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It’s no secret that e-commerce is here to stay.
With more consumers shopping online than ever before, retailers must work hard to get noticed.
What if you don’t have the budget for ads? Are you doomed to fade into the online abyss?
Absolutely not.
Over half of consumers prefer to shop online. Great news for online retailers like you, right?
With the growth of online marketplaces and hoards of choices available to consumers, it’s tough to get the attention you need to drive traffic and revenue.
Today, I’ll share 25 e-commerce tips to get more visitors to your site—without spending a dime on paid ads.
Best of all, many of these tips are easier to implement than you might think.
Many marketers focus on paid e-commerce strategy because they think it’s the only way to outshine the big brands, but that isn’t always the case.
With 95 percent of website traffic hitting the first page of Google, all the traffic you could hope for is there, waiting.
One of the most obvious benefits of non-paid e-commerce strategies is you don’t need to invest money to drive traffic. You’re not trading dollar-for-dollar; instead, you’re trading time or resources for sales.
Another benefit is focusing on non-paid traffic means building a better, easier-to-use website. According to a study done by Amazon Web Services, 88 percent of online shoppers won’t return to a site they had a bad experience on.
With all the options for e-commerce shopping, why would they?
We’re completely inundated with options. The threshold for mistakes and user experience problems is getting lower and lower.
Finally, thinking outside the box helps build a real business with long-term potential.With paid ads, as soon as you turn off your budget, your traffic will plummet.
SEO, email marketing, and on-page experience are long-term strategies that pay off over time.
Overall e-commerce sales have grown steadily year after year and show no sign of slowing down. By 2025, e-commerce sales could hit nearly 7,400 billion dollars. If you’re having trouble getting the traffic you want, there are tons of opportunities to get a piece of the pie.
Here are some e-commerce tips you can implement today to get more traffic to your site.
Leads that come from referrals convert at a 30 percent higher rate than any other marketing method. If you don’t have a referral program for your e-commerce store, it’s never too late to get started.
Keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be elaborate.
Take GetResponse, for example. You get a $30 account credit for every person you refer to the software.
Offer something of value to existing customers for every customer they bring to you; it’s as simple as that!
To get started, find a referral program platform, then use these tips to drive sign-ups.
Google controls more than 92 percent of the search market, which means if you want traffic, you need to invest in SEO. Investing in a blog and delivering valuable content is one of the best e-commerce tips I can offer.
Start producing content regularly whether you have to hire someone or write everything yourself. I’m definitive proof that this strategy works.
If you don’t currently have a blog on your e-commerce website, starting one is easy. Most e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify have built-in blogging templates to help you get started.
Google makes it crystal clear that the on-page experience is one of the most important factors they look at when determining whether a site should rank.
On-page experience refers to (but is not limited to):
To use these e-commerce tips, start by running the reports linked above. Google will offer you tips and strategies to improve your on-page experience.
Improving these factors helps increase your e-commerce traffic because your site looks better in Google’s eyes, and it’s easier for users to navigate, which keeps them coming back.
Repeat customers spend 67 percent more than new customers—and one of the best ways to bring them back is by building an email list.
Why?
You’ve already established trust with them, and they know what you have to offer.
Take a look at this example from Birchbox:
Offering a unique promo code encourages customers to return and makes the offer feel exclusive and like they’re getting something that isn’t available to everyone.
To build an email list, try these strategies:
Once you’ve built out an email list, you’ll want to retarget users based on onsite behavior. Retargeting, in this case, means sending an email to someone who has shown interest in your business but didn’t take the action you were hoping for. (It can also be used for paid ads, but in this case, we’re covering non-paid strategies.)
Abandoned cart emails are one of the most effective ways to leverage email retargeting. In fact, they’re responsible for recovering nearly 30 percent of abandoned carts.
You can also send current customers suggested products related to a previous purchase. As we already covered, it’s easier to go after customers you already have than find new ones.
Here’s a quick guide to retargeting your email subscribers:
Only around two percent of your web traffic will convert on the first visit, so capturing email addresses through your CTAs is crucial.
You need to experiment a bit to see what works. Even something as simple as the color of your CTA button can make a difference.
For example, Performable found that switching their CTA button from green to red boosted their conversion rate by 21 percent.
Try different CTA buttons and phrasing to see what works and test them side-by-side using A/B testing.
Don’t stop at colors, though. You can also test your CTA’s:
Nearly 70 percent of people abandon their cart. This can be due to hidden fees, shipping costs, too many steps, and a poor overall experience. The best e-commerce tips build on what you’re already doing, and the checkout process is a great place to start.
While people are more comfortable than ever shopping online, they also have high expectations for the process. How do you improve the process? Here are a few tips:
Scandiweb did a great case study of the steps to improve their checkout experience. You don’t need to go nearly this far, but it’s a smart e-commerce strategy to implement no matter how big or small you decide to make it.
A white paper by Altfeld shows that when selling to an existing customer, the probability of closing that sale is as high as 70 percent.
What’s the most effective way to bring customers back? Loyalty programs!
Rewarding customers for returning and doing business with you again is a brilliant and timeless strategy.
Take Sephora for example.
For every dollar spent, you earn one dollar in rewards. The more you spend, the more rewards you’re eligible for, including discounts and free shipping. It’s so simple when it’s broken down this way, but the hard part is coming up with a smart rewards program.
To set up an effective rewards program, you’ll want to:
I’ve mentioned SEO already, but this step focuses on internal linking within your e-commerce website. How can this improve e-commerce traffic?
Sites without proper internal linking don’t rank as high as those with a solid link-building strategy.
By creating a web of links on your site, you’re telling Google that you are an excellent resource for what people want to buy and you’re a wealth of knowledge in whatever niche it is you sell in. That will improve the user experience while also improving your worth to Google.
Here are a few tips for adding internal links:
Ninety-one percent of people read at least one review before making a purchase. Where is a great place to get a lot of customer reviews?
Social media, of course.
Are you using social media to drive traffic to your e-commerce store?
Are you using it as a place for customers to land if they have something positive or negative to say about your business?
You should be doing both things because it helps show customers that you’re a real business with real people and not just some brand.
Here’s how to build a social media strategy for your e-commerce business.
You need to be there for your customers. Sixty percent of people want to connect with someone during the sales process.
Remember that one time you were in a brick and mortar and wanted help finding something, but you walked around and couldn’t find anyone to help you?
How did that make you feel? Unimportant?
As people turn to e-commerce, they expect to have the same customer service experience they get in person. That means you need to be available to answer questions and assist throughout the sales process.
There are plenty of live chat software to make this process simple. Leveraging chatbot automation, which answers common questions before connecting users to a live person, can also make it more affordable.
Your e-commerce strategy cannot revolve around you asking your customers to do things without making them feel like they’re getting the most for their time and money.
A great example of this is email marketing. We all know we need a lead magnet if we expect anyone to give us their email, right?
We’re getting to a point where just offering a product isn’t enough to make a sale.
You need to offer free shipping, free trials, fast shipping, bonus offers, and handwritten letters to drive sales.
Whatever you decide to offer, make sure it’s clear what you’re offering upfront so people can see the value before they click to buy.
This also extends to other areas of your site, such as:
You could be losing a lot of money due to poor product descriptions.
Want to know an easy fix?
As you write about a feature, think about the benefit for customers and center that in your copy.
Look at this example from Gillette:
Every feature is tied to a benefit.
They don’t just explain what it does. It’s a razor, we know what it does, but they explain how it will make you feel.
Here are a few other ways to improve your product pages:
Eighty-seven percent of video marketers say that video helped increase e-commerce traffic to their website.
