable rate.
Now that you’ve got staff, you need to start work on a website and find a place to base your business.
4. Find a Location and Build a Website
Now you’re ready for the next stage of your how-to start a startup plan: finding a physical location and setting up a website.
Whether it’s offices, retail space, or a manufacturing location, you need to buy or lease a property to operate your business.
Unless you’re working from a home office, your two main options are leasing or ownership. Leasing usually works as out more expensive long term; however, don’t just base your decision on costs. Leasing and ownership both have their pros and cons. Look at the whole picture before making a decision.
I appreciate that it may not be realistic for all entrepreneurs to tie up the majority of their capital in real estate.
Strategize for this in your business plan and try to secure enough funding so that you can afford to buy property. It’s worth the investment and can save you money in the long run.
Let’s move on to setting up a website.
Today, your company can’t survive without an online presence. Don’t wait until the day your business officially launches to get your website off the ground, either, and remember, it’s never too early to start promoting your business.
If customers are searching online for a service in your industry, you want them to know that you exist, even if you’re not quite open for business yet.
The beauty of an online presence is you can even start generating some income through your website before you find premises. If it’s applicable, start taking some pre-orders and scheduling appointments.
For those of you who aren’t convinced about the pre-orders business model, many startups are succeeding with it.
Here are some tips about how to launch and promote a successful website:
- When designing a website, it is important to keep the user in mind. The layout of the website should be easy to navigate and use. The colors and fonts should be easy on the eyes.
- Make your website visually appealing. Use eye-catching images and dynamic designs to make the website stand out from the competition.
- Keep the content of the website fresh and up-to-date to keep users coming back to visit your site. Your website is an ideal place to keep your audience up-to-date with a glimpse inside your company, product launches, and, of course, the details of your business premises.
- Another important thing to keep in mind is usability. Your site should be easy to use on all devices, from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets.
Finally, make sure that your website is fast.
I can’t stress this point enough.
I’ve got a video tutorial that explains how to speed up your website.
All of these items combined may sound tough, but it’s really not that difficult. Just focus on one task at a time, and you’ll get there.
Once your website is up and running, you need to expand your digital presence. To do this, use social media platforms like:
- TikTok
- Snapchat
Your prospective customers are using these platforms, so you need to be on them, too. However, when choosing a platform, ensure you go where your core audience is. For instance, if you’re targeting a younger market, TikTok may be ideal.
5. Become a Marketing Expert
If you’re not a marketing expert, you need to become one.
You might have the best product or service in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then your startup can’t succeed.
To start spreading the word, you must learn how to use digital marketing techniques like:
- Content marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
However, if you’re starting a small business in a local community, some of the traditional methods can still work well. Think:
- Print advertising
- Radio advertisements
- Television
- Billboards
While some would argue that outbound marketing efforts are not as effective these days, research shows that methods like cold emailing and calling still work well.
For those of you who aren’t efficient marketers, there is no shame in hiring a marketing director or even a marketing team, depending on the size of your company.
Your marketing efforts will be one of the most important, if not the most important, components of launching your startup business. To improve your chances of success:
- Allocate a marketing budget.
- Determine how you’re going to distribute this money across different channels.
- Have a plan and try to maximize your return on investment for each campaign.
Take these numbers into consideration before you spend your entire budget on something like banner ads.
The bottom line is this: Marketing needs to be a top priority for your startup company.
6. Build a Customer Base
If you’re following this plan in order, the good news is that you’re already on the right track to building a customer base.
Starting a website, growing your digital presence, and becoming an effective marketer are all steps in the right direction. However, now it’s time to put these efforts to the test. That means:
- Opening your doors (or website) for business.
- Getting a customer to make a purchase is the first step.
- Retaining customers.
There are three keys to customer retention:
- Customer service
- Customer service
- Customer service
It’s no secret. The customer needs to be your main priority. They are the lifelines of your business, and they need to be treated accordingly.
Once you establish a steady customer base, you can use it to your advantage.
You’ll get more money from your existing customers than from new ones.
It’s a more effective method than cross-selling.
Less than 0.5% of customers respond to cross-selling.
Over 4% of your customers will buy an upsell.
These strategies both double back to having effective marketing campaigns.
Overall, establishing, building, and maintaining a customer base will help you get your startup company off the ground.
7. Prepare for Anything
Expect the unexpected.
Launching your startup company won’t be easy, and you need to plan for some hurdles along the way.
Don’t let these speed bumps become roadblocks.
You can’t get discouraged when something goes wrong.
Preserve and push through it.
The difficulties that you face while launching your startup company help prepare you for the tough road ahead.
Even after your business is up and running, it won’t necessarily be smooth sailing for the entire lifecycle of your company.
As illustrated above, you face peaks and valleys while your company operates.
Mistakes and setbacks happen.
Some of these things will be out of your control, like a natural disaster or a crisis with the nation’s economy.
Employees will come and go.
You’ll face tough decisions and crossroads.
Sometimes, you’ll even make the wrong decision.
That’s OK.
Part of being an entrepreneur is learning from your mistakes.
It’s important to recognize when you’ve done something wrong, move forward, and try your best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Pay your bills.
Pay your taxes.
Operate within the confines of the law.
As long as you’re doing these things, you’ll be able to fight through any obstacle your startup company faces in the future.
FAQs
How Do I Start a Startup?
Check if your idea is viable. Do some research and ask around. Are people looking for a business/service like yours? Then ask yourself: How are other businesses in your sector performing? Have you spotted a genuine gap in the market?
Then you’re ready to start drawing up a business plan.
Where Can I Acquire Startup Funding?
There are several sources, including personal financing, banks, crowdfunding, friends, family, angel investors, and venture capitalists.
Do I Need a Website to Launch My Startup?
In the vast majority of cases, yes. You also need a social media presence that is applicable to your audience. After all, social media is a free, efficient way to reach a huge volume of people that you couldn’t otherwise target.
How Can I Use Marketing to Launch My Startup?
It depends on your budget. Begin with strategies like social media, free press release distribution, and content marketing. As your business grows, you can allocate a budget for affiliates, email marketing, SEO, online ads, and influencer campaigns.
Conclusion
Let’s recap.
Launching a startup company is not easy.
First, you need to determine if your idea is worth turning into a business, then you must determine if you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur.
The percentage of entrepreneurs in the United States is growing strong, and each one of them is going to face challenges along the way.
With that said, having a proper blueprint to follow helps simplify the process. You can get learn the basics of how to start a startup by following the seven steps, and adapting them to suit your individual needs.
With that said, most successful businesses start with validating an idea, creating a comprehensive business plan, and raising adequate funding. Without proper financial planning, your startup doesn’t stand a chance.
Then, surround yourself with the right people and play to your strengths.
For instance, if you’re great at organizing and motivating, focus on that; If marketing just isn’t you, outsource it to a professional who excels in that area.
Don’t forget about lawyers, insurance agents, and accountants to keep your business in order, and make sure you have essentials like an online presence.
Launching your startup is an imperfect journey, and you must prepare for unforeseen circumstances. However, proper planning and execution help limit these hurdles and get your business off to a flying start.
How will you raise funding to get your startup company off the ground?
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Launch Your Startup: 7 Essential Steps, Tips, Strategies, & Ideas
Everyone has ideas. Some of them may be worth running with, while others are probably not so good.
However, even if your project looks awesome on paper, there’s a big difference between that and creating a successful startup company.
Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?
If your answer is yes, then you need a detailed guide on how to start a startup.
For those of you who haven’t launched a business before, it can sound like an intimidating task.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that getting your startup off the ground is an easy mission.
It takes hard work, dedication, money, some sleepless nights, and, yes, some failures before you succeed.
Nearly 20 percent of businesses fail in the first year, and just because you make it beyond 12 months doesn’t mean your startup is going to continue to thrive.
According to government stats, 30.6 percent of businesses fail after their second year, 49.7 percent fail after five years, and 65.6 percent fail after their tenth year.
Once you get your company off the ground, it doesn’t get any easier: you need to work just as hard to keep it going each year.
With that said, it’s useful to have a guide and a set of instructions to follow to learn how to launch a startup.
When I write about launching a startup, I’m talking from personal experience. I’ve created several startup companies like Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and NP Digital.
I’m happy to share my knowledge and experience to help make things a little easier and less stressful for you as you go through this process.
Realistically, it takes hundreds of stages to launch your company, but I’ve narrowed down the top 7 steps into a blueprint for you to follow if you want to learn how to start a startup and learn how to create and develop your own business.
In the following article, I outline and discuss each step in detail so you have a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
Let’s begin with the basics.
1. Create a Business Plan
Have you heard the saying ‘if you fail to plan, you plan to fail?’ That was the thinking of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.
Well, research appears to back that up. Study after study shows that businesses with a plan are more likely to succeed. In addition, you can find many articles spelling out the importance of a business plan.
However, the Small Business Development Center at Duquesne University explains it most succinctly:
“A business plan is a very important and strategic tool for entrepreneurs. A good business plan not only helps entrepreneurs focus on the specific steps necessary for them to make business ideas succeed, but it also helps them to achieve short-term and long-term objectives.”
It’s pretty straightforward, really. Having an idea is one thing, but having a legitimate business plan is another story.
A proper business plan gives you a significant advantage, but what should you include in a business plan? It helps if you think of it as a written description of your company’s future. Basically, you outline what you want to do and how you plan to do it.
Typically, these plans outline the first three to five years of your business strategy and detail your business’s purpose and aims. Ideally, your document should outline your business goals, strategies, and your plans for achieving them.
Here are the key steps to writing a successful business plan:
- Outline your business goals
- Describe your target market
- Explain your product or service
- Detail your marketing and sales strategies
- Write down your financial projections and detail the funding
- Summarize your overall strategy
If you need some help with your plan, the Small Business Administration has an easy-to-follow guide, along with some templates.
2. Secure Appropriate Funding
Without adequate funding, your business won’t launch or stay afloat long-term. According to Statista, in 2021, there were nearly 840,000 businesses that had been in operation for less than a year. Many of these startups won’t survive because they underestimate the cost of doing business.
Perhaps you’re wondering what level of financing you need? When it comes to raising cash, there’s no magic number that applies to all businesses. The startup costs vary from industry to industry, so your company may require more or less funding depending on the situation.
Costs also vary depending on whether you’re a brick-and-mortar store, e-commerce enterprise, or service business. If you’re unsure how much you might need, try the SBA’S startup cost templates to get a better idea.
Once you’ve got a clearer picture of the costs, where do you get the funding? These days, most startups get their funding from:
- Online startup loans, which you can apply for online and pay back over time, with interest.
- SBA microloans, providing up to $50,000 in loans for start-up businesses. The main advantage is the lower interest rates.
- Lines of credit, which is a type of loan available in both secured and unsecured formats.
- Invoice factoring/financing, a process in which a business sells its invoices to a third party, at a discount.
- Friends/family/personal loans, which are unsecured loans.
- Business loans, which you pay back over an agreed period.
- Angel investors, who have considerable wealth and give seed funding to start-up businesses.
- Crowdfunding, where you raise money from a group of investors online.
Let’s circle back to our business plan for a minute.
All business plans contain a financial plan. This usually includes a:
- Balance sheet, which displays your business’s assets, liabilities, and owner’s equity of the company.
