South Africa has 36.54 million active internet users as of January 2020 and 34.93 million of which are mobile internet users. 22 million South African residents are active on social media, 21.56 million of which are active mobile users. Source: Statista

Try to paint the picture of our South African digital population in your mind, then ask yourself…Can my business afford not to be part of this population? Ofcourse not…right?

Well below I have compiled just 7 reasons why your business needs a solid social media presence….

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share

Your business needs social media marketing, here is why;…..

It boosts awareness of your brand.

Social media platforms provide businesses with the privilege of having direct access to their potential customers with their ever growing active user bases.

Having access to these customers helps your business raise awareness of your brand cost-effectively and with ease. When you post about your business, products, services, offers etc, your followers see your posts and some share them on their friends and connections which is more exposure for your brand. This will also start to build trust in your brand from your audience.

It helps you build relationships with your audience.

Social media marketing gives businesses a human voice which will assist your business in establishing solid relationships with your audience. People interact well and connect with brands who understand them at a nearly personal level.

Generally people buy from businesses they know, trust and like.

You can promote your products and services.

You can post your products and services on your social media pages so your followers can buy.Social networks also give you the opportunity to inspire potential customers to buy from you.

It is very important to know the best ways of promoting your products and also getting potential customers to choose you.

You can also post supporting information about your products and/or services, how to use them, how they can be of value to your customers etc.This will go a long way into convincing your customers to buy from a transparent source.

Social media marketing helps you understand your audience.

Monitoring your social media pages closely, reading and responding to your customers’ comments, complaints, compliments will give you more information that will make you understand your audience better.

As a business, now equipped with information about your customers’ needs, pain points,likes etc, you can be able to tailor your products and services to satisfy their expectations.

Your competition is on social media.

More and more people are joining the social media world and also more and more businesses are taking advantage of the massive power of social media platforms of pooling large audiences.

There is a high chance that one or more of these businesses is your competitor. Imagine how much market share you could be losing to your peers by just not having an online presence.

Struggling to find your footing the social media space? No problem…we have just what you need to get started!

Boost your SEO , getting targeted traffic.

Social media platforms are great sources of quality traffic to your website. This is traffic of prospect customers who interact with your brand frequently as your followers. They are likely to easily convert into buying customers,that is if your website is well optimized for conversions.

Getting high quality traffic to your website, prospect customers who will already interested in what you offer will in turn boost your search engine rankings. This is due to the fact that search engines will perceive your site as a source of valuable information for an audience similar to the one you will be attracting via your social media pages.

Basically good social media marketing practices will boost traffic to your website, which in turn leads to higher rankings. Ranking high on search engine result pages increases your chances of getting click throughs to your website, potentially turning into more sales for your business.

Your business cannot afford not to have a social media presence, not at all!!!

Above I mentioned just 7 reasons why social media marketing needs to be part of your marketing strategy , however, this is just a fraction of the many other reasons.

Get started with it now . Contact us today let’s discuss your options.

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‘Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.’ Wikipedia

7 reasons why you should invest in SEO in 2022

1. People are actively searching for your products and services on search engines.

Nowadays consumers search the internet for products and services before making a purchase. 93% of online activities start on a search engine, it is only wise to make sure that your business can be found via search engines for what you offer.

Businesses that fail to incorporate SEO in their digital marketing strategy or perform poorly, miss out on this opportunity of attracting quality traffic. It is traffic of people actively searching for your products and services. These people are more likely to convert, potentially increasing leads and sales.

2. Build trust and credibility using Search Engine Optimization

People trust websites that rank organically more than those that do not, they also trust them more than the paid/sponsored ones.This is because people trust the search engines algorithms to generate the best results for them.

Practicing good SEO and excelling in it will enable you to outrank your competitors. You will be in a position (1st page) where you can be viewed as trustworthy and credible on search engine result pages.

3. Promote you business 24/7 with top SEO rankings

It takes time and much effort to achieve top SEO rankings, however, once you are at the top,you can stay there as long as you keep monitoring and making necessary adjustments in time.