I could do an entire guide on video e-commerce tips because that’s how important it is right now.
If you’re not embedding videos into your product pages, you’ll want to start right now.
As much as 80 percent of people say user-generated content impacts their purchasing decision.
User-generated content can be as simple as taking an image of a product in use that a reviewer left and putting it on your website.
People are more likely to trust you when they see other people enjoy your products. Here are a few other ways to leverage UGC:
If you don’t know what a customer persona is, you could miss out on one of the simplest e-commerce tips.
What is a buyer persona?
It’s essentially a representation of your customer. What do they do? How do they act? How do they think? What makes them click?
If you don’t have a specific avatar that you’re marketing to in your e-commerce business, you’re potentially leaving money on the table.
According to TrustedSite, lack of business legitimacy causes 50 percent of cart abandonments.
What are we talking about when we say legitimacy?
Trust.
As someone works through the purchase process, they might start to feel uneasy. Are you a real site, or a scam? Is the quality going to match their expectations?
How do you avoid mistrust?
Add trust signals to the process. These include:
Adding a video of yourself or someone in the business is another great way to show customers you’re a real business.
Here’s a stat that could drastically change your e-commerce revenue: 66 percent of consumers expect free shipping on every single online purchase.
These people expect you to pay the cost of shipping their products no matter how much they spend. You can thank Amazon for that.
That said, offering free shipping isn’t the revenue buster you think. As an added bonus, if you do everything else right on this list, you’ve likely secured yourself that customer.
There are a few ways to make free shipping work for you:
This e-commerce tip goes hand-in-hand with trust signals, but it’s important on its own.
E-commerce sites collect a lot of data about their customers, including onsite actions, banking or card information, addresses, and potentially even social security numbers on your website.
What are you doing to protect this information?
Here are a few ways to keep your customer’s information safe:
Make sure you let your customers know that you’re doing all of this. When asking them to input sensitive information, include all the steps you take to protect their data.
Influencer marketing is when you pair up with another brand or influencer to help them promote your products.
We see this frequently on platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram.
With the influencer marketing market growing to 16.4 billion in 2022, the potential is there.
Start reaching out to influencers in your niche and see if they sell endorsements. Send them free products to test out.
Dan-Os Seasoning is a great success story on TikTok, and now influencers all over the platform are using it in their cooking videos.
At this point, you’ve read through 20 e-commerce tips; all of which will help you drive more traffic to your site and convert at a higher rate.
If you want to succeed, you need to implement these strategies. However, not all strategies will work for every brand. Or they might work, but with a different approach.
For example, an e-commerce fashion website might get better results using influencers than a B2B manufacturing e-commerce company.
The only way to know is to research, test, and pivot. If something doesn’t work for your audience, try something new. It’s the only way to keep growing.
Visitors who leave your site without purchasing rarely complete the sale.
Urgency offers a compelling reason to complete the purchase now.
Maybe it’s “Act now! Quantities are low!” or “Buy now for free shipping!” or “This is a limited time offer!”
You can approach it from various angles, as long as the feeling of “don’t miss out on this” is created with your visitor.
Look at this example from American Apparel:
Right there in red font, they warn shoppers that they are about to run out of this item.
There are so many ways to create urgency through exclusivity and FOMO, including:
Many smaller e-commerce stores ignore one of their arsenal’s most accessible selling weapons: upselling.
There is a false impression that it isn’t worth the effort, but that’s not the case.
Upselling can increase average order value, which adds up over time.
The very first year that Amazon tested upselling on their platform, they increased sales by 35 percent.
Here are a few ways to increase upsells:
According to Nielsen, 63 percent of buyers like it when manufacturers offer new products. What does this mean for you as an e-commerce store owner?
You need to launch new products and make innovations in your industry regularly. The best e-commerce tip I can offer you is to focus on making a difference for people.
See what the competition is doing and figure out ways that you can take it to the next level.
If you don’t manufacture your products, there are still ways to innovate.
For example, if you’re selling home improvement products, perhaps you could find a way to bundle multiple items together? You could even create a bundle subscription box.
While this whole list of e-commerce tips focuses on how “not” to spend money, perhaps you could take whatever you would spend on paid ads and spend it somewhere else.
Spend it on outsourcing high-quality blog content, SEO strategy, or influencer marketing.
Every business should have a marketing budget regardless of how big or small it is. If you’re currently spending money on paid ads, think about what else you could do with that budget and experiment with other paid options.
Social media and influencer marketing are the two fastest ways to get more e-commerce traffic. Other methods like SEO are more of a long-term solution.
In years past, organic traffic had some of the highest rates of conversion simply because people are finding you naturally. This means you’re likely a solution to a problem the visitor has. It’s tough to put an exact number on this though because every business is different. However, you can succeed with nothing but paid traffic if your strategy allows for it.
There are many ways to track e-commerce traffic. You can use your site’s Google Search Console dashboard as well as tools like SimilarWeb and Ahrefs.
Organic traffic is website visitors that find your site without the use of paid advertisements, often by searching on sites like Google or Bing.
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As you read through these 25 e-commerce tips, which ones resonated with you the most? Do you feel more equipped to drive traffic to your store?
The most important thing to understand is that you don’t have to do all of these things perfectly, you just need to gradually implement them to see results.
Figure out what is currently wrong in your e-commerce store and identify the low-hanging fruit. Perhaps you simply need to ramp up blog content or update your checkout process. Most of those changes can be completed in a few days or weeks.
With all of these tips and tricks available to you, the possibilities are endless.
What are some of the ways you boost e-commerce sales without spending money on ads?
The number one search result on Google receives more than 39 percent of all clicks. This means if someone searches for your targeted keyword phrase, four out of ten people will click the first result and ignore everything else.
Imagine what an impact it would have on your business if you could rank first for a few of your desired phrases.
The goal of this guide is to help you understand the most important Google ranking factors so you can implement them on your website and get more traffic.
Google ranking factors are the elements of your website that the Google search algorithm takes into consideration when deciding what webpages to show in the search results for a given search query.
When someone searches for a phrase relevant to your business or service, you want them to find you and not your competition, right?
To truly understand how to get your website ranked in Google search results, you need to understand Google ranking SEO. There are hundreds of ranking factors, some of which can have a significant impact, while others matter less.
In this guide, we’ll cover the factors that matter most, so you know which SEO strategies to spend the most time and money on.
While the ROI on SEO can be a bit fuzzy, a study by Intergrowth gives it a little more clarity.
The first five organic results amount to 67.60 percent of all clicks. After that, the percentage of clicks drops to 3.73.
Let’s say you rank number one for a keyword with 1,000 searches per month at a 30 percent click-through rate. That would drive 300 new visitors to your site each month. If you convert only one percent of those visitors, it would still mean three new customers every month for a year.
Simply ranking number one on Google for a single keyword can bring 36 new customers per year to your business.
Implementing some of the steps in this guide to rank for a handful of keywords can have a significant impact.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important Google ranking factors so you can learn how to increase your SEO ranking on Google.
In the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile traffic accounted for 54.4 percent of global traffic. The majority of people surfing the web on their smartphone expect your site to work perfectly on their device, and if it doesn’t, they’ll likely bounce from your site.
This is why mobile friendliness is one of the most important Google ranking factors. If your site doesn’t function properly on mobile, Google is knocking you down a peg.
If you don’t believe me, you can read about it directly from Google. As of summer 2019, they began mobile-first indexing, which means your functionality on mobile is what determines your ranking. Desktop performance is second in importance.