- Sales forecast, which predicts future sales.
- Profit and loss statement, which details your earning and spending patterns. This figure helps calculate your net income.
- Cash-flow statement, or financial statement detailing how much your business has spent and generated.
You use these financial statements to determine how much funding you need to launch successfully. Additionally, you may discover that the number is significantly higher than you originally anticipated.
For example, I’m sure you’ve heard someone say, “That would make a great app,” or “I should make an app for this.”
Do you know how much it costs to make an app? Depending on the complexity, you’re looking at anything between $40,000 – $300,000, and that’s just to make it.
It doesn’t include the cost of running it or customer acquisition costs.
This is the point I’m making: to secure the appropriate funding, you need to find out how much money you need.
To find this number, you must research and predict realistic financials in your business plan.
Let’s say you discover that your startup needs $100,000 to get off the ground.
What if you don’t have $100,000?
You’ve got some options, like bank loans and commercial lenders, and that’s the way many small businesses go. With this said, banks are less likely to give large amounts of money to new companies with no income or assets to default on, which may make it hard for your typical startup to get the funding they need.
Don’t worry, your dream isn’t dead yet. You can find investors. They could be:
- Friends
- Family
- Angel investors
- Venture capitalists
- Crowdfunding
However, whichever method you use, proceed carefully because you don’t want to start giving away significant equity in your company before you launch.
Then, if you get lucky and find a potential investor, you need to know how to pitch your idea quickly and effectively. Here are some tips to help you do that:
- Memorize your financial numbers; ensure you know them inside out.
- Refer to your business plan and ensure your financial figures cover the costs.
- Make sure your business plan is presentable so you can give potential investors a copy.
- Practice and perfect your pitch.
One more thing: It’s imperative that your business plan has a proper executive summary to entice busy investors.
Once you secure the appropriate funding, you can proceed to the next step of how to start a startup business: finding the right people.
3. Surround Yourself With the Right People
No one makes it on their own. William Proctor might not have been a high-profile, successful businessman if he hadn’t met James Gamble.
Where would we go for advice if Larry Page hadn’t met Sergey Brin? Not Google, that’s for sure.
Then what if Ben Cohen never met Jerry Greenfield? We would’ve been denied one of the world’s most famous ice cream brands.
Even if you’ve already got a co-founder in place, you need some core staff.
Where do you start? According to Business News Daily, there are eight people your startup needs:
- CEO and COO. Between them, they develop a vision and put it into action.
- Product Manager, who is responsible for taking a product from its development stages and onto the market.
- Chief Technology Officer, who works with executive members to oversee the technical side of a business.
- Chief Marketing Officer, whose job involves creating a marketing strategy and executing it.
- Sales Manager, for managing customer relationships, selling products/service, and motivating the team.
- Chief Finance Officer, who manages the financial planning and decisions for a company.
- Business Development Officer. This is a varied role that involves drawing up a business plan, establishing funding, and building customer/relationship funding.
- Customer Service Officer, who assists customers with their questions, any complaints, and providing product information.
However, your business structure depends on the industry, so look at the above as definitive.
When you’re just starting up, hiring an entire team often isn’t realistic, and you find yourself wearing several business hats. That’s OK, to an extent. Just remember to play to your strengths and outsource if you can’t afford to recruit.
That said, there are some experts you should consider essential, including a:
- Lawyer
- Accountant
- Financial advisor
Unless you’re an expert in law, finances, and accounting, these three people can help save your business some money in the long run.
They can explain the legal requirements and tax obligations based on how you structure your business. For example, it could be a:
- Sole proprietorship
- Partnership
- Corporation
- Limited liability company
While your lawyer, accountant, and financial advisors are not necessarily employees on your payroll, they are still important people to surround yourself with.
Finally, for this section, don’t forget the fundamentals for starting any company:
- Register your business name.
- Get a federal ID number from the IRS. The IRS lets you submit your business information online to get your employer identification number (EIN).
- Get insured: Shop around and find an insurance agent who can get you plenty of coverage at an affordable rate.
Now that you’ve got staff, you need to start work on a website and find a place to base your business.
4. Find a Location and Build a Website
Now you’re ready for the next stage of your how-to start a startup plan: finding a physical location and setting up a website.
Whether it’s offices, retail space, or a manufacturing location, you need to buy or lease a property to operate your business.
Unless you’re working from a home office, your two main options are leasing or ownership. Leasing usually works as out more expensive long term; however, don’t just base your decision on costs. Leasing and ownership both have their pros and cons. Look at the whole picture before making a decision.
I appreciate that it may not be realistic for all entrepreneurs to tie up the majority of their capital in real estate.
Strategize for this in your business plan and try to secure enough funding so that you can afford to buy property. It’s worth the investment and can save you money in the long run.
Let’s move on to setting up a website.
Today, your company can’t survive without an online presence. Don’t wait until the day your business officially launches to get your website off the ground, either, and remember, it’s never too early to start promoting your business.
If customers are searching online for a service in your industry, you want them to know that you exist, even if you’re not quite open for business yet.
The beauty of an online presence is you can even start generating some income through your website before you find premises. If it’s applicable, start taking some pre-orders and scheduling appointments.
For those of you who aren’t convinced about the pre-orders business model, many startups are succeeding with it.
Here are some tips about how to launch and promote a successful website:
- When designing a website, it is important to keep the user in mind. The layout of the website should be easy to navigate and use. The colors and fonts should be easy on the eyes.
- Make your website visually appealing. Use eye-catching images and dynamic designs to make the website stand out from the competition.
- Keep the content of the website fresh and up-to-date to keep users coming back to visit your site. Your website is an ideal place to keep your audience up-to-date with a glimpse inside your company, product launches, and, of course, the details of your business premises.
- Another important thing to keep in mind is usability. Your site should be easy to use on all devices, from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets.
Finally, make sure that your website is fast.
I can’t stress this point enough.
I’ve got a video tutorial that explains how to speed up your website.
All of these items combined may sound tough, but it’s really not that difficult. Just focus on one task at a time, and you’ll get there.
Once your website is up and running, you need to expand your digital presence. To do this, use social media platforms like:
- TikTok
- Snapchat
Your prospective customers are using these platforms, so you need to be on them, too. However, when choosing a platform, ensure you go where your core audience is. For instance, if you’re targeting a younger market, TikTok may be ideal.
5. Become a Marketing Expert
If you’re not a marketing expert, you need to become one.
You might have the best product or service in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then your startup can’t succeed.
To start spreading the word, you must learn how to use digital marketing techniques like:
- Content marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
However, if you’re starting a small business in a local community, some of the traditional methods can still work well. Think:
- Print advertising
- Radio advertisements
- Television
- Billboards
While some would argue that outbound marketing efforts are not as effective these days, research shows that methods like cold emailing and calling still work well.
For those of you who aren’t efficient marketers, there is no shame in hiring a marketing director or even a marketing team, depending on the size of your company.
Your marketing efforts will be one of the most important, if not the most important, components of launching your startup business. To improve your chances of success:
- Allocate a marketing budget.
- Determine how you’re going to distribute this money across different channels.
- Have a plan and try to maximize your return on investment for each campaign.
Take these numbers into consideration before you spend your entire budget on something like banner ads.
The bottom line is this: Marketing needs to be a top priority for your startup company.
6. Build a Customer Base
If you’re following this plan in order, the good news is that you’re already on the right track to building a customer base.
Starting a website, growing your digital presence, and becoming an effective marketer are all steps in the right direction. However, now it’s time to put these efforts to the test. That means:
- Opening your doors (or website) for business.
- Getting a customer to make a purchase is the first step.
- Retaining customers.
There are three keys to customer retention:
- Customer service
- Customer service
- Customer service
It’s no secret. The customer needs to be your main priority. They are the lifelines of your business, and they need to be treated accordingly.
Once you establish a steady customer base, you can use it to your advantage.
You’ll get more money from your existing customers than from new ones.
It’s a more effective method than cross-selling.
Less than 0.5% of customers respond to cross-selling.
Over 4% of your customers will buy an upsell.
These strategies both double back to having effective marketing campaigns.
Overall, establishing, building, and maintaining a customer base will help you get your startup company off the ground.
7. Prepare for Anything
Expect the unexpected.
Launching your startup company won’t be easy, and you need to plan for some hurdles along the way.
Don’t let these speed bumps become roadblocks.
You can’t get discouraged when something goes wrong.
Preserve and push through it.
The difficulties that you face while launching your startup company help prepare you for the tough road ahead.
Even after your business is up and running, it won’t necessarily be smooth sailing for the entire lifecycle of your company.
As illustrated above, you face peaks and valleys while your company operates.
Mistakes and setbacks happen.
Some of these things will be out of your control, like a natural disaster or a crisis with the nation’s economy.
Employees will come and go.
You’ll face tough decisions and crossroads.
Sometimes, you’ll even make the wrong decision.
That’s OK.
Part of being an entrepreneur is learning from your mistakes.
It’s important to recognize when you’ve done something wrong, move forward, and try your best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Pay your bills.
Pay your taxes.
Operate within the confines of the law.
As long as you’re doing these things, you’ll be able to fight through any obstacle your startup company faces in the future.
FAQs
How Do I Start a Startup?
Check if your idea is viable. Do some research and ask around. Are people looking for a business/service like yours? Then ask yourself: How are other businesses in your sector performing? Have you spotted a genuine gap in the market?
Then you’re ready to start drawing up a business plan.
Where Can I Acquire Startup Funding?
There are several sources, including personal financing, banks, crowdfunding, friends, family, angel investors, and venture capitalists.
Do I Need a Website to Launch My Startup?
In the vast majority of cases, yes. You also need a social media presence that is applicable to your audience. After all, social media is a free, efficient way to reach a huge volume of people that you couldn’t otherwise target.
How Can I Use Marketing to Launch My Startup?
It depends on your budget. Begin with strategies like social media, free press release distribution, and content marketing. As your business grows, you can allocate a budget for affiliates, email marketing, SEO, online ads, and influencer campaigns.
Conclusion
Let’s recap.
Launching a startup company is not easy.
First, you need to determine if your idea is worth turning into a business, then you must determine if you have what it takes to become an entrepreneur.
The percentage of entrepreneurs in the United States is growing strong, and each one of them is going to face challenges along the way.
With that said, having a proper blueprint to follow helps simplify the process. You can get learn the basics of how to start a startup by following the seven steps, and adapting them to suit your individual needs.
With that said, most successful businesses start with validating an idea, creating a comprehensive business plan, and raising adequate funding. Without proper financial planning, your startup doesn’t stand a chance.
Then, surround yourself with the right people and play to your strengths.
For instance, if you’re great at organizing and motivating, focus on that; If marketing just isn’t you, outsource it to a professional who excels in that area.
Don’t forget about lawyers, insurance agents, and accountants to keep your business in order, and make sure you have essentials like an online presence.
Launching your startup is an imperfect journey, and you must prepare for unforeseen circumstances. However, proper planning and execution help limit these hurdles and get your business off to a flying start.
How will you raise funding to get your startup company off the ground?
What is an Influencer: Types, Examples, & How Much They Make
If you don’t know what an influencer is, where have you been living for the past decade? Influencers have transformed the way customers and brands use social media.