Ranking high on search engine result pages gives your business the opportunity to be found for services and products you offer, multiple times. This will make your brand stay top of mind of your prospects who are frequently interacting with your website.

4. You can measure the performance of your optimized website

There are many tools you can use to measure the performance of SEO for your business. These include free ones like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and paid ones like SemRush, SERanking etc.

These tools can help you measure these metrics and more;

• conversions
• source of conversions
• organic traffic
• progression of rankings…..

5. You are losing market share to your competitors who are using SEO

Your competitors are getting leads and clients that you are missing either because you are not implementing SEO or poor SEO practices. The traffic that your competitors are benefiting from comes from people actively searching for products and services that you offer too.

To attract that traffic to your site you need to incorporate SEO into your marketing strategy and implement it better than your competitors.

6. Good Search Engine Optimization gives small businesses a big voice

A search engine optimized website can make you small business stand out and outrank competitors, regardless of the size of their businesses.

Large businesses usually rely on advertising and are likely to outspend small businesses in Pay Per Click advertising like Google Ads, however, small businesses with effective SEO strategies are able to outrank these large businesses.

7. SEO is target-oriented

You can optimize your website for the specific keywords that your target customers are likely to use as words and phrases in searching for products or services you offer.

This ensures that visitors that will be pointed to your website are high quality traffic, actually in need of what you have to offer.

SEO has very high conversion rates and ROI compared to other marketing tactics because of this quality of being laser-targeted.

Conclusion

Investing your time, money and effort into quality and strong SEO will boost your website’s rankings and domain authority, which in turn will boost your business.

Make SEO part of your marketing strategy this year, outrank your competitors and attract high quality traffic to your website.

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A website is the center of your digital marketing plan and process, like an ocean all digital rivers run to and from it.

In creating a website for your business, first you need to make sure you clearly understand your business model, goals, target audience and value proposition.

Now that you have all that in place, it’s time to begin your website design process. At Digitechbolt Business Solutions, we believe that search engine optimization should be part of the process of creating your site from the beginning rather than save it for later.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is basically making your website attractive, visible and readable to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Let’s get started!

Now let’s look at the the best parts that will make your website SEO-friendly.

1.Site structure and architecture

Your website must be structured in a way that makes it easy to be crawled by search engines and user-friendly to a human.The structure must be crafted in a way that shows the hierarchy of your content ;

Your website – categories – Sub categories – Pages (in descending order), for example;

Home

–Services

—-Digital Marketing

——-Social Media Marketing

——-Email Marketing

Context is depicted by the position within the site and the URL, so it will be good for you if you use simple words, (include keywords) to name the categories and pages.

2. Responsiveness (Mobile-friendliness)

Most people nowadays access the internet using mobile phones. In order to attract the maximum number of visitors to your website, you will need to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Google prefers and rewards mobile-friendly websites by ranking them high on search engine results pages.Ranking higher increases your chances of getting traffic to your website.

3. Page load speed

Optimize your site to load faster. Generally people have limited patience when it comes to waiting for pages to load on the internet. If your website does not load in less than 2 seconds, you will definitely lose a lot of prospects.

Use tools like the Google page speed tool to test the speed of your website, the free tool will also give you suggestions of how you can improve the speed.

4. Usability

First of all, your design must be appealing to the eye, choose your colors and fonts well. They must be fitting for your type of business and resonating with your target audience

Create a simple but elegant layout and allow for a seamless navigation across your site. Any user on your website should know where they are, where they have been and where they want to go with ease at any moment they are on your website.

Make form entry lightweight and easy to fill as possible.

5.Keyword targeting

Keywords are in integral part of search engine optimization.Search engines detect content on web pages using them. Conduct an extensive research of the keywords that your target customers are likely to use in searching services and products you offer.

Create content based on the outcome of your research and in optimizing your web pages for the keywords, try to focus on a few keywords per page. Avoid optimizing for the same keywords on multiple pages as this makes your pages compete with each other for them.