To rank in the Google search results, you need to make sure your site functions the same on phones, tablets, and computers. Make sure the theme or template you select is mobile responsive. Next, ensure all your images are displayed clearly, check whether any words fall off the screen, and limit giant walls of text, which might look fine on desktop but on mobile can cover the entire screen.
Make sure the site loads properly by reducing the number of changing video URLs and limiting the amount of “lazy-load” content on your site.
Google introduced Core Web Vitals as yet another important ranking factor in May 2020. These refer to the overall health of your website in terms of the experience it provides for users.
The vitals are broken down into three categories:
A 2021 study revealed only four percent of websites scored well in all three Core Web Vitals categories.
Let’s break each of these down so you can understand how they impact your rankings.
Largest Contentful Paint: Google expects your site to completely load its first page within 2.5 seconds. This reduces the number of people who will click away, and it impacts Google ranking SEO.
You can improve your overall page loading speed by reducing the number of complex elements on your site, shortening pages, limiting redirects, and fixing any broken external or video links.
First Input Delay: Google expects your site to react quickly to users when they interact with something. You have 100 milliseconds or less for a button or window on your website to respond to a user when they click it.
The best way to improve FID is to use Page Speed Insights. To give you an example, I ran a test on neilpatel.com.
Cumulative Layout Shift: Google expects your site to load predictably and not change once it’s loaded. Have you ever clicked a link on a site as it’s loading, and then it jumps halfway down the page taking you to a different link? This factor plays into overall page experience, which is important for Google ranking SEO.
This occurs when items on the page load at different speeds resulting in layout changes. The best way to prevent this is by ensuring all images are the same size, new content isn’t inserted above old content, and animations load at the same speed.
According to SEMRush, 55 percent of brands experienced better results due to the improvements they made to their content.
There is no room on the internet for poor-quality content. I consider this one of the single most important Google ranking factors simply because it doesn’t require anything tricky or fancy. Write great, thorough, and value-rich content, and Google will work in your favor.
What do I mean by value-rich?
I mean write content people want to read, content that helps, and content that provides more than the competition. A great place to start is researching questions your customers have and creating content that provides the answers. To find common questions, use keyword research tools like Ubersuggest, question forums like Quora, and monitor chatter among your target audience on social media.
If you can create high-quality content that also incorporates the more technical elements we discuss in this guide, you have a great chance of improving your SEO and eventually, your bottom line.
Unfortunately, domain age is one of those Google ranking SEO factors you can’t necessarily control unless you’re purchasing seasoned domains.
Domain age refers to the amount of time your domain has been registered, and authority is essentially your reputation with Google.
Even though the “King of Search” John Mueller himself said domain age does nothing, I still have to believe it plays a role in your overall site authority.
If you want to improve your authority you need to focus on something called E-A-T, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
A few ways to improve your E-A-T score are involving subject matter experts and giving them bylines in your blog posts, including interviews and reviews by industry experts, leveraging social proof across your website, and increasing your website’s security.
Keep in mind that E-A-T isn’t a direct ranking factor, but it does impact SEO indirectly. In fact, after Google’s 2018 medic update, monthly traffic to YMYL sites with a lack of E-A-T dropped from 2 million to around 4,000 by 2020.
More than 90 percent of web pages receive no traffic, often because they don’t have any backlinks.
And yes, links are still important for Google ranking SEO. Inbound links, outbound links, and internal links are all important ranking factors because they increase the overall authority of your site and help your site prove itself as a valuable resource.
Inbound or “backlinks” are links that come from someone else’s site to your content. These increase authority by showing Google your content is so great that someone wants to link to it.
Outbound links show authority by providing additional relevant resources to visitors to your site. For example, you should be including outbound links to help readers learn more about something or back up any facts and stats you include in your content.
Internal links are links within your own website that tie ideas together. Having a web of internal links is crucial to Google ranking SEO because it shows Google you are a complete A to Z resource on a subject.
Bounce rate is one Google ranking factor that can significantly impact where Google ranks you in search results. One study found the average bounce rate is around 49 percent. Most believe a 50 to 60 percent bounce rate is acceptable. If your bounce rate drops much below that, it signals to Google that your page probably doesn’t give users what they’re looking for, meaning your page is less likely to appear in search results.
Click-through rate and dwell time are other important on-page experience Google ranking factors. They tell Google whether someone likes what they see when they click to your site from the search results for their search query.
You can improve your on-page experience metrics by ensuring your content aligns with your target keywords, metadata, and title tag. This ensures that when someone clicks through to your site, they get what they’re looking for.
Technical SEO is still an important Google ranking factor. Technical SEO includes things such as:
A study on technical SEO found the following:
Thankfully, technical SEO could be one of the easiest things to adjust on your website. Make sure you’re using relevant keywords in all headers and metadata. The key to doing this is having a quality keyword research tool that provides you with complex competitor data and keyword gaps. You can also run an SEO audit, and this guide explains how.
As for header tags, you want to ensure you’re using keywords in the headers of your articles whenever possible. When Google crawls your site, headers are a big indicator of what your article is about, and they’re important for overall Google ranking SEO.
Your meta description and title tag are what display in the SERPs when someone searches for a relevant keyword. You want to use keywords in both the meta and title tag—but make sure it’s natural and not forced.
While this study may be a bit dated, it still provides context to the importance of social media in SEO.
The graph and study performed by cognitiveSEO show how the number of social shares impact the overall ranking of a web page. As the shares go down, the ranking goes down. Of course, this factor alone won’t make a tremendous impact on your ranking, but in the heat of competition, this can set you apart.
Keep in mind that a social presence is also a significant trust factor. If visitors can find you on social media and see that you’re active and present, they may feel more inclined to purchase from you.
This Google ranking factor can be separated into three main categories:
These are three incredibly important factors going forward in Google ranking SEO. Google is paying much closer attention to the actual content that people are producing and putting a lot of weight on whether a website actually provides solutions to people or if they’re writing entirely for the search engine.
Surfer did an incredible case study and found that out of 37,000 keywords, about 12 percent of them changed intent, with many shopping-related keywords turning informational. This means that people who were once searching for something to buy are now searching for information to help them make a purchasing choice.
Think of content hubs as a destination where someone can come and find everything they need to know about a subject. If your site provides an exhaustive look into something, Google sees you as an authority. By creating these hubs on your website, you’re showing Google you can provide everything from A to Z.
This Google ranking factor is one I would consider somewhat new but falls into the category of trust signals. As more and more people turn to the internet for nearly everything, you need to translate the in-store experience to your website.
What does this mean? It means people are expecting to be able to pick up the phone and call you, they want to see where you’re based, and they expect you to be there to answer their questions in real-time.
Getting a Google Voice number, creating an “About Us” page with real pictures, and even adding an address to your website can help increase authority and show Google you’re a real business.
It’s been debated and tested time and time again, but it’s always proven that longer content performs better.
Longer content yields more social shares and more unique pageviews. Longer pieces of content also tend to hold their position longer.
Now, that doesn’t mean go and throw up a 15,000-word salad and expect it to rank. You still need to provide a ton of value, resources, and incredible information with those words. However, if you can put together a more comprehensive article that is longer than the competition, you have a better chance of ranking.
Where do we see Google ranking SEO going in the future? Based on experience and research, I see five main factors as most important in the coming years (Google also tells us these factors are important):
What do these five things tell us about what Google is looking for? Google wants you to provide users with a good experience when they land on your site.
This study performed by Content Science makes the importance of content relevancy clear as day. To sum it up, they state that while it’s great to have a lot of traffic on your site, and it looks good to Google, to actually generate goal completions, content relevance is key.