For most brands, they are part of a core marketing strategy that drives awareness, traffic, and sales. Influencers wield a lot of power. If you can get an influencer to endorse your product or brand, you can tap into the audience at the influencer’s disposal, which may be far more vast than your own following.
In this article, I’ll explain what an influencer is and how influencer marketing works. I’ll let you know how much you can expect to spend and how to get started today. Ready to increase your reach? Then let’s begin.
What Is an Influencer and What Is Influencer Marketing?
To put it simply, an influencer is any person who influences the behavior of others. In a marketing context, influencers are individuals who collaborate with brands to promote products or services to their audience.
Now that word-of-mouth recommendations and criticisms spread through social media faster than fire in a dry field, influencers are more important than ever. They usually have huge followings on social media and are brand advocates as well as niche promoters.
True influence drives action, not just awareness.
Jay Baer
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy that sees brands leverage the audience of influencers to drive awareness and sales. Influencers are paid to endorse or promote a product to their audience, who, in turn, buy the product from the brand.
Influencer marketing has been growing in popularity for years and will once again be one of the leading marketing trends for 2022. Almost three-quarters (72.5 percent) of marketers are predicted to use influencer marketing in 2022.
Who Uses Influencer Marketing?
While it seems that some companies don’t want to let go of their outbound marketing practices, fashion ecommerce sites are targeting influencers like pros. Many are reaching out to reputable fashion bloggers and sending them clothing and accessory items to be reviewed. The blogger then posts photos and writes about the garments, often linking back to the site where their audience can buy the items being reviewed.
ModCloth, a vintage clothing site, does a great job of this. They are active in sharing (on social media platforms) the images their audience members provide showing them wearing ModCloth’s clothing. This makes their audience feel special, which encourages more posts about the clothing.
I’ve seen many fashion sites send their items to an influencer, and then the audience could enter a contest to receive them. Or sometimes, they will send a credit to an active fashion social media user, magazine writer, or blogger so they can go to the site, pick out some clothing, and then review the experience as a whole.
What Are the 4 Types of Influencers?
There are several different types of influencers. Influencers can be celebrities with millions of followers, or they can be a normal person with a few thousand followers. Typically, influencers are grouped into the following four categories depending on their audience size.
Nano-influencers
Nano-influencers have the smallest audience size with 10,000 followers or fewer. These people may be experts in very niche areas or people who are just starting their influencer journey. Their audiences may be small, but they are incredibly engaged.
NYC-based self-care and exercise Instagrammer Jen Lauren is an excellent example of a nano influencer. She has a small but highly engaged community and creates niche content.
Micro-influencers
Micro-influencers have audiences that range from 10,000 followers to 100,000 followers. These people are typically niche experts with reasonably large and engaged audiences. They aren’t celebrities, and you’d walk past them in the street without knowing who they are.
Travel and lifestyle blogger Miette Dierckx is a micro-influencer with a carefully curated audience who follow her globe-trotting adventures. She works with a range of companies like sunscreen brand La Roche Posay and chocolate brand Cote D’or.
Macro-influencers
Macro-influencers have audiences sized between 100,000 and 1 million followers. These are some of the most accessible influencers with the biggest audiences. They tend to be B or C-list celebrities or online-native influencers who have worked hard to build up a big audience.
Fashion blogger Amy Jackson is a macro influencer who works with a huge range of brands like Celine and Cuyana.
Mega-influencers
Mega influencers have the biggest audiences. Influencers have to have at least 1 million followers to be considered a mega influencer.
These are usually celebrities who have gained fame offline and translated that into online earnings — think Ryan Reynolds or the Jenners. Some, however, are native internet and social media users. People like Zoella or MrBeast are great examples of this.
How Much Do Influencers Cost?
Successful influencer marketing campaigns do not come cheap. In fact, brands will spend $15 billion on influencer marketing in 2022.
While you may be able to send free products to nano influencers, don’t expect a huge amount of traction. Influencers with larger audiences expect to be paid and campaigns can quickly reach five, six, and seven figures.
There are several ways you can pay influencers. Most will charge a flat fee for a post. Some may request an affiliate commission rate where they receive a percentage of every sale they make.
How much influencers cost depends on a number of factors, including:
- audience size
- platform
- engagement levels
- niche
Rates vary broadly. A report by Fox Business found that influencers with over one million followers can charge more than $100,000 per post. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, charge up to a few thousand dollars per post and can make upwards of $100,000 per year.
Why Do Influencers Matter For Your Brand?
Consumers trust recommendations from a third party more than from a brand itself, particularly if they are seen as knowledgeable and trustworthy. An influencer is a great example of this kind of third party. Working with influencers passes the trust they’ve built with their audience to your brand and makes you seem much more credible.
It makes sense if you think about it in a more personal context; you don’t usually trust a person at a cocktail party who comes up to you and brags about himself or herself and spouts fun facts about his or her personality to convince you to be a friend. Instead, you often believe your mutual friend who vouches for that person.
An influencer is the mutual friend connecting your brand with your target consumers.
An influencer also significantly expands your brand’s reach. When you align your brand with an influencer, not only do they bring their audience, but they also bring their audience’s network as well. Because of the loyalty of their audience, an influencer has the ability to drive traffic to your site, increase your social media exposure, and flat-out sell your product through their recommendation or story about their experience.
With the fall of traditional outbound marketing, influencer marketing is becoming one of the most effective ways to attract customers and clients. Modern-day consumers are self-sufficient and want to research a brand on their own and hear about it from someone they trust.
How do influencers assist with your inbound marketing? They generate content about your brand, they recommend your brand to their loyal following, and they insert themselves into conversations surrounding your brand. Getting them on your side before your competitor does can make a huge difference in the success (or lack thereof) of your company or product.
How to Get Started With Influencer Marketing
Working with influencers is a great way to grow your brand on social media.
Determine Your Goals
Do you want to increase brand awareness or make more sales? These are the two most common goals of influencer marketing campaigns, but achieving them requires significantly different strategies.
If you want to make more sales, for instance, you may choose to focus on micro-influencers who have small but engaged audiences. If you care about raising brand awareness, however, it will probably be better to work with a handful of macro and mega influencers.
Think About Your Audience
As a marketer, you already have a solid idea of the audience you should be targeting for your brand. To locate the ideal influencer, you need to take it one step further and think about the types of topics, blogs, and Twitter handles that your audience would follow.
Since I market a blogger outreach tool for my company, the influencers that I target are PR and marketing blogs that focus on content and influencer marketing. Followers of these blogs usually are PR professionals and marketers who want to keep up with the latest technology and trends in their field.
Thus, hopefully, they find my company relevant when a blogger they follow recommends it. However, had I gone after bloggers who write about finance, even though a particular blogger might like my software, their audience most likely wouldn’t care.
Find the Right Influencer for Your Brand
With your goals and target audience established, you can start to find influencers who are a great fit for your brand. There are three factors I recommend bearing in mind when choosing influencers.
Context: Is your influencer a contextual fit? This is the most important characteristic when targeting the right influencers for your brand. For example, Justin Bieber is known as one of the most “influential” social media users with his 37+ million followers. Would his tweet about your software really bring in sales, though? Probably not, because the target audience for tech software and Justin’s target audience aren’t the same; his endorsement isn’t really relevant.
Reach: In addition to wanting an influencer from your field, you also want them to have reach. This is so they can share their awesome content or positive recommendation of your brand with as many of the right people as possible. If your online business sold clothes for “tweens,” then maybe a mention to 37 million girls from Justin Bieber wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Actionability: This is the influencer’s ability to cause their audience to take action. This characteristic comes naturally when you target individuals that are in contextual alignment with your brand and have a far enough reach.
Influencers don’t force themselves upon an audience. They are an “opt-in” network. Their audience chooses to follow their blog or Twitter handle. Thus, their audience is engaged and is there to hear about the topic being discussed. Hence, the need for a contextual fit.
I want to note that there is a lot of market research coming out about mid-level influencers. These are the influencers who have a decent reach but don’t have such a large audience that they can’t nurture relationships with their audience and harness loyalty. A loyal audience soaks up recommendations like a dry sponge. If in doubt, these are the influencers you should aim for.
Where to Look for Your Ideal Influencer
The final step in getting started with influencer marketing is to find those influencers who meet all of the criteria we’ve listed above. Here are my favorite ways of finding them.
Social Media Monitoring
Brand advocates are the loudest influencers your brand will have. Not only does their audience follow them because what they write aligns with your brand, but they also talk loudly and actively about how much they like your company. By tuning in to your social media mentions and blog posts about your brand, you will find influencers and advocates you didn’t realize you had.
Social media monitoring also allows you to find influencers who advocate for the genre or niche you outlined in step 1. For example, someone may post and tweet heavily about yoga gear but not mention your website as an awesome place to buy yoga apparel or equipment. Well, this is someone you want to engage with and expose your brand to.
Research Hashtags
Identify the hashtags that your target influencers are using. For my company, I follow #bloggeroutreach and #influencemktg. By tuning in to the conversations surrounding these hashtags, I have not only identified active talkers in these categories, but I’ve also identified blog topics that I wrote to appeal to these influencers as well.
Once you start finding influencers that seem like a good fit for your brand, I recommend putting them in a Twitter list so that you can organize and follow them most effectively. I use HootSuite to organize my Twitter channel. Here is what my hashtags look like in their platform:
Google Alerts
Set alerts for keywords pertaining to your brand to identify people who actively write about topics in your realm. You also should create alternatives for the name of your brand so that you can find posts and articles containing your mentions and identify advocates who already are in place.
Mention
Mention allows you to type in your company’s name to discover mentions on different outlets such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, just to name a few.
Blogger Outreach
Bloggers arguably are the strongest spoke in the wheel of influencers. One of the bonuses of targeting bloggers is they almost always are active across many social media platforms.
When locating influential bloggers for your brand, start by searching for blogs in your genre and find the niche(s) by reading through the posts to determine if they write about relevant post topics. After making a list of the contextually relevant bloggers, then it’s time to locate their SEO stats and social media information to pinpoint the ones that equal the best reach for your brand.
Manually sorting through blogs to find all of the criteria that you outlined when you gave your influencer an image can take a long time. Luckily, there are a lot of really good blogger outreach tools out there to make this process easier. There is a tool to cover every part of the spectrum.
Influencer Marketplaces
Influencer marketplaces like AspireIQ and Famebit connect brands with influencers in their industry. They often help track the ROI of campaigns, manage payments, and track engagement metrics. They do, however, take a cut, so make sure it’s a good fit for your campaign before investing.
Examples of Influencer Marketing Matches
Callum Snape and Sun Peaks Resort
Macro influencer Callum Snape is one of Canada’s best-known wilderness and travel photographers. That made him a perfect partner for Sun Peaks Resort, an alpine ski resort in British Columbia. His incredible images and videos created hundreds of thousands of views and likes, driving massive awareness for the resort.
Chrissy Teigen and BECCA Cosmetics
Launching a new product alongside a mega influencer can result in a huge boost in awareness. That was the case for BECCA Cosmetics which launched its new Be a Light palette with Chrissy Teigen. Her promo video garnered 2.7 million views, which has helped launch an incredibly profitable product line.