6. Title and meta tags

Create compelling titles for your content across the website, include keywords in the titles. Use the HTML headings (H1, H2,H3…) well, use the H1 just once on a page to highlight the main point and the H2, H3….to reveal the context of your content by hierarchy.

Include your keywords in meta tags during the site design process and make the copy compelling as well.Search engines can use meta tags to detect more information about the page for ranking purposes.

7.Page Content

Create great content that engages your audience, remember to include your keywords in your copy. Make your high-quality content readable both to search engines and human users.

Content includes text, images and videos that you choose to use, make sure you have the right combination of these.

Search engines scan and read your webpage content to detect if it matches the needs of the searcher.Focus on the right keywords, good structure of the site and write awesome SEO content.

8. Image Optimization

Images bring a page to life and also contribute to your website ‘s SEO.

It is always wise to use original images instead of stock images especially when you are writing about your team or work place etc. Use images that are relevant to their subject.

When it comes to optimizing your images for search engines, start with the file name. Use a file name that best describes what your image is about.

You should choose the right format for your images:

• JPEG for larger photos – it will give you good quality with a relatively small file size.
• PNG to preserve background transparency.
• WebP instead of PNG and JPEG – produces high quality results with smaller file sizes.
• SVG for logos icons -these can be easily modified using CSS and Javascript.

Add captions to your images, people read them when scanning your content and also add alt text so there can be descriptive text in place of the image if it can’t be displayed. (Include a keyword in your alt text so both search engines and people can read it.

Conclusion

A well designed and search engine optimized website will boost your business online by making your business visible and standing out in the crowd of your competitors.As you plan for your website design project, take into consideration what we have just discussed above. Feel free to contact us for any further information that you may need to set up your business for success.

The post Website design and Search engine optimization: A solid online presence. appeared first on Digitechbolt Digital Agency.

Yes, we will be doing it together and this is how it will work; I will give you 7 steps you can follow to create a comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy and since you obviously understand your business better, you will customize those steps to fit your business.Simple, right? Let’s dive straight into it.

Step #1 SWOT Analysis

The first step you need to take when creating your Digital Marketing Strategy is to analyze your marketing assets, environment, challenges or limiting factors. I recommend that you use the SWOT analysis framework to guide you on this exercise.

It allows you to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for your business and market.

Step #2 Set Goals

Establish digital marketing goals that resonate and complement your overall business goals, for example, if your goal as a business is to increase sales by 20% for the year, your marketing goal might be to generate 50 leads per month.

The SMART goals framework is a very effective tool in setting goals that are ; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. An example of a SMART objective is: ‘To attract 5000 visitors to my website per month within 3 months’, instead of just saying : ‘To increase traffic to my website.’

Step #3 Define your Target Market

For the implementation of your Digital Marketing Strategy to be successful, it has to be well crafted with right information for the right audience.

Create buyer personas of your target audience by their demographics : age, gender, type of employment etc, psychographics ; buying behavior etc ;interests,hobbies. Having a clearly defined audience to target makes it easy to create relevant content for them and increase their chances of converting into followers, subscribers, leads, ultimately into customers.

Step #4 Channels

Now that you have your goals and a clearly defined Target audience, it is time to choose the platforms where you can reach them. Will you reach them via social media platforms, a blog or website?

Audit your existing channels, improve them, create strategies and tactics that are relevant to your Target Audience, keeping your goals in mind.

*TIP:Identify distribution channels that are best to reach your target audience and the best times to post.

• Facebook : Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 12-4pm
• Instagram: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 11 am – 1pm
• Twitter : Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday around 12pm
• LinkedIn : Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday 5pm -6pm

See also Best times to post on Social Media

Step #5 Content Strategy

Write content that your target audience will find educational and useful. Maintain consistency of the type of content you post and tone across all your channels.

Research key words for search engine optimization and create a content calendar, organize your posts and schedule posting.

*TIP Publish content as a blog on your website and share URL link to this new blog on social media.

Step # 6 Campaigns Strategy

The Digital