User experience and site functionality go hand-in-hand with content relevancy. No matter how great the content is on your site, you need to have a site that performs well and checks a lot of the technical boxes Google expects.
If you take a look at its mission statement page, it’s spelled out.
Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That’s why Search makes it easy to discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources.
I will always think that the key to Google ranking SEO is high-quality and valuable content.
While it’s not necessarily a list, it’s a solid explanation of what factors are most important. You can see the focus is primarily on user experience.
Improve your ranking by implementing all of the Google ranking factors in this guide.
There are likely hundreds if not thousands of factors ranging from small to large. Google has a rigorous process to determine what factors are most important.
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While there aren’t any foolproof ways to rank your content, adding these Google ranking factors can certainly increase your chances of ranking for your chosen keywords. Of course, hiring a qualified agency is another great way to rank higher.
If you’re going at it alone, you don’t have to do everything at once. Start with the most important factors and work your way down. It may take a while, but Google is a merciful and honest leader who rewards those who put in the work.
What factors do you think are most important for Google ranking SEO in the coming 5 to 10 years?
A business credit score tends to not be necessary to apply for an insurance policy. But insurers may ask to access your business data after you apply. High credit scores correspond with low premiums and vice versa. That doesn’t mean you should ignore financials in favor of improving your credit score. Rather, if you improve your company’s credit history by paying down debt or working on payables management, then this could help you save money on business insurance premiums.
Getting ready to apply for business insurance is like preparing to apply for financing. You need to know certain details about your business. If you must have certain coverage before signing a lease or contract, understanding the required coverage will also be key before applying. Doing your due diligence beforehand will save you time and maybe even money.
Part of due diligence is looking for an agent. Make sure you work with an agent who understands your business needs and the best options for you. Then the process can go much more smoothly. It is best practices to find an agent specializing in your industry. Their expert advice can be helpful in the process.
Data your insurer uses revolves around correlation. Poor credit tends to mean a higher risk. Insurance is all about probability, and the data shows a higher chance of frequent claims and overdue payments, when insurers cover someone with bad credit.
Having no business credit score won’t prevent you from buying general liability insurance. And it won’t keep you from getting a decent premium. But a good business credit score might get you solid discounts. So, it makes sense to start building PAYDEX and other business credit scores.
Many business owners have no idea their insurance rate is affected by their credit report. But let’s consider personal credit for a moment. And, since Experian business scores (in part) come from personal credit scores, it does apply to your business credit.
Statistics show that people with high personal credit scores file fewer claims than those with low credit scores, and those with higher scores are less likely to have traffic accidents and traffic violations. Additionally, history in a credit report can show if a business or an individual will pay insurance premiums on time or at all. For that reason, federal law lets insurance companies look at items from your credit report. Carriers do not have to tell you they are using your credit report.
Rates are based on a narrow set of information in your credit report. Carriers can only use those specific types of information; this information together is your insurance credit score. The insurance credit score does not include your FICO score.
The score does include items like the pattern of monthly bill payments, collection activity, total number of outstanding loans, and total number of credit cards. Under the law, your rates cannot increase if you do not have enough credit history to calculate a credit score. If you want to see what your personal insurance credit score is, you can buy a copy of the report from True Credit, a division of Transunion.
It’s smart to review your insurance credit report and make certain everything in it is correct. It is important that you do this to get the best rate you can find.
Only some items on your business credit report are considered when you apply for business insurance. The insurance credit score only considers areas of your credit report which apply to the insurance industry. It is against the law to deny an insurance policy based on a lack of credit history.
The items your business carrier will look at include:
Items that insurance companies CANNOT use when checking an insurance credit report include:
It matters because you can’t get by with no business insurance! Every small business owner needs certain insurance policies to protect them in case the worst happens.
Differing industries will have different degrees of risk. Examine your risks and put together a business insurance plan based on that information. Shop around and find the right carrier for your small business. There are nine basic types of business insurance every small business may need to protect a business.
Every business needs general liability insurance. It will cover:
The type of your business, its size, assets, and corporate structure will determine the amount of coverage you need. But this policy won’t cover motor vehicles.
If you have a physical address, you should carry commercial property insurance to cover losses of business or personal property. This type of policy usually covers damage to the structure and inventory or property within it from damage from storms, fire, theft, or vandalism. Dovetailing with commercial property insurance, it might also make sense to look at a business owners’ policy (BOP) depending on the size and assets of your business.
Insurance companies will sometimes offer a BOP to small and medium-sized businesses. A BOP policy will usually combine general liability, property insurance, and business interruption coverage. You can often add riders to such a policy. It can be more affordable to bundle the coverage you already need.
If property sustains damages, you may not be able to keep your business open during repairs. Hence business interruption insurance can help cover financial losses. It can cover your employee payroll, taxes, operating expenses, debt repayment, and sometimes the cost of a temporary location. Many business owners used business interruption insurance during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when they had to close their doors.
If you hire employees to work in your business, you’re legally required in most states to get workers’ compensation insurance. Workers’ comp protects you and your employees if they’re injured or become ill at work. It can cover an employees’ medical expenses and lost wages while recuperating. If an employee agrees to accept workers’ compensation as part of their hiring package, they often waive the right to sue you for an incident at work.
If you use a vehicle for business purposes, then you need commercial auto insurance. Because if you get in an accident while doing business-related work, your personal car insurance may not cover it. Some insurers will require separate policies for dump trucks and semis.
If you manufacture or sell any type of product, you can be held liable if that product injures someone, damages their property, or makes them sick. Product liability insurance can help cover associated medical costs, replacement of the purchased product, and even legal fees and settlement costs if your business is sued. Distributors and sellers can be the subject of product liability lawsuits, so, they should consider this form of coverage.
If your business is the subject of a data breach and customer information was accessed or stolen, cyber liability insurance can:
Some insurers call this data breach insurance. Anyone who stores customer information electronically should get it, as your general liability policy won’t cover this.
If you run a business where you offer professional advice or are responsible for completing projects—such as a doctor, lawyer, or architect—you need to carry professional liability insurance. It’s also called errors and omissions insurance. This policy can protect you and your business if you’re accused of negligence (or were negligent), missed deadlines, undelivered services, or breach of nondisclosure/copyright insurance. Doctors and other professionals often must carry a specialized type of professional liability—malpractice insurance. But even plumbers, realtors, and event planners can use professional liability coverage.
At times, it can be more affordable for a small business to purchase an umbrella policy, instead of increasing the limits of an underlying policy. An umbrella policy may also cover business risks that an underlying policy excludes. Hence, if the policy limits of your general liability policy are exhausted, umbrella insurance can step in to cover whatever remains. But umbrella policies can’t and won’t cover everything.
You may be wondering if any of this can apply to you. You may not have a physical business location. But your homeowners’ insurance will only cover some of any damage to business property. And most if not all the other insurance policies apply, too.
A small business may do well to consider key person insurance. With key person insurance, if there’s one person—this could be you—key to the operation of your business, the business won’t grind to a screeching halt if that key person were out for a long time (say, with Covid). This coverage can help cover any associated monetary losses for a certain time until your business replaces this person, or they return to work.
Two other types of consider are commercial crime insurance, and equipment breakdown coverage. Crime insurance can protect your business if you’re robbed (even by an employee). It can help cover financial losses other types of insurance may not. Equipment breakdown covers damage to or the loss of your A/C systems, boilers, furnaces, and computers and other electronics, if damaged by power surges or they break down.
If you’ve got employees, then you may be thinking about offering employee benefits. Often, depending on the size of your business, you must provide disability insurance, health insurance, and other insurance, like life insurance, to help protect your employees. But with good business credit, you may be able to save on all these types of insurance.