Gymshark and Multiple Influencers
Gymshark has built a billion-dollar business on the back of influencers. The brand’s recent 66-day challenge is a great example of how you can raise brand awareness and engagement on a massive level by working with multiple influencers across several channels at once. By partnering with influencers like Melanie Walking and Laurie Elle, Gymshark garnered 241.3 million views on TikTok and 750,000 posts on Instagram.
FAQs
What is an influencer?
An influencer is an individual who wields influence over an audience of people. In a marketing context, they have a large social media following and work with brands to promote products and services.
What are the four types of influencers?
There are 4 types of influencers: nano-influencers, micro-influencers, macro-influencers, and mega-influencers.
How much does it cost to hire an influencer?
The cost can vary based on industry, the campaign, and the influencer’s reach. Smaller Instagram influencers make between $100 and $300 per post, large celebrities can make thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Where can I find the right influencer for my industry?
Consider using influencer engagement marketplaces or searching relevant hashtags and brands on your platform of choice.
How do I track ROI for influencer campaigns?
Pairing influencer campaigns with affiliate marketing is the easiest way to track ROI. By providing influencers with a unique link makes it simple to track sales and engagement.
How successful is influencer marketing?
Like any marketing campaign, it depends on your strategy and goals. However, 80 percent of marketers find influencer marketing is effective, and 89 percent say it is as effective or more effective than other channels.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing has evolved since it first became a digital marketing strategy, but the technique continues to be successful for many brands.
It’s easy to make mistakes with your first influencer marketing campaign. If you want help creating an influencer campaign for your company, let our agency know and we can help guide you through the process.
Where do you look for influencers for your brand? Cheers to a good discussion in the comments below!
Keyword Research: How to Do It, Tips, Tools & Examples
68 percent of online activity begins with queries in search engines like Google or Bing.
That’s why keyword research should be the basis of any online marketing campaign.
The goal of keyword research is to find out what your target audience is searching for online and determine what it will take to actually rank in search engines for those keywords.
Without knowing what keywords you should be targeting, how will you effectively optimize your website, target phrases for link building, or know what content to develop for your audience?
In this first section, we’ll go through setting up a spreadsheet for your keyword research and discover the best keywords for both your main website’s search engine optimization and topics for content development.
In the next section, we’ll discuss what data will help you choose the best keywords to target.
The final section will be a compilation of the top posts on keyword research.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research refers to the process of discovering what search terms your target audience is entering in search engines to find businesses and websites like yours and optimizing your content so you appear in the search engine results.
For example, my target audience for this blog is primarily marketers and small businesses looking for help with their SEO and digital marketing strategies. This means I want pages from my website to appear in the SERPs when my audience searches for terms related to SEO and digital marketing.
Let’s say someone in my target audience is searching for “what is SEO?” I want to make sure I have content on my website that comes up early in the results for that search term. Luckily, I do! Here are some of the top results for the phrase:
Why Is Keyword Research Important?
If you want your audience to find your website–whether’s it to your blog, e-commerce website, or for local services like lawn care–you must develop a strategy to help them find you. That’s where keyword research comes in.
The top result in the Google search results for a given search query (aka “keyword”) gets the most traffic 49 percent of the time. The second results get the most traffic 22 percent of the time. By the time you get to the second page of Google, users click on each result less than one percent of the time.
In order to drive your audience to the website, you must identify the keywords they are searching for, and create content that matches their search intent.
How to Do Keyword Research
There are many methods and tools you can use for keyword research. We’ll outline some of those methods and tools below, so you can pick and choose what works best for you.
Prework: Spreadsheet Set Up
The first thing you will want to do is set up a spreadsheet to record your data.
I’ve set up a basic spreadsheet that you can access. This document has columns for data using all tools mentioned in the first two parts of this blog post.
You can add or delete columns as you wish in order to match your keyword research needs. The columns included are as follows.
- Keyword
- GAKT – Competition (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
- GAKT – Global Monthly Searches (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
- GAKT – Local Monthly Searches (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
- GAKT – Approximate CPC (Google Ads Keyword Planner)
- SEOmoz KA – Difficulty (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 DA (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 1 RDLRD (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 DA (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 2 RDLRD (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 DA (Moz Keyword Explorer)
- SEOmoz KA – Competitor 3 RDLRD (Moz Keyword Explorer)
In this section, we’ll cover filling up the columns with keyword and Google Ads Keyword Tool data.
In the following section, we’ll look at how to narrow down those keywords using the Moz Keyword Analysis tool (or some alternative methods if you are not a Pro member).
Saving the Google Docs Version
If you are signed into your Google account, simply use the File > Save option to save the spreadsheet to your documents and start filling it in with your information.
Downloading Excel and Open Office Versions
If you don’t have Google Docs, or would prefer to save it on your local machine, go to the Google Docs version and use the File > Download As to save it as your desired file type. I’d suggest Excel for best possible functionality.
Step 1: Keyword Discovery
The first phase of keyword research involves coming up with new keyword ideas.
Sometimes this is the most difficult part of the process as many people unfamiliar with keyword competition will select very broad target words such as pizza, hotel, or Los Angeles.
Others will pick obscure phrases that no one will likely search such as SEO/Link Building/Social Media (yes, I’ve seen people trying to similarly over-punctuated phrases).
So the first thing you will need to do is find suitable, related phrases for their business.
You can always start with some simple brainstorming. Look at the main topics on your website and jot down keywords associated with those topics.
I would suggest doing so in Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet application.
Then, whenever you’re ready to expand on those ideas, continue to some great keyword tools.
Keyword Discovery Tools
The following are a great collection of free and premium tools that will help you discover new keywords related to your website or business.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is great for helping you discover new keywords.
To get started, simply enter the keyword or phrase in the tool.
Let’s say we’re researching Social Media Marketing.
Input the phrase and click Search.
You’ll get a breakdown that looks like this:
- Search volume – number of searches the keyword has during a month
- SEO difficulty – estimated competition in organic search
- Paid difficulty – estimated competition in paid search
- Cost per click – average cost per click for a Google Ad
You’re also provided an overview of what it takes, on average, in terms of backlinks and domain score, to reach the first page of Google for the keyword. This is located above a chart displaying the keyword search volume, both for desktop and mobile, over the past 12 months.
You’ll also be able to scroll down and see different variations of your keyword phrase.
This gives you a wider view of what you can strive to rank for.
For low budgets, you may want to optimize a low competition, low cost per click option that still gets good results. For example, “jobs with social media marketing” fits the mold.
Or, you can pick multiple and A/B test them for the best results.
However you use it, this is a great tool to start with.
Ubersuggest Search Suggestions
Once you have some basic ideas, you can expand upon them by using the five keyword idea variables in Ubersuggest:
- Suggestions
- Related
- Questions
- Prepositions
- Comparisons
In the screenshot above, “suggestions” is highlighted by default. But if you’re searching for the largest list of keywords that contain your phrase, click “Related.”
Every keyword on the list now includes your seed keyword, “social media marketing.”
From there, you can experiment with the other search types. Here are some examples of the keyword phrases you’ll uncover for each one:
- Questions
- is social media marketing dead?
- is social media marketing worth it?
- is social media marketing effective?
- Prepositions
- guide to social media marketing
- help with social media marketing
- problems with social media marketing
- Comparisons
- social media marketing vs digital marketing
- social media marketing vs traditional marketing
- social media marketing and SEO
Alternative Search Suggestions
Looking for alternative suggested search boxes?
The following search engines have similar suggested search options that appear below the search box when you start typing in keywords.
Depending on your keyword, each search engine will offer different suggestions.
Most people stick with Google as it is the most-visited web platform in the world, but it still doesn’t hurt to get additional keyword ideas from elsewhere.
Google Ads Keyword Tool
The next tool up is the commonly referenced Google Ads Keyword Planner.
If you have a Google account and, better yet, an Ads account, I would suggest signing in to those once you arrive on the Google Ads Keyword Tool to get better results.
To give you an idea, I searched for social media when I was not logged into my account and received 100 keyword ideas.
I searched for it again when logged in and received more than 600.
My suggestion is if you are looking for keywords just for your static website and not interested in the cost per click pricing (CPC), go with the results without logging into Google Ads.
If you are interested in the CPC pricing and also getting keyword ideas to help with content development, go with the results while logged into Google Ads.
Here is what each of the columns displayed in the Google Ads Keyword Tool will tell you about each of the keyword ideas displayed.
- Competition – “The Competition column gives you a sense of how many advertisers are bidding for a particular keyword. This data can help you determine how competitive the ad placement is.”
- Global Monthly Searches – “The approximate 12-month average of user queries for the keyword on Google search.”
- Local Monthly Searches – “If you specified a country or language for your search, this is the approximate 12-month average number of user queries for the keyword for those countries and languages.”
- Approximate CPC – “This is the approximate cost-per-click you might pay if you were to bid on the keyword. The CPC is averaged over all the ad positions.”
You can learn more about the search traffic statistics shown in this tool in Google Ads Help.
If you want a simple method to see a broader or narrower range of keywords, you can select this option in the filters on the left side of your screen.
You can also select specific Match Types by clicking the “Modify search” tab and scrolling down to the “Plan your budget and get forecasts” option.
Inputting your search term with the added punctuation will change the traffic volume for Global and Local Monthly Searches based on the approximation of traffic that a keyword gets on Google.
- Broad – The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms, and related words. If you were doing PPC and targeted the broad match for social media, ads would show with any searches including social or media. Organic results would include the same.
- [Exact] The search volume for that keyword idea. If you were doing PPC and targeted the exact match for social media, ads would only show if someone typed in social media but not any other variation of that phrase.
- “Phrase” – The sum of the search volumes for all terms that include that whole phrase. If you were doing PPC and targeted the phrase match for pizza dough, ads would show for anyone who typed in social media, with or without additional keywords such as social media marketing or about social media. Organic results would include only results including the exact phrase social media.
You can learn more about match types (and some additional ones not on this list) in Ads Help.
You can also see the difference in data based on the three match types using the phrase social media in order of broad, “phrase,” and [exact].
And if you were to use these match types in a search, you would get 419 million results for a broad match search for social media and only 304 million results for a phrase match search for “social media.”
Going back to the generic term social media, you might want to remove certain words from the keyword ideas.
For example, you may not want to target anything about social media jobs, so you could add the word job under the Negative Keywords tab on the left side of the screen.
Now, you’ll need to export your data.
To do so, simply use the Download button under the Review Plan tab and export to your preferred format.
You can then copy the data from the exported spreadsheet to your keyword research spreadsheet.
You can also get this data for the keyword ideas you generated using SEMrush and suggested search by copying and pasting those keywords into the Word or phrase box and checking the box to only show ideas closely related to my search terms.
Then export the data for those keywords and phrases by checking the boxes next to them under the Search Terms section.
At this point, you probably have a lot of great keyword ideas.
In the next section, I will cover how to use the Moz Keyword Analysis Tool (or an alternative method to get the same information if you are not a Pro member) to get additional data and then narrow down your keywords to the ones that you should most likely focus upon for your online marketing strategy.
Step 2 – Analyzing and Choosing the Best Keywords
Now that you have a base spreadsheet to use for keyword data entry, let’s look at what’s next.
I want to show you some ways to get even more data about each keyword and further narrow down your results.
Please note that this data will take a bit of time to compile, so you might want to run through the keyword list and remove any obvious ones that you don’t want.
I usually go with no more than 100 keywords for this part of the process.
Keyword Analysis with Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a great tool for analyzing which keywords to use and what websites to examine for ideas.
For example, when we search for social media marketing in Ubersuggest, you can see a list of “content ideas”:
As you can see, a list of pages that rank for the keyword “social media marketing” appears. You can also see how many visits the page gets from the keyword, how many backlinks the page has, and how many shares it has on Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit.
You can poke around the most successful websites and use that as a jumping-off point for what to include on your own page to rank for the keyword.
Keyword Analysis with Moz
You can get other important data to help you narrow down your target keywords with Moz.
If you have a Pro membership with Moz (you can always get a 30-day free trial if you have just one keyword research project to do), then you have access to a very nice little tool called Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis.
This tool will show you the percentage of difficulty for each keyword, giving you an idea of how hard it will be to rank highly for it.
You will also see the top ten sites ranked for each keyword, each listed with its domain authority and the number of root domains linking to it.
The latter is really the information that will help you decide which keywords to target.
You can put in five words at a time, and you can now pick between keyword, root domain, subdomain, or page.
Using our keyword phrase “social media management,” you can see the results of the difficulty assessment, search volume, organic click-through rates, and the balance of ranking ease and end results (Priority).
While this information is helpful, it’s not really anything we don’t already know. We’ve already decided we like this keyword phrase.
If anything, this is just a double-check that confirms the basics you found in the Ads Keyword Tool.
Below this information, you’ll find more keyword suggestions and a SERP analysis of the keyword.
The suggestions are fine for more brainstorming, but we’ll come back to the SERP analysis. That’s the real goldmine.
You can also find a short list of mentions for your keyword at the bottom of the page.
This is useful in letting you know who is using the keyword and how recently they created content with it.
While this information is nice, the real competitor information can be seen when you click on the SERP full analysis for each keyword, such as these results for a social media company.
I like to open them in new tabs for convenience.
This is the part where you can learn a few things.
First off, you can see who you will be trying to beat.
If your website comes up in this list of the top ten, then congratulations – you’re on the first page for a keyword phrase with a highly competitive keyword difficulty of 61%.
If you’re not in these results, you can compare your own website’s domain authority and linking root domains to the stats of the sites ranking in the top ten.
Domain authority is a score from 1 to 100. The higher a website’s domain authority, the more likely it is to rank for the keywords it is optimized for.
The linking root domains is the number of unique domains linking to a website.
You can see that the site with the highest authority and linking root domains doesn’t necessarily win the top spot.
But if you want to make #1, your site may need a domain authority of 28 or higher and hundreds of linking root domains to beat the competition.
Another thing you can learn from this is whether a keyword is drawing commercial or informational results.
This means that you will learn whether your keyword is being searched for commercial purposes (meaning that someone wants to find a product or service) or whether it is being searched for informational purposes (meaning that people are looking for information, not a product or service).
For social media company, the results include seven actual social media consulting companies and agencies.
Comparatively, if I do a full analysis of the keyword phrase “what is social media” you will see that the first page of results is purely informational. All of the results are from highly authoritative domains.
So if you are a social media company, you will probably want to target the phrase social media companies for your main business homepage.
You will also want to create some content based around the phrase what is social media and place it on highly authoritative domains such as YouTube and SlideShare to see if you can get it into the rankings for a phrase searched potentially by a million people monthly.
Alternative to the Moz Tool
If you’re not interested in a premium tool, then you can simply look up each keyword and look at websites ranking on the first page of the results.
If you’re interested in the domain authority stats, you can get some using another Moz tool called Open Site Explorer. You’ll get a limited amount of stats for free accounts though.
Or, you can use the free version of the SEOmoz toolbar – just use that and compare it to your own website’s domain authority.
At least with this information, you can still determine the commercial vs. informational usage of a keyword plus some basic stats to compare against your own website.
Step 3: Putting It Together in the Spreadsheet
The final part of the process is taking the spreadsheet and interpreting the data.
I like to use the Conditional Formatting in Excel to highlight cells a certain color based on the numerical value in the cell.
You simply highlight the cell range you want to compare, then go to Conditional Formatting > New Rule.
Select the 3-Color Scale Format Style, and change the Lowest Value / Highest Value color when applicable.
Certain fields in your spreadsheet will need to display the fact that a higher number is good whereas a lower number is bad.
For those fields (global & local monthly searches), you will want to leave the color settings as default, as shown below.
Other fields in your spreadsheet will need to display the fact that a higher number is bad whereas a lower number is good.
For those fields (GAKT – Competition, GAKT – Approximate CPC, SEOmoz KA – Difficulty, SEOmoz KA – Competitor DA, SEOmoz KA – Competitor RDLRD), you will want to change the lowest value color setting to green and the highest value color setting to red, as shown below.
Once you’re finished, you can highlight the top row and add a filter by applying the Sort & Filter > Filter option.
I like to start with selecting the filter for the SEOmoz KA – Difficulty column and sorting it from smallest to largest.
This way you get the following (click on the image below to see a larger view):
As you can imagine, having the highlighting and sorting options would be very valuable when looking at a spreadsheet with up to 100 keywords.
You could quickly see which keywords have the most searches and least competition or the least competition but most searches.
You could then move over and look at the actual competition for each keyword if you were shooting for #1 rankings.
Step 4: Making the Final Keyword Choices
My suggestion when making the final choice of keywords is as follows:
- If your website is commercial (offering products or services), go with keywords that seem to have the most commercial intent based on the current ranking websites. If your website is informational (blogs come to mind), go with keywords that have the most informational intent.
- Look for a “sweet spot” of high search volume in conjunction with low-difficulty/competition.
- Look at keywords with high search volume with top competitors that have lower domain authority and backlinks.
- If your website is already ranking on the first page, but not in the top 5 spots (or beneath other search result areas such as images, local results, etc.) and the keyword has good search volume, focus on getting those keywords and phrases to move up.
Sometimes, it’s not the actual decision that is the most difficult – it is actually compiling the data that takes the most time! Also, don’t forget to take the keywords that are more informational and use them for content topic ideas!
This concludes our method of discovering keyword ideas, analyzing them, and then choosing the best for your website.
We have noticed that there are many various ways to perform keyword research, and you have to try out different analysis methods to see which ones speak to you the best when deciding on keywords.
Keyword Research Resources
- A New Way to Do Keyword Research: This article and video walk you through another way to complete keyword research.
- SEO Unlocked: Keyword Research Part 1: In this video, I walk you through the basics of keyword research.
- SEO Unlocked: Keyword Research Part 2: This is the continuation of my keyword research walk-through videos. Be sure to check out the keyword research PDF for a more detailed walk-through than this post!
Keyword Research Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know what keywords to target for my website?
Think about the topics related to your industry or business that your audience is likely to search on the Internet. Use a tool like Ubersuggest to find and select the best keywords for those topics.
Are there free keyword research tools?
Tools like Ubersuggest and Moz have free versions of keyword tools you can use, though you will unlock additional data and features when you select a paid version.
Should you do keyword research for paid campaigns?
You should do keyword research for your organic and your paid marketing.
How does keyword research relate to SEO?
SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank in the search results for specific terms related to your business.
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Conclusion: Keyword Research
Completing thorough keyword research is crucial if you want to drive traffic to your website.
There are many keyword research methods to try in addition to those I outlined in this post. As you get more experienced with keyword research, you may want to try out some additional methods.
There are also a plethora of keyword research tools at your disposal. My favorite (biased though I may be) is Ubersuggest. Our team is continually rolling out new features to provide you with better data that other tools don’t provide.
If you don’t want to do your own keyword research, SEO, or digital marketing, you can reach out to my agency for help.
What is your favorite method of keyword research?
What are your favorite keyword research tools?
Off-page Seo: What Is It & How Can You Take Advantage of It
As smart bloggers and content marketers, we usually start with on-page SEO.
However, one of the most important Google ranking factors isn’t found on your page at all. Rather, it’s backlinks from other websites pointing towards your site. The top results on Google have an average of 3.8x more backlinks than the results that appear in positions 2-10.
Off-page search engine optimization is not just about building backlinks though.
It goes deeper than that. For example, brand mentions (your site URL or brand name mentioned on another site without a hyperlink) are an integral aspect of off-page search signals.
Off-page SEO simply tells Google what others think about your site. For example, if you’ve got a lot of valuable links pointing to your pages, search engines will assume that you’ve got great content that provides value for users.
People only cite, reference, and share content they like. Even in a brick-and-mortar business, if your product is helpful and affordable, you’ll get a lot of word-of-mouth referrals from your current customers.
If you’re ready, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about off-page search optimization.
What is Off-Page SEO?
“Off-Page SEO” refers to all of the activities that you and others do away from your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines.
Though many people associate off-page SEO with link building, it goes beyond that. Many activities that don’t result in a standard link on other sites are important for off-page optimization.
On-page search engine optimization happens within the site, while off-page SEO happens outside the site. If you write a guest post for another blog or leave a comment, you’re doing off-page site promotion.
Preparing a Site/Page for Link Building
Links are still very important to Google. In fact, it’s almost impossible for Google to determine the value of any web page if there are no links pointing to it, no matter how useful, fresh, or in-depth the page content might be.
Site owners are often tempted to skip initial preparations for link building. But it’s important that you give this top priority because preparing a site will ensure that you’re mindful of the links you sent to them.
So how do you ensure that your web pages are ready for link building?
1. Lay Out Your Internal Pages
Optimized internal pages can make a huge difference in your overall rankings. This includes interlinking your pages using random keywords (with more emphasis on your brand name).
According to Brian Dean’s famous post “Google’s 200 Ranking Factors,” the number of internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on the site.
Be careful when you do this, however. In a recent study, Semrush found 42.5 percent of websites have broken internal links.
To optimize internal linking, you should have silo pages that connect to your category pages and supporting pages (posts). That way, when you send a link to the homepage, the juice flows through your category and supporting pages, thus boosting your search performance.
Smart search engine optimization professionals don’t just throw links at a page. Instead, they lay out the pages so that each link will pass SEO juice to other interconnected pages.
None of your internal pages should stand alone. Make each page an integral part of your site and include seamless navigation. This is essential to your site users and your appeal to search engines.
Ideally, pages addressing the same or related topics should be linked together in order to provide a rich experience for the users.
In search engine optimization, internal pages are often overlooked. Most SEOs and site owners don’t realize that much of a site’s “SEO value” flows from how the internal pages are structured.
This is usually made possible when you have links from high-value pages on the same site. Silo your pages properly if you want healthy link equity between your internal pages.
Remember that it’s no longer only about the number of links you have. The quality of links to your internal pages is as important as the structure of the pages themselves.
In fact, sometimes reducing the number of links pointing to your internal pages could help your SEO efforts.
For example, CMS North America, a manufacturer of 5 axis CNC machines, had an established website with 170 indexed pages. Yet, the site wasn’t generating substantial search traffic.
By auditing their site using the Internal Link Juice Tool, they discovered that the site had 168 links pointing to the homepage.