It’s best practices to take time to revisit your policy, especially if you change parts of your business and need new coverage. Experts say you should search every three years or so for a new policy. This is to make sure you’re not only staying current on your coverage but getting the best rate.
The strength of business credit scores like PAYDEX can affect the price of your policies. Insurance carriers tend to look at open debts and collections, and how quickly your business pays its bills. Paying on time and keeping accounts out of collections can help both your business credit scores and what you’ll pay for premiums—for any type of business insurance.
The post Does a High PAYDEX Drive Down My Business Insurance Premiums? appeared first on Credit Suite.
Ultimate guides are everywhere. You’ve probably read your fair share, and maybe you’ve even written a couple.
They can be a great way to get traffic, build links, and increase your authority, but they’re far from easy to create. The issue most people run into is the sheer amount of content out there nowadays. How do you create an ultimate guide if there are already tons of posts on your chosen subject?
In this post, we’ll look at the steps to creating the ultimate guide on just about anything.
What turns a lengthy blog post into an ultimate guide? Well, there are a few things that almost every in-depth guide has in common:
Apart from that, what you put in your ultimate guide and how you design it is up to you.
If you didn’t know how powerful ultimate guides are already, here’s why you should start creating them right now.
The length, depth, and authority that go into ultimate guides make them a fantastic weapon in your SEO arsenal. The fact that they are so detailed means they should rank for a huge number of keywords. Including internal links to your other blog posts boosts their rankings, too.
A big, in-depth resource like an ultimate guide can be a fantastic source of links. Not only can you use it to go out there and request a backlink as part of your link-building process, but other sites naturally start linking to an authoritative resource, too. So much so that your ultimate guide can continue to attract links for years to come.
There are few pieces of marketing collateral better at positioning your brand as an authority in your industry than an ultimate guide. This is your opportunity to showcase how much you know about your subject to the world and go above and beyond what has previously been written about your topic.
Picking a topic can be a huge stumbling block for many aspiring writers. Don’t get bogged down overthinking it, though. Here’s how you can find the perfect topic quickly.
This first point is obvious, but it needs to be said. You need to know your topic inside and out if you want to write an excellent guide. That doesn’t mean you can’t use a freelance writer to help you out, but you should give them a thorough brief and create the outline of the guide yourself.
Not every guide needs to be written with the express purpose of ranking in Google, but it can seriously help drive traffic and generate customers. That’s why I recommend you enter your topic ideas into a tool like Ubersuggest to see the keyword volumes of the main topic and the volumes of every other related keyword.
Don’t just pick the topic that has the main keyword with the highest search volume, however. You may find another topic has so many more related keywords that it could actually generate more traffic overall.
Ultimate guides are successful when they’re written about trending topics. When people are excited about a topic, they want to consume all the information they can find about it. Your guide should be a part of that, too.
That’s not the only reason you want to focus on what’s trending, though. The newer your post is, the better it might do in search results if someone is searching by posts made within the last week, month, and so on.
With your topic picked, it’s time to get to work creating your guide. Here’s how I recommend you go about it.
Even if you’re an expert in your field, you’ll still want to read blog posts on your topic before you start writing. Doing so will help you understand the level of content currently out there, the common threads writers pull, and the things you need to mention.
Pay attention to the results that Google serves up, too. You’ll find that specific formats are more popular than others, and you’ll want to try to mirror these when it comes to writing your content.
While you’re reading other people’s content, make a note of everything that’s missing from the posts. If you’re writing a how-to post, be sure to go through the steps yourself after reading posts by others.
Then, jot down things you notice during the process that others might have missed or not explained thoroughly. It also might help to sit down with someone who is unfamiliar with your topic and see what questions they come up with.
You can write an ultimate guide off the back of your expertise alone—but you can make it stand head and shoulders above everyone else’s content if you conduct your research.
For some, this is a case of canvassing their colleagues and contacts for their opinion on a certain topic. Others might want to commit to more detailed research and partner with a market research company that’ll carry out a study on their behalf.
The more effort you put into the research, the more valuable and link-worthy your ultimate guide will become.
To create your ultimate guide, simply combine the basics plus the additional details you found were missing from other posts and your research. This way, people coming across your guide as the first piece of content they have read about a topic will get all of the basic information, and people who have read many other guides will be wowed by all of the missing pieces that you included.
An ultimate guide is no good if no one reads it. Considering the amount of time and energy you have spent on your ultimate guide, you owe it to yourself and your readers to promote it well. Do so by:
If you want to take your ultimate guide to the next level, bear in mind these four tips when writing.
You don’t have to be Hemingway to write a great ultimate guide, but take a lesson from Ernest regarding clarity. Short, clear, punchy sentences win out here, especially when writing thousands of words on your topic. Long, convoluted paragraphs may help you get your message across, but they’ll only cause the reader’s mind to wander.
Formatting will also help in this regard. Clearly labeled titles and subheadings will make your guide much more digestible. Short paragraphs will, too. Don’t forget that most of your audience will be reading your advice on a screen, so consider how they might skim it for the information they’re looking for.
One thing I sometimes find missing from other ultimate guides is good screenshots. Take yours using your account of the topic as opposed to generic stock photos. This will make it easier for others to follow along and visualize the process.
Once you have the basics and missing pieces down for your ultimate guide, look for some good examples of your tips in action. If you’re talking about creating great timeline cover photos, then include some examples from pages in different industries.
If you’re talking about using Pinterest to drive traffic, then link to top Pinterest users who are doing things right. Think about your target audience and find examples that they can easily relate to so they feel they must follow your advice to be successful.
There is a lot of advice out there suggesting you should take long posts and break them up into a series, so you can get people to come back to your website over and over again. However, I find that if someone hits a piece of content that says 101 Tips on ___, and the post only includes steps 1–20 with the promise of more to come, they move on to find everything they’re looking for elsewhere.
People want to consume information now, not wait for it. When they read the words ultimate guide, they’re going to expect to get everything in one chunk, so unless you are planning to write 5,000+ words on a topic, keep it in one piece.
There are a lot of great ultimate guides out there, but here are some of my all-time favorites.
If you’re looking to grow your startup, I’m pretty sure you’ll get a huge amount of value out of my ultimate guide on the topic.
With 12 chapters and virtually every angle covered, there’s no reason to read another guide before creating your logo.
If you’ve ever wondered why shoppers are leaving your website at checkout, this mammoth guide by VWO will answer all your questions.
Ultimate guides don’t have to be about marketing, as this guide by Eevi Jones proves.
While Tim Urban hasn’t called this an ultimate guide, you’re unlikely to find a more thoughtful or detailed blog post on picking a career anywhere online.
This blog post isn’t exhaustive by any means. If you want to dive deep into creating high-quality long-form content, then check out these five resources:
You don’t have to write your ultimate guide yourself. If you’re hiring a freelance writer to write your guide for you, here’s how you can create a spec they can follow with ease.
A top-level overview can help a writer quickly get to grips with the topic and goals of the ultimate guide.
Take the initiative and write an outline that includes all of the major points you want the writer to talk about. This makes sure all of the gaps you identified in other pieces of content get covered.
If improved rankings are one of your main goals, then highlight the keywords you’re aiming to rank for.
Where appropriate, make notes for the writer to help guide them. Alternatively, you can record yourself talking about the topic.
Highlight a handful of top-quality resources your writer can turn to for inspiration.
Expect an ultimate guide to take a fair bit longer to write than a standard blog post.
There isn’t a defined length for an ultimate guide, but most are at least 3,000 words in length.
You can use social media and email to get your ultimate guide in front of your target audience.
Absolutely. Ultimate guides offer a lot of value in terms of SEO and building your authority, so you should write as many as you can.
Ultimate guides can be used at any part of your funnel, but they’ll be most useful towards the top. They are great at attracting users into your funnel and converting them to email subscribers.
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Ultimate guides are an incredibly valuable marketing resource. I’ve used them to generate huge levels of traffic, build my reputation as an authority in the industry, and improve my site’s SEO.
Follow the advice I’ve given above, and you’ll be on your way to achieving your content goals while sharing valuable insights about your chosen topic.
Have you created an ultimate guide on your website or blog? What other tips would you add to making your ultimate guide a success?
There are 69.3 million U.S.-based users active on Twitter, meaning it’s a platform full of potential when it comes to lead generation within the states.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to know how to find leads effectively on Twitter—unless you know how to use Twitter’s advanced search queries. That’s why I’m going to tell you what advanced search queries are and how to use them to help drive more leads.
Twitter’s Advanced Search function allows you to narrow down your searches to precisely the type of user you want, including location, interests, and more. You can even find users who are talking about your company without tagging (or @ing) you.
Chances are, you have already used Twitter’s search panel on the right-hand side of your desktop screen or the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of your mobile screen to search for basic things like hashtags and users.
Say you search for a company, such as Converse. You’ll be able to see accounts related to your search, top tweets, and recent tweets mentioning that keyword.
These searches are general, so you probably couldn’t learn much from them.
And if Converse was your company or competitor, that’s disappointing.
Millions of tweets go out each day, so finding exactly what you’re looking for means you need some filtering tools to narrow down your search.
Twitter’s advanced search option does just that.
There are a multitude of reasons you may want to use advanced search functions in Twitter. The way you perform the search depends on what information you are seeking.
You can see tweets from people or companies in any location with any particular phrase you can think of with Twitter Advanced Search. It’s just a bit more complicated than the normal search option.
Currently, you can only access Twitter’s advanced search tool on their desktop site or web app, not the actual Twitter app on your phone or tablet. The next several suggestions can be used on the app or website, but frankly, the desktop advanced search function is easier, and we suggest going that way if you can.
Sentiment searches can help you understand what keywords people use and why they use them via a basic form of natural language processing (NLP). Such searches are generally categorized as positive, negative, and neutral.
Knowing both what and why people search can help you figure out what your potential customers need.
You can purchase programs to run complete NLP analyses on Twitter, but you can do this on your own to a certain extent. For starters, search for happy or sad faces and punctuation combined with your chosen keywords.
In the example below, I searched for the phrase “iphone?” to find people asking questions about iPhones. You can filter results to see top tweets, latest tweets, people, photos, or videos. There are more options on the app, though they sometimes changed based on current events.
A simple search like this is a great way to determine what questions people are asking in your industry or about your products or even your competitors’ products.
Be sure to read through the context of each tweet, though, because sentiment filters depend on context.
Someone asking questions about an iPhone could be looking for apps, security information, or troubleshooting guides. However, they could also be looking for a buyer for their used phone, making some kind of joke, or asking a totally unrelated question—it only looks for the word and the punctuation in this search.
Even with the less relevant results still included, sentiment search narrows things down a bit and could be a great way to find users looking for answers or recommendations. If you can answer your questions, showing your brand’s authority, you could find yourself with a new lead.
This method may be more successful if you run a local brand and aren’t competing against international players.
Find tweets in any country or city with geolocation filters.
That way, you’ll be able to weed out the tweets from faraway places. This is important if you’re a small local business because you can target leads right in your area.
Just add ‘near:(city/country)’ and ‘within:(X mi)’ to find tweets from any specific location worldwide.
The ‘near:’ addition filters out exactly where you want to see tweets from. The ‘within:’ addition lets you pick the distance from that location you want to see tweets from.
Essentially, it creates a radius around the city, county, or other region you specific with the ‘near:’ filter.
For instance, if you own a restaurant in a particular location, for example, you could find anyone who’s looking for a place to eat and send them to your business.
Do this by entering a keyword related to your industry (like ‘Japanese restaurant’) and add ‘near:(your location) within:(X mi)’ to find potential local customers. We recommend looking at “Latest” for this so you can find people who are hungry right now.
Your results should look something like this:
Finding new customers could be as simple as that.
And providing help to users with questions—like where they can find good soba!—can boost your online reputation, which is an added perk of using sentiment searches.
Sentiment searching can give you insight into what people are saying to your competitors and asking them about, too.
If you find that customers are unhappy with one of your competitor’s features, tweet back at them with relevant information about your service.
You can dive into any conversation and add your opinions and answers to build an engaging relationship with Twitter users.
One of the easiest ways to track new leads is to do username searches to track mentions.
All you’ve got to do is add “to:” or “from:” before a username.
The “to:” search reveals tweets sent to that user. For example, if you search for “to:NeilPatel,” you’ll be able to see tweets that other Twitter accounts sent to me, whether in response to my Tweets or independently.
If you enter in ‘from:’ before my name, you’ll see tweets that I have sent out instead:
You probably would use this option more to search for tweets from your competitors, not yours.
Say I’m interested in seeing if anyone has questions for me about branding. All I would have to do is add that keyword to a ‘to:’ search, like this:
Note I added the question mark back in to help narrow it down to questions only.
Then, all I’ve got to do is engage with those users.
Twitter lets you save as many as 25 searches per account. That’s plenty of searches to keep tabs on.
To save a search, all you’ve got to do is click the three dots on the right-hand side of your search query. Then, select “+ Save search.”
That way, you can keep an eye on people sharing your blog posts, mentioning you or your competitors, or tweeting about certain keywords.
Cut out the search results you don’t want by using the exclusion filter.
All you’ve got to do is add the “-” symbol before a keyword, filter, or Twitter user.
For example, if you want to find Twitter users who are talking about smartphones, but you don’t want to see tweets from a competitor (let’s say Samsung), just search for ‘smartphone’ -samsung.
.
Getting refined results really can be that easy.
If you use hashtags correctly, you can build your own filter for driving leads.
Use just one hashtag at any given time, ensure it’s branded and creative, and add it to the majority of your posts.
One of the most successful branded hashtags was Redbull’s #PutACanOnIt:
The hashtag became popular worldwide because it encouraged people to use Red Bull cans creatively, take a photo, and share it with the hashtag.
This not only allows your customers to do your marketing and product placement for you, but it also creates a branded hashtag you can search later to interact with Twitter users.
Hashtags like this might encourage people who have never purchased your products to buy them so that they can participate in the fun.
You don’t have to do advanced searches manually, though. Save yourself some time by letting Twitter do the work for you.
As mentioned, the actual advanced search function is only available on Twitter’s website, not the app. If you have a computer or access the site through your browser on your mobile device, this method can shorten the time you spend searching.
Next to your search bar, you can see three dots. Click those dots, then choose “Advanced search.”
From there, it will take you to this form where you can do a variety of different things. You need to scroll multiple times to see all the available options; that’s how advanced this function has become. What shows up on each scroll may vary a bit by your computer, but here is what you can generally expect.
The first screen shows the basics: words to use, words to exclude, and hashtags to search.
After your first scroll, you can choose a language, tweets to and from accounts, tweets mentioning accounts, and the top of the choices regarding filtering replies.
Your next scroll gives you additional options regarding replies, allows you to choose whether to include links, and the amount of engagement you want a post to have had before you view it.
Your final scroll allows you to choose the date ranges of the tweets you want to see.
You can choose as many filters as you want, then hit search.
The only thing this option can’t seem to do with advanced search is the specific distance option. If I wanted to search Tweets regarding Japanese restaurants within 10 miles of Seattle, I should do that through the regular search bar. However, I can search for Japanese restaurants in Seattle via advanced search by including “Japanese restaurants Seattle” in the first search filter.
I recommend narrowing down dates with every search you do. Tweets from seven years ago aren’t going to help you drive more leads, but recent ones may.
You can look for tweets from the last few days, weeks, or months, or even the last year.
If you want to shell out a few extra bucks each month for even more advanced Twitter searches, there are various paid programs out there, such as Twilert.
All of this could be for nothing if you don’t talk to Twitter users who could be within your target audience. Once you’ve filtered your search to the types of tweets you’re looking for, start to connect with users.
Whether a user tweeted directly at you, asked a question you can answer, or was looking for advice on what to purchase, if you can respond in a relevant way, do so.
Here’s how Apple does it:
Once you’ve identified a lead, head to their profile and follow them. If they follow you back, you may be able to engage further and more efficiently.
No matter why you engage with a customer, if it’s appropriate, add a link to your website somehow. Only do this if it’s directly relevant to their query, though—just tacking one on could make you seem like a salesman rather than a person using their expertise to help.
Best practice may be to simply add a link to your first response, then simply answer follow-up questions unless a link is necessary to expand upon the answer.
For instance, if someone asked “What’s the best Japanese restaurant in Seattle?” and you run one, respond with something friendly and include a link. For instance, “Hey, we think we’re pretty good! Come give us a visit! [Link]”
Then, if they ask, “do you have soba?” you can simply answer with “Yes, and it’s awesome!” or “no, but we do have [acceptable replacement.].”
There are millions of users on Twitter, potentially making it a great place to drive leads. But you’ve got to know how to use advanced search options to find them first.
Advanced searches let you find specific leads to target and build relationships with by adding extra filters to Twitter search queries.
If you’re on a mobile app, you do this by manual searches through the standard search function. If you’re on a browser, try out their advanced search function in all its glory.
Be sure to connect with your potential leads personally and remain engaged with them over time.
That said, if you simply don’t have the time to run all this yourself, we’re here to help.
Which advanced search queries help you drive the most leads?
Whether you care to admit it or not, the decisions you make today will be driven by your emotions. In emotional marketing, we talk a lot about using psychological triggers to get customers to click, convert, engage, etc.
“By leveraging common psychological triggers all people have,” you might hear, “you can drive more sales.”
While it may feel like we make decisions with our minds, using logic and reasoning, the “mental triggers” we hear about are tied more to emotion than anything else.
Case in point, Antonio Damasio spent time studying individuals with damage to the area of the brain where emotions were generated and processed.
While these subjects functioned just like anyone else, they couldn’t feel emotion.
The other thing they had in common was they all had trouble with making decisions.
Even simple decisions about what to eat proved difficult.
While they could describe what they should be doing using logic and reason, most decisions couldn’t be settled with simple rationale.
Without emotion, they weren’t able to make a choice.
This is supported by data from Gerard Zaltman, author of “How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market.”
Zaltman found that 95% of cognition happens beyond our conscious brain, instead coming from our subconscious, emotional brain.
Emotions are an X factor you can’t control, but you can’t afford to ignore them in your content marketing.
When you make an emotional connection with your audience, it’s incredibly easy to steer them to the desired outcome.
You’ve formed an emotional bond, however brief and fleeting, that makes them open to ideas and suggestions. It creates a certain level of trust that’s virtually impossible to artificially manifest.
Rob Walker and Joshua Glen found firsthand what an emotional connection can do.
In one experiment, they bought hundreds of items from thrift stores and similar locations — all cheaply priced.
The duo wanted to see if they could sell the products using an emotional connection through the power of stories alone.
With 200 writers on board, they generated fictional stories for the products and used those stories to sell the thrift store items at auction on eBay.
They raised just under $8,000, which was a profit of approximately 2,700%.
And they did it all using that emotional connection through storytelling.
That’s not to say there isn’t a place for the logical or the rational in decision making.
This is where marketers often leverage the theory of dual processing in psychological marketing.
The theory holds that the brain processes thoughts and decisions on two levels.
The first level is that of emotion, which processes automatically, unconsciously, and provides a rapid response when we need it with virtually no effort.
The second level is the more deliberate and conscious thought process, where we handle decisions with reason and logic. It happens far slower than the emotional response.
In most cases, we fire back with a ready response from our emotions and then try to consciously rationalize it.
Think about some big-brand rivalries and preferences will surface in your mind.
How do you feel when you look at this major brand comparison?
Here’s another common one that has people divided, sometimes within the same family:
And then there’s this brand rivalry we know all too well.
In each of these, you likely have an opinion almost instantly about which you prefer, but it’s not because you have a logical reason.
It’s typically tied to emotion and/or experience; how you feel using their products, or how the brands left you feeling after an experience or reading a news article.
The brain then tries to rationalize that emotional response.
For example, your emotional response goes straight to Coke and then your brain works to rationalize the decision by deciding that it tastes better in a can, it’s fizzier, has a stronger bite than Pepsi, etc.
So, while you might feel like you’re making a rational choice about your beverage, it’s really just an emotional one.
The most successful marketers know how to lean on the emotional over logic in order to make their content draw in the audience.
That’s why nearly a third of marketers report significant profit gains when running emotional campaigns, but the number of successful campaigns dips if you introduce logic into the marketing.
And those results get sliced in half when marketers switch to logic over emotion.
We experience a laundry list of emotions every day.
Is it really as simple as leveraging some emotion to make content more effective?
Yes and no.
Emotion is certainly important, but there are also other factors like timing, exposure, the format of the content, how it’s presented, who produced or shared it, etc.
Despite understanding the role emotion plays in content, we still haven’t quite perfected a formula for what makes content go viral.
Though we’ve gotten pretty close.
Brands have long tried to inflate the consumer’s emotional response through manufactured content; some met with great success.
Take, for example, Intel’s five-part “Meet the Makers” series.
The videos profile a person around the world who uses Intel’s technology to create new experiences and build new technology that makes a difference in the world.
Like 13-year-old Shubham Banerrjee, who used Intel’s technology to build an affordable Braille printer.
And of course, some companies try to leverage emotion and create viral campaigns that just don’t take off.
CIO reported a number of failed viral marketing campaigns, such as “Walmarting Across America.”
In this blog, two average Americans travel across the country visiting Walmart locations, reporting their interactions on a blog along the way.
After countless upbeat entries about how people loved working for the company, it was discovered that the trip was paid for by Walmart and the entire thing was a campaign created and managed by the company’s PR firm.
That didn’t receive a warm reception from the blogosphere, which deemed the content to be a “flog” or fake blog.
Many emotions fuel our behaviors and our decisions, especially our purchase decisions.
Some more than others — especially when they’re authentic.
A study was done by Buzzsumo analyzing the top 10,000 most-shared articles on the web. Those articles were then mapped to emotions to see which emotions had the greatest influence on content.
The most popular:
Conversely, the least popular were sadness and anger, totaling just 7% of the content that was most shared.
Two researchers at Wharton also wanted to dig deeper into virally shared content to find commonalities and better understand what makes that content spread.
What they found was the emotional element, and some very specific results tied to emotions.
While some emotions are more likely to engage than others, every audience is different. What drives one to action may do very little for another.
This modern adaptation of Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion, illustrated by CopyPress, shows the range under eight primary emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.
For content to be widely shared and have an impact on your audience, it needs to leverage one or more of these emotions.
The proof is on the web, not only in the statistics I shared above, but also in the popularity of user communities that regularly share content.
Just look at Reddit and some of the most popular subreddits by subscriber count. Each can be tied back to emotions (some more obviously than others) like anticipation, awe, joy, and more.
Here’s how some of those emotions can play into the engagement with your audience:
You don’t want your audience to make bad decisions. Bad decisions can lead to buyer’s remorse, which can paint your brand and the overall experience in a negative light.
But it can be helpful if you leave the audience a bit more open to influence.
A Berkeley study revealed that anxiety can be linked to difficulty in using information around us to make decisions. When we experience uncertainty, it becomes harder to make decisions and our judgment is clouded.
Still, anxiety can also spur people to act as a result of that uncertainty.
Take a two-year study by Wharton Ph.D. student Alison Wood Brooks and a Harvard Business School professor.
They found that upon increasing the anxiety of certain subjects with video footage, 90% of the “anxious” participants opted to seek advice and were more likely to take it.
Only 72% of the participants in a neutral state, who viewed a different video, sought advice.
Awe is comparable to wonder, but it doesn’t always fall under the umbrella of joy or humor.
It’s intended to captivate the audience and keep them riveted.
You often see this kind of hook in headlines that seem so earth-shatteringly significant that no one in their right mind would want to miss it.
Here’s a good example of that kind of awe used in content when Dropbox first launched.
Co-founder Drew Houston submitted his product to the website Digg, hoping to get some visibility from the social bookmarking site. That headline helped significantly.
Another great example of using Awe to capture attention is a video produced by Texas Armoring Corporation.
To emphasize the quality of the company’s bullet-resistant glass, the CEO crouched behind one of TAC’s glass panels while several rounds were fired at it from an AK-47.
Awe can impact decision making as much as anxiety.
A study from Stanford University found that people experiencing awe are more focused on the present and less distracted by other things in life. They also tend to be more giving of their time.
When you have their attention and their focus, they’re more likely to have time to rationalize a decision.
While joy and laughter can have their lines blurred, they’re really two different emotions when it comes to your content.
Because while laughter often leads to joy, not everything that is joyful is laugh-out-loud funny.
Still, next to awe, joy, laughter, and amusement were the highest contributors to social sharing and engagement in the above studies.
That influence goes all the way back to early childhood.
As babies, out first emotional action not long after being born is to respond to the smile of our parents with our own smile.
Per psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, joy and amusement are hardwired into us from birth.
His studies tell us that our innate desire for joy increases when it’s shared. That’s the nature of the “social smile.”
That explains why these feelings or emotions are such huge drivers behind the virality of content. Happiness, overall, is a huge driver for content sharing.
In fact, Jonah Berger’s study of the most-shared articles in the New York Times (around 7,000 articles) revealed the same kind of results around emotion.
The more positive the article, the more likely it was to go viral.
Brands have worked “joy marketing” into their strategies for decades, aiming to make their audience feel warm, comfortable, and happy.
That’s the intent of campaigns like P&G’s highly successful and viral “Thank You, Mom” campaigns that are injected with a lot of emotion (especially joy) when celebrating the strength of mothers.
Joy can take a lot of forms, though, and it doesn’t have to be commercially intended to elicit a direct sale.
Look at what Beringer Vineyards did with influencer marketing.
Russian Instagram sensations Murad and Nataly Osmann built a following of more than 4.5 million people with photos featuring them holding hands at locations around the globe during their world travels.
They attached the hashtag #FollowMeTo on those posts.
The couple teamed up with Beringer Vineyards to create some images meant to inspire joy, love, and of course the sense of adventure the couple already shared with their hashtag.
Anger may be perceived as a negative emotion by some, but it can have positive influences as well as positive outcomes when leveraged in the right way.
A leading researcher in the study of anger, Dr. Carol Tavris, draws a parallel between anger and how it impacted society over the years.
Women’s suffrage, for example, developed from anger and frustration.
Anger can be empowering for the individual, bringing a sense of clarity and positive-forward momentum. It gives people a feeling of direction and control according to a study from Carnegie Mellon.
In the previously mentioned study on content shares in the New York Times, negatively perceived emotions like anger are equally associated with the virality of content.
In fact, Berger’s study of the New York Times content found that content which incites feelings of frustration or anger is 34% more likely to be featured on the Time’s most emailed list than the average article.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you deliberately create controversy by taking shots at readers or picking fights.
The key with using anger in content is to frame an issue that incites anger or frustration in a way that’s constructive.
You have to be thought-provoking and engaging.
This interactive graph from the New York Times is an example of how content can lead to frustration and anger over economic or societal issues.
This piece of content is simple, yet it provokes engagement as well as thought when results are revealed in comparison to what an individual perceives to be the truth.
The difference between logic and emotion in content comes down to the words we use and how we position statements and information.
It’s just like the laundry list of power words used to improve conversion, or terms commonly used in e-commerce to get customers to buy more products.
When creating copy and content, you have to be acutely aware of whether you’re taking a rational or emotional approach to the information you’re sharing.
You need to think about the response you want to elicit to help guide your content development to make the right kind of psychological and emotional connection with your audience.
The context of your copy can remain the same.
By changing the words you use, however, you can make content appeal more to the emotions of the audience and prospective customer.
The simplest approach to finding the right high-emotion words takes only three steps:
What you’ll find in researching the right words is that emotionally persuasive and impactful words tend to be abrupt. It’s the short, concise, basic words that appeal most to our emotions over our intellect.
Just look at this list from the Persuasion Revolution.
The majority of this emotionally weighted list (and there are over 350 items) is made up of shorter words.
The rational mind, on the other hand, tends to associate with longer and more complex words.
It’s not easy to make that emotional connection with your audience. You have to know them.
Like anything else in marketing, your decisions and the content you create needs to be based on data. In this case, that data is your audience research.
That same research that tells you what topics to create, where your audience spends their time, and the content they prefer to view, can clue you into how to make that emotional connection.
You just need to expand your buyer personas.
In this case, you want to build up the psychological profile of your audience. You can achieve this by asking the right questions to help steer your content research and production.
Your research could turn up a common topic or theme that appears frequently in the content they read and share.
For example, you might discover that a certain segment or demographic in your audience has a strong affinity to family values, or health and wellness.
Turn that into a content campaign that shares the feel-good side of your company.
Delve into the family life of your employees, how your company supports the work/life balance, or better health initiatives.
Google is well known for its company structure, promoting flexible schedules, support of family time, personal projects, and a focus on work/life balance.
The company often shares behind-the-scenes images (visual content) showing off employees enjoying what they do. Here’s an example from Google Sydney’s offices:
That can influence a positive emotional response toward the brand when targeted segments see that content.
Don’t get caught up with the dated idea that emotion is only applicable to consumer-focused businesses.
Emotional marketing has its place in the B2B world as well.
You may be dealing with a longer buying process between one or more organizations, but the decisions are still made (and fueled by) people who are absolutely driven by emotion.
That includes emotions like:
Emotion absolutely influences B2B purchases, and in some cases, emotion matters even more than logic and reason.
You hold a great deal of influence with your audience when you’re able to tap into their emotions.
Once you understand your audience, you can better determine their emotional state.
From there, make the decision about whether you need to influence and exploit emotions that are already present, or if you want to create or give rise to emotions the audience wasn’t initially expecting or experiencing.
Even the most (seemingly) rational decisions are influenced by emotion — and that applies to everyone.
When you learn how to leverage that emotion in your content, you will see increases in engagement, social action, and conversions within your funnel.
How do you use emotion in your content and copy?
The post How Using Emotional Marketing in Content Can Help Drive Way More Sales appeared first on Neil Patel.