This was more than best practices called for, which is especially a problem when the SEO juice from those links doesn’t flow to internal pages.
They initiated a new navigation structure and removed some of the links pointing to silo pages, while retaining the links that supported usability (such as “contact us” and support pages). In all, 70 links were removed.
After 6 weeks of re-structuring the internal pages’ links and the homepage, most of the fresh pages and links had been re-crawled by Google’s spider.
The company saw improved rankings for 18 of the 21 keyword phrases the site was targeting. Keywords that were already ranking on page 2 improved an average of 3.7 ranking slots.
2. Do Basic On-page SEO First
On-page search engine optimization is important. After all, you don’t want Google to view your site as a neglected portal.
I’m sure you’ve heard enough about meta tags and keyword density. Yet, there are other important on-page SEO factors that matter and that are often overlooked. This on-page SEO infographic from Backlinko lays many of them out for you:
One of the reasons many authority sites no longer dominate the top organic listings is because they’ve neglected basic on-page SEO.
You want to link to your internal pages using the keyword that best defines that page.
When you create a landing page that you would like Google to rank highly, you should pass more SEO juice to that page from your important pages.
If the search engine giant is seeing a lot of pages on your site for a particular search term and is unsure of which one to rank higher than the others, you’ll struggle to increase your search engine rank no matter how much value you provide.
And that’s what the basic on-page search engine optimization process is all about. There’s no magic secret formula. Just ensure that your pages are well structured, your keywords specified, and signals are being sent to Google in the right manner. This will work towards improving your search engine ranking.
Here’s an example: Daily Mail Online, a popular online magazine that ranks highly for several keywords, failed to dominate the top listings during the 2014 World Cup. Other brands took their spots:
The online magazine missed out on this opportunity to attract thousands, if not millions of search users, given the sheer interest in the tournament (with a spike peak around June 18).
With several brands dominating Google’s first page rankings, Daily Mail Online missed out on the term “World Cup.” Each new article published about the World Cup overlapped with Daily Mail’s landing page, which they desperately wanted to rank better than other pages (shown in pink).
What’s happening here is the search engine giant is seeing lots of pages from Daily Mail Online for this search term, and is unsure of which one should be ranked highest.
This has a lot to do with internal page linking—or the lack thereof.
To capitalize on the trending search term at the time, Mail Online could have linked back to the hub page from every internal page (especially those related to ‘Word Cup’).
This would have been a strong signal to Google that this page was significant and perhaps useful to users.
Sadly, Daily Mail had lots of opportunities to link back to the hub from relevant blog posts and pages, but they didn’t do so.
3. Pick Thematic Keywords, Even for Off-page SEO
Although links are still the icing on the cake, the upshot to SEO that controls every other factor is the keywords you choose.
Keywords are the fundamental building blocks for your content campaign. In the diagram below, the more accurate view of on-page SEO shows that use of related keywords and primary keywords account for 7.5% and 40% of on-page SEO, respectively.
But not all keywords are created equal. If you want to improve the odds of driving organic traffic to your site, then you need to pick thematic keywords.
The word “thematic” simply means having or relating to a particular subject.
So when you’re picking keywords, focus on those that are related to a particular subject. You can’t afford to spread your net too wide. Here’s an example:
Let’s assume that your business delivers WordPress theme customization services. It’s important to find the right related keywords that you can create content around.
Simply plug your main keyword (WordPress theme customization) into the Ubersuggest search bar. Click the “Search” button. Simply plug your main keyword (WordPress theme customization) into the Ubersuggest search bar. Click the “Search” button. Here are thematic keyword phrases that populate in the results:
Remember that you’re in business to help others. By knowing the words, phrases, and search terms they use in search, you can more easily tailor your content to meet their needs.
You can supercharge the power of your keywords by switching toward branded keywords. In other words, instead of targeting “SEO tips,” you could niche down and include your brand or domain name (e.g., Moz SEO tips, Neil Patel SEO).
Domain or brand-oriented keywords usually bring up several results from the same site in Google search results.
Of course, you have to create useful, high-quality content. When you see several of your pages ranking in Google search results, it doesn’t matter what positions those pages hold – you can pass more link juice to them through any of the link building strategies below:
Branded thematic keywords will give you an edge over the competition and serves as a leading SEO technique. No matter how many top brands are dominating the top 10 organic listings, you can find yourself driving motivated visitors to your site.
When you’re targeting keywords in on-page optimization, don’t just keep reiterating those primary keywords over and over.
Instead, use synonyms or latent semantic indexing (LSI) terms. LSI keywords have one purpose – to help search engine spiders extract meaning from normal keywords (especially those with more than one meaning). For example, Apple, the computer company vs. apple, the fruit.
Ideally, if you were writing content on a subject related to Apple, the company, Google expects you to mention relevant words and terms that are common to the organization.
Stay away from mentioning your primary keyword (e.g., cheap airline tickets) over and over in your content. Google will view that as over-optimization and may well penalize you.
You might be wondering how you can find these synonymous words. The good news is that there are several tools that you can use to research LSI search terms. Simply follow these steps:
Step #1: Go to Ubersuggest and input your primary keyword (e.g., cheap airline tickets). Click the “Search” button.
Step #2: Click “Keyword Ideas” in the left sidebar.
Step #3: Review the Keyword Ideas
Step #4: Choose Keywords
Choose keyword phrases with high search volume, a low SEO difficulty score, and high CPC.
The final step is getting a better idea of what you need to do to outrank your page one competitors.
In summary:
On-page keyword optimization all boils down to researching, choosing, and integrating keywords that you can easily rank for. You don’t want to compete with top brands with higher and stronger domain authority.
That’s why you should also focus on long-tail keywords. You already know how to find and use them to improve your search rankings.
How to Get Relevant, Authority, and User-Friendly Backlinks
In January of 2022, Google processed 12.1 million search queries. Think of all the potential traffic your website could receive if you could capture just a tiny fraction of those searches. How?
As SEOs, content marketers, and bloggers know, backlinks are currently the most important off-page SEO factor.
That’s because natural links from authoritative and relevant websites act as an independent “vote of confidence,” which helps search engines trust your website more.
When Google’s search spider crawls your site, looking for fresh content (sometimes depending on your sitemap settings), it indexes your new pages and prepares them for search users.
After your pages are added into its vast index to be returned in search results when relevant search queries are triggered, Google uses several algorithm factors to determine where those pages will rank.
In the SEO world, we refer to these as Google’s ranking factors. They’re the determining factors for organic web page rankings. Fortunately, you don’t have to memorize all of the ranking factors. This is great news since there are literally hundreds of them.
But the most important factor as far as SEO is concerned is links. Well, not the links per se, but the impact of such links. Some other off-page factors are:
In the past, if I generated 100 links to my page, and you had only 20 links, Google would view my web page as more authoritative and valuable than yours.
Link quality wasn’t all that important at the time.
But today, links are perceived differently. A lot of questions arise when Google sees a link pointing to your web page. For example:
- Where does the link come from?
- What prompted the site owner to link to you?
- What is the link quality? (I.e., is it from an authority site?)
- How fresh is your link?
- How natural is your link profile?
- And so on…
When building links to your site or internal pages (which is more ideal in today’s SEO), focus on relevant, authority, and SEO-friendly links.
Ways to Get Valuable Links to Improve Off-page SEO
There are a variety of approaches when it comes to getting backlinks. Here are some of the most common and effective.
1. Broken Link Building
Even though I’ve written tons of posts on broken link building, sadly, not many people do it. Per Semrush, 40.5 percent of websites contain broken links, and you can leverage that by asking websites with broken links to replace the links with valid ones to your site.
Broken link building is easy, faster than guest blogging, and could provide a substantial avenue to earn the right links.
When I launched my nutrition blog, I leveraged broken link building tactics and generated a handful of natural links from trusted sites through that strategy.
The opportunities are just endless when you capitalize on dead links. Because in reality, the internet is broken…literally.
Lots of links that you see on authority blogs are actually dead. As hosting expires, sites are messed up during file transfer or migration or typing mistakes happen and links are bound to break. They lead to 404 error pages, which don’t appeal to users (more on this later).
All these broken links are to your advantage.
There is nothing new or fancy about fixing broken links. This link building tactic will never become outdated or fizzle out, because the internet will always have new broken links that need to be fixed.
If you have too many dead links on your blog, and are wondering whether your search performance will be affected, you don’t have to worry. According to the Official Google Webmaster Central blog, and confirmed by Semrush in 2021, 404 error pages or broken pages won’t affect your site’s ranking.
404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”).
Although Google likes to see a proper 404 error page, do you think it’s a good experience for the user? Absolutely not.
When people click on your web page from an organic results page, they’re not expecting to see a 404 error page, but rather want to see the exact content they searched for.
Imagine how frustrated people will be when they searched for “best digital wrist watch,” only to click on the first result and see an error page.
A few of these searchers will likely mark the site address and vow never to visit again. Obviously, the user experience was poor. And there’s nothing that drives people away more than a poor user experience, which is a natural indication of your overall customer service to the searcher.
The result of this can be disastrous. According to Sacramento Design Network, “85% of your business could be lost due to poor customer service.”
In a nutshell, broken link building breaks down to four simple steps: conduct a backlink analysis on a relevant website, find a broken link, contact the owner, and let them know about their dead links.
Since you’re helping the site owner locate non-functional links, they might do you the favor of including a link to your website. Ideally, offer a replacement link when appropriate.
If I linked to a particular web page from my Neil Patel blog and found the links to be dead, I could easily replace it with another relevant and high-value resource. If that high-value page belongs to you, that’s both SEO juice and a valuable link.
Trust me, you can get it right the first time, and build the right links to your web pages using this tactic. You’ll find these resources really helpful:
- How to Build 100 Quality Links Without Writing Fresh Content
- 13 Efficient Link Building Strategies for Busy Marketers
- The Black Belt Broken Link Building
- How to Use the Broken Link Strategy to Get Links
Create and Distribute Compelling Infographics
There’s no doubt about it: infographics still work and will likely continue to work in the future.
As of 2020, infographics were the fourth most commonly produced form of content marketing media.
While infographics can still yield impressive results, you have to understand that not all infographics will get the job done.
You’ll most likely agree that my infographics are top-notch. In fact, I spend up to $1,000 to have a single infographic designed.
However, if you’re on a tight budget or just starting out, you may not be able to afford $1000 infographics.
Luckily, you can use sites like Dribbble to find professional infographic designers for half the price. If you decide to use Visual.ly, you’ll get a better design – but their service costs more.
A lot of content marketers use infographics to attract the right audience, acquire authority links, and grow their email list.
For instance, Ken Lyons shared a WordStream case study in which they created a useful infographic that helped a lot of people. Interestingly, the infographic earned a link from CNN and drove loads of traffic to its site.
Ann Smarty, a prolific content marketer, created a useful infographic that generated 10 powerful links in just 2 days.
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, you can use visual marketing to drive engagement with your target audience and earn editorial links from the right sites.
I love creating and distributing compelling infographics. Like any compelling content, when you give it sufficient initial promotion, an infographic has a greater chance of going viral.
The good news is that you’ll continually generate organic traffic to your blog when people start to share your infographics.
In my experience, I’ve found that infographics generate 37.5% more backlinks than a typical blog post. This makes creating infographics an irresistible link building tactic that you should definitely try.
If you’re ready to create and distribute infographics to improve your off-page SEO efforts, the resources below will be helpful:
- How to Create and Promote Infographics to Drive 5,000 Visitors Per Week
- The Complete Guide to Creating Visual Content (Even if You Aren’t a Graphic Designer)
Of course, there are other ways to build quality links to your web pages. For example, you can leverage blogger outreach to build relationships that will yield better links, and use social media outreach to claim unlinked brand names from relevant blogs.
How to Avoid Google Penalties for Unnatural Links
Backlinks are really important, especially if you want to sustain your site’s ranking position. But we can’t talk about off-page SEO without mentioning Google penalties and unnatural links.
The truth is that links can significantly affect search performance – for better or worse.
If you ask pro bloggers which factor they think has the strongest impact on search rankings, many of them will say “links.”
Top brands, small businesses, and blog owners are also into link building. Data from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report found that 59% of companies have done external link building.
You want to avoid Google’s penalty as much as possible, because recovering from a penalty can be daunting and very difficult.
Many things that used to interest Google, such as links from high PR sites, no longer have that strong impact.
Google is now more concerned about user optimization, user intent, and valuable content. The focus is no longer on the search phrases people use, but their purpose for using that particular phrase.
A full backlink analysis can help you pinpoint which links are good or bad for your site – and how to stay off Google’s penalty radar.
The search engine giant hasn’t yet clued the SEO community into any step-by-step process for staying safe. However, there are things you can do to ensure that your site isn’t penalized.
These best practices have helped me generate over 700,000 blog visitors to QuickSprout without experiencing any penalty due to unnatural links and over-optimized anchor text.
1. Create Content and Optimize for the Users First
You probably already know what this means. The question is, are you putting your users first?
To truly put users first, forget about mentioning your keywords several times in the post, especially if it doesn’t flow naturally.
Putting users first goes beyond keyword usage. Sometimes you may not outright target any keyword, yet somehow your content looks too promotional.
Users don’t like to be sold. Instead, help them by creating valuable content. As much as you can, integrate data into your blog posts, and use visuals to convey your message clearer.
If you help them with great content, they’ll want to know more about you.
2. Diversify Anchor Texts
After conducting a full backlink analysis and seeing where your links are coming from, you should next work to diversify your anchor texts.
Diversifying your anchor texts simply means using different keyword phrases, brand names, and generic terms so that Google will view your links as natural and not manipulative.
After all, if you didn’t do anything fishy to get the links, then your links shouldn’t all have exact match keywords in their anchor texts, right?
When diversifying your anchor texts, make relevance your top priority. Google will analyze your link based on the topic of the referring page and how thematically consistent it is with yours.
You know that it’s impossible to control where you get links from. Anyone can share your content and link to it however they please.
Since you can’t control your anchor texts or where the links come from, you should use your brand name as anchor text more often.
If you’re a social media expert and you’re interviewed by a car blog, you should use your brand name as anchor text.
That’s because these topics — cars & social media — aren’t thematic or closely related and Google uses the anchor text of external links to the page to judge the quality, relevance and usefulness of any link gotten from there.
Last, but not least, make sure that you get links from high-quality sites, disavow low-quality links from thin pages, blend nofollow links into your link profile to make it natural, and publish fresh content to increase brand mentions.
Off-Page SEO Conclusion
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO includes any signals that tells Google and other search engines that your site is valuable to your audience. Inbound links are one example.
What are some off-page SEO elements?
Links, reviews, company information, video, social media profiles and audiences
How does on-page SEO relate to off-page SEO?
By optimizing your on-page SEO, you increase the value of the page, thus making it more desirable to link to.
How do keywords affect off-page SEO linking?
There are many attributes that go into the value of keywords in off-page SEO links, including user experience, use of the primary keyword, and value/depth of the content surrounding related keywords and topics.
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Off-Page SEO Conclusion
It’s high time to get off your site and to network with other industry bloggers and site owners if you want to increase boost your search engine ranking.
Understand that Google Penguin and other algorithm updates weren’t primarily targeting search results that didn’t have tons of incoming links.
You should always use white-hat link building strategies to improve your off-page optimization.
However, you need to prepare your website to receive authority link juice as you work hard to build and earn links. Make sure your site is easily navigable.
When it comes to creating a better content experience, it all boils down to answering user’s questions. Start by identifying the questions asked by your ideal customers. You can find these questions on Quora, Twitter, and other social networks. Creating high-quality content is a top SEO technique that cannot be overemphasized.
Above all, search engine optimization is not a hit-and-run marketing approach. You should approach it knowing that the efforts you put in today will pay off in the future, ultimately increasing your search engine rank and leading you to the success you desire.
Most of all, be consistent and patient and you’ll gradually climb to the top of Google’s results.
Which other off-page SEO best practices do you think are important for improving organic search rankings? What are your thoughts on the intersection between SEO and your social network presence?
Marketing Automation: What is it, Examples & Tools [2022]
Marketing is important to your business.
Just call me Captain Obvious.
However, as customers evolve, so does the unpredictable marketing landscape.
This means you’re likely spending more and more time trying to keep up with the latest marketing tips and trends.
That’s wasting your precious time that you could use for other tasks.
What if there was a way to simplify? Or even automate those tasks altogether?
No, I’m not just talking about emails.
Keeping up with what you should be measuring or targeting can be exhausting, difficult, and time-consuming.
But marketing automation tools make your job a little more painless, so you and your team can focus your time and attention on other efforts that drive revenue.
Luckily for you, I’ve compiled a list of the best marketing automation tools with countless features and automated workflows that will make marketing less of a headache.
Here are 20+ tools (in no particular order) that you should try out if you’re looking for new, easy ways to streamline marketing functions.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the act of using software and technology to create and implement applications to automate repetitive tasks, such as (yes) email marketing, ad campaigns, tracking, and much more.
For example, brands could create an automatic lead generation funnel that gathers an email address, sends a recorded demo, then invites the prospect to schedule a live demo.
Marketing automation is not a nice-to-have strategy you can ignore — the industry is expected to be worth more than 25 billion dollars by 2023.
If you want to compete, you need to be using marketing automation.
The good news? Using marketing automation can save you time, money, and improve your marketing efficiency. Here are a few ways to add it to your strategy.
1. Let Constant Contact Deliver Powerful Emails Simply and Easily
Constant Contact is an extremely useful email marketing automation tool that has powerful automation capabilities to take your marketing beyond just the basics.
Its autoresponder is wonderfully adaptable. You can build welcome sequences, drip campaigns, and any other sort of automated email campaign with fine-tuned customization.
That applies to everything: timing, volume, subject matter, targeting, triggering, and even the content in your emails.
Plus, Constant Contact allows you to quickly embed custom forms on your landing pages. So, you not only get names and email addresses, but any other information you want to ask for.
Thus, you can send one welcome sequence to new senior VP-level subscribers, another one for sales folks, another one for regular Joes, and on and on. And that’s just on the basis of job title. You could thin slice on anything from where they live to their favorite kind of beer.
Make it as granular and intricate as you’d like. Set long-tail, automated campaigns for each track and let Constant Contact do the hard work for you over weeks or months. All you have to do is look at the reports and keep a finger on the pulse.
You’ll need Constant Contact’s Plus plan to really reap the benefits of the platform’s email automation. That starts at $45/month for up to 500 contacts in your list, scaling upward at increments of $25-$30 for each additional 2,500 contacts you need to accommodate.
2. Gain Opportunities on Abandoned Carts and After Purchase with Sendinblue
Marketing automation is a massive tool for ecommerce. With Sendinblue, you can close the gaps that allow sales opportunities to slip through your grasp.
And it’s a piece of cake to set up. Sendinblue comes with powerful automation capabilities out of the box. You can build your own automation workflows, but the platform comes with eight helpful, prebuilt options for ecommerce.
The two I love best are triggered by either a completed purchase on your web store or an abandoned cart.
In either case, Sendinblue sets up the first and last actions in a three-step automation: the trigger event (either completed checkout or a visitor leaves with items in their cart) and the action (send them a message).
You’ll determine the delay between the trigger event and when you want the email to be sent out and build out the message in those follow-up emails. The latter can entail offering a promo code to complete their purchase or for their next one, personalized reminders about the product they’re interested in, or a satisfaction survey, to name a few examples.
In minutes, you can have automations set up to generate sales from situations you may not have been able to capitalize on before.
Sendinblue offers automations on every plan, including their free forever package, but the tiers below Premium will limit you to targeting up to 2,000 contacts.
Try out Sendinblue’s free plan and see how easy it is to gain ecommerce opportunities through automation.
3. Automatically Engage and Grow Your Following on Instagram with MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey is a powerful Instagram automation tool that lets you automate everything from replying to comments, stories, and even direct messaging.
This is a huge advantage for busy marketers looking to get back more time in their day through automation.
And don’t forget the power of automation to grow your audience, your brand affinity, and your conversions from hot engagement channels like Instagram.
MobileMonkey Instagram marketing tools let you automate:
- Replies to DMs
- DM replies to Story Mentions
- DM replies to post comments
And if you really want to juice the Instagram marketing funnel, set up drip campaigns to send timed follow-up messages to anyone who starts a messaging convo with you.
The Instagram follow-ups feature, which is included in InstaChamp as well as the multi-channel MobileMonkey messaging automation suite (along with messaging tools for Facebook Messenger, SMS, and web chat) is a convenient way to send offers and promotions to anyone who DMs your Instagram.
Best of all, these Instagram DM automations are 100% Instagram-approved because MobileMonkey is one of the only official partners for Facebook and Instagram marketing automation.
4. Generate Leads, Close Seals, and Manage Your Pipeline on Auto-Pilot With HubSpot
HubSpot is an inbound marketing tool with the goal of turning outbound leads into inbound ones.
It’s perfect for content marketing.
Their Starter package is $45 a month for all the free tools plus simple automation, conversation routing, task queues, and email support.
Their Professional Plan starts at $450 per month, which provides everything in the Starter package, plus marketing automation, goal-based nurturing, and custom workflows.
You also get Salesforce integration, smart content, attribution reporting, user roles, A/B testing for CTAs, and A/B testing for emails.
Enterprise pricing is $1,200 and includes revenue reporting, custom-event reporting, custom-event automation triggers, predictive-lead scoring, contacts and company reporting, and event-based segmentation are included.
5. Use Customer.io to Automate Timely Emails
Customer.io lets you send targeted messages to your customers that you can craft based on how they interact with your business.
The best part about this tool is that it integrates with your mobile app or website so you can see data in real-time and triggers actions by adding in predefined rules.
Basically, it makes personalized messages simple.
Other features include A/B testing, conversion tracking, customer profiles, and in-context conversations.
Pricing starts at $150 per month for unlimited emails, SMS, tracking, and technical support. Their Premium plan costs $995 a month and includes all the basic features plus dedicated customer service rep, onboarding, HIPPPA compliance, and premium tech support.
6. Supercharge Your Marketing Analytics Automatically With Pardot
Pardot, a Salesforce company, is a marketing automation suite perfect for boosting your revenue.
Amp up your engagement with CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting.
This tool is perfect for helping sales teams shorten sales cycles.
Their Growth plan pricing is $1,250 per month, and features include email marketing, in-depth prospect tracking, lead nurturing, and lead scoring and grading.
You also get ROI reporting, forms and landing pages, and standard CRM integration.
Their Plus plan is $2,500 per month and includes all standard features plus advanced email analytics, email-rendering preview, and spam analysis.
Email and landing page A/B testing, advanced dynamic content, and Google AdWords integration are all included.
You also get API access, multiple scoring categories, an integrated marketing calendar, and social profiles.
Advanced pricing is $4,000 per month and includes pro features as well as customer-user roles, custom-object integration, and API access for up to 100,000 calls per day.
It also includes a dedicated IP address and phone support.
7. Use AdRoll to Automate Ad Campaigns
AdRoll is helpful for retargeting customers through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and the web.
With cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities as well as flexible segmentation, you can provide customized experiences that dramatically improve marketing efficiency.
Key features include retargeting across devices and platforms, dynamic LiquidAds, flexible segmentation, transparent analytics, and expert optimization and conversion reporting.
AdRoll offers a free plan with limited features, or you can get their Growth plan for $19 a month.
9. Automatically Nurture Leads With Marketo
This marketing software lets you drive revenue with lead management, mobile marketing, and more.
Marketo, an Adobe company, is a cloud-based tool for companies large and small that not only helps build customer relationships but helps you sustain them.
There are no set-up fees, and the tool comes with a free trial, so you don’t have to commit until you’re sure it’s right for you.
Their first product was “Lead Management” in 2006, but the company has grown tremendously since then and now offers a larger variety of features.
9. Automate Inbound Call Analytics with Dialog Tech (Invoca)
Dialog Tech (now called Invoca) is great for voice-based marketing automation so you can boost ROI with call automation and analytics.
You can optimize voice interactions with Dialog Tech’s tools by measuring your success and adjusting accordingly.
Features include keyword call-tracking, phone surveys, caller-profile data, reverse lookup, conversation analytics, in-call scoring, geolocation routing, voice broadcasts, SMS, and more.
Keyword call tracking is a game-changer for voice interactions.
Otherwise, you really have no way of tracking that kind of data over the phone yourself unless you’re manually recording calls and playing them back later.
Even then, you’d have to manually track how those customers reacted after hearing certain keywords.
Unfortunately, they don’t publish their pricing. So you’ll have to get in touch with them to get a quote.
10. Deliver Personalized Campaigns Across Multiple Channels With Oracle Eloqua
Oracle’s B2B cross-channel marketing solution Oracle Eloqua lets marketers plan automated campaigns while simultaneously personalizing them.
The company was launched in 1999 with the goal of boosting lead generation.
Now, the tool has grown into an effective personalization device across various channels like email, video, and mobile.
Oracle Eloqua will give you all of the lead-management tools you need and segment your audience in specific ways to get them to buy.
Plus, you can track reports and insights into a buyer’s journey with just a few clicks.
They no longer list their pricing online, but previous plans started around $2,000 a month.
11. Track Marketing Interactions Across All Channels With Bizible
Bizible closes the gap between sales and marketing.
You can maximize AdWords ROI and use multichannel tracking to get a full picture of both sales and marketing metrics.
Big features include keyword-level metrics for AdWords as well as metrics for campaigns and ad content, UTM parameters, detailed lead history, custom reports, and integrations.
Bizable was purchased by Adobe, and now exists as a product under Marketo. You’ll need to reach out for a quote and more information.
12. Let Act-On Seamlessly Nurture Inbound and Outbound Leads
Act-On’s cloud-based platform lets you connect inbound and outbound leads to manage your nurturing programs. There are tons of other helpful features too, like landing page design.
With this tool, you can take your revenue to the next level.
The company was founded in 2008 and first sold software through Cisco exclusively.
The professional package starts out at $900 per month for 2,500 active contacts, 3 marketing users, and 50 users in sales. You’ll get 30,000 API calls-per-day.
Enterprise pricing is $2,000 per month for 2,500 active contacts, 6 marketing users, and 100 sales users. You’ll also get 30,000 API calls-per-day with this feature.
13. Automate the Customer Journey With LeadSquared
LeadSquared, founded in 2012, helps small and medium companies align their marketing and sales efforts.
Capture leads from inbound email, online campaigns, phone calls, your website, chat, and more with this tool.
LeadSquared offers a free trial, and pricing for automation plans starts out at $400 for the basic package (10,000 contacts).
The cost is $1200 for the standard one (20,000 contacts) and $2500 for the enterprise package (200,000 contacts).
14. Get CRM, Sales, and Marketing Tools Automated Together with Keap
Keap (formerly Infusion Soft) is for you if you want to get organized, increase sales, and save time.
Don’t we all?
If you’re a small business owner or blogger, this tool is perfect for you.
Keap makes it simple to create a new sales or marketing strategy and execute it so that you can capture and close sales more quickly.
Save time by automating repetitive tasks like follow-ups, billing, contact management, and payments.
Pricing starts at $79 for Lite plan, $159 for their Pro plan, and $199 for their Max plan. Each package covers 500 contacts, with additional costs for additional contacts or users.
15. Grow, Engage, and Acquire Customers with Genoo‘s WPMktgEngine
WPMktgEngine is a WordPress plugin designed to help small businesses implement marketing automation.
Capture lead forms, profile customers, and create new landing pages to drive results fast.
Key features include a centralized lead database with unlimited leads, landing page design, CMS, lead activity tracking, SEO analysis, and more.
Their Conversion Pro package starts at $166 per month for up to 15,000 leads. The Engage Pro package starts at $83/month for 5,00 leads, and their Inbound Pro packages starts at $44 per month for up to 2,500 leads
16. Attract, Capture, and Streamline Leads With Sugar Market
Salesfusion (now called Sugar Market) is another tool that helps B2B companies link sales and marketing more closely together.
The truth is, 70 percent of the buying cycle is complete before the customer ever contacts sales.
Sugar Market helps businesses build revenue funnels by creating custom digital conversations that marketing and sales representatives can use to convert customers.
The tools help your team say the right thing to the right leads at the right time and includes all the CRM features you could ever need.
Pricing depends on the number of contacts you want but begins at $1,000 per month for 10,000 contacts.
17. Segment and Automate Customer Experiences Using iContact
iContact provides marketing-automation software, email marketing services, and more so that your team can drive successful results every time.
Integrate landing pages, email marketing, social media management, and analytics together to outsmart your competition and reach more contacts.
Plus, you’ll have access to strategic advisors who can help you “optimize your sending strategy and inbox delivery for maximum conversions.”
This is the tool for you if you’re looking to grow your business and become notable in your industry.
Pricing depends on your number of contacts, but you can easily select your list size.
iContact is a minimum of $15 per month for 1500 contacts for the basic Email Marketing package, and $30 per month for 500 contacts for the Pro package.
The Pro package includes features not available with the basic Email Marketing package, such as:
- Email, automation, and landing page reporting
- Unlimited landing page creation
- Custom API
- Smart sending
- Automation followups
- Welcome, birthday, and event eries
- Segmentation
- Behavioral targeting
- Social monitoring
18. Get BuzzBuilder Pro to Automate Cold Email Campaigns
BuzzBuilder Pro is useful for entrepreneurs, sales teams, and marketers. Find prospects, generate leads, and nurture them more easily.
Key features include advanced email marketing automation, a website form builder, tracking and analytics, lead nurturing, scoring and ranking, social media marketing, and hot-lead alerts.
You will need to call for detailed pricing information.
19. Create Automated Marketing Workflows With Net-Results
Net-Results helps to automate almost every kind of marketing task imaginable.
Their goal is to help you save time while allowing you to better uncover and nurture leads so that your revenue will grow quickly.
Features include an email builder, form builder, landing-page builder, campaign builder, and A/B-test builder. Nurture leads, automate workflows, and more.
Pricing ranges start at $800 per month for 2,500 contacts and go up from there.
20. Streamline and Simplify Marketing Automation With GreenRope
GreenRope is “the ultimate dashboard for your business.”
This tool is useful for completing marketing automation and CRM all in one place.
Manage operations, sales, and marketing all from one dashboard that will help you visualize your performance and make key business decisions.
Features include interaction tracking, event and project management, calendar booking, SMS marketing, surveys, video tracking, and predictive analysis.
You can also trigger automation, lead scoring, analysis, prediction, and engagement.
Pricing starts at $99 per month for 500 contacts and goes up to $799 per month for up to 50,00 contacts.
21. Deliver Automated Email Campaigns Using MailChimp
With intelligent email marketing features, it’s hard not to love MailChimp.
This tool is perfect for contacting prospects or customers who are vital to your success. If you need an effective email tool, this is one you should definitely check out.
Features include email marketing automation, personalized emails, automated welcome emails, behavioral targeting, engagement monitoring, and more.
With this tool, you can trigger emails based on actions like sign-up date and website activity.
The cost is free for up to 2,000 contacts, and upwards of $425 or more per month depending on your total number of subscribers.
22. Automate Marketing Processes with Gliffy
Create organizational charts, high-quality flowcharts, UML diagrams, network diagrams, technical drawings, wireframes, and more with Gliffy.
It works in your web browser to help you visualize workflows and boost marketing productivity.
Key features include workflow organization, an intuitive interface, collaboration with anyone with access to a web browser, and more.
The best part? They have a free trial!
23. Use Inbound Marketing Automation with Jumplead
Jumplead turns website visitors into leads and then nurtures them until they become paying customers.
Jumplead is a go-to source for everything from lead tracking to CRM, analytics, and automation.
Features include lead tracking, CRM, behavior-triggered actions, email marketing, landing pages, and analytics.
The cost is free for 200 visitors and goes up from there. The pro package is $199 per month for 20,000 visitors.
Bonus: Add fresh data to your marketing campaign with DataForSEO
DataForSEO provides “comprehensive SEO data via API at a predictable price.”.
While they mostly work with SEO providers, you can use their data to juice up your marketing efforts.
Here’s a list of API’s DataForSEO provides:
- Rank tracking API
- SERP API
- Keywords data API
- Competitor API
- OnPage API
- Keyword finder API
Marketing Automation FAQ
What is marketing automation?
A strategy that uses software that creates “rules,” which allows brands to create an efficient, often hands-off marketing process.
What are the benefits of marketing automation?
Automation allows you to get more done in less time, improve effectiveness, and provides access to far more data. For small or streamlined teams, it is ideal.
Are there any free marketing automation tools?
Some tools offer a free trial or free plan, including MailChimp, HubSpot, and Zoho.
What can I do with marketing automation?
A ton! You can automate email campaigns, reporting, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and much more.
Marketing Automation Conclusion
Good marketing has the ability to set you apart from your competition.
However, it can be hard to keep up with what marketing strategies work and which ones don’t.
Even when you do, it’s hard to focus on all of them at once. You don’t always have the time or energy to do it. Neither do I.
Thankfully, marketing automation tools exist to make marketing easier for you and your team.
By automating, you can spend your time and attention focusing on other efforts that will increase your company’s success.
Try out some of these marketing automation tools based on your needs and budget.
Kick back as they streamline your processes for you.
Then, pick your favorites and stick with them.
What marketing automation tools are you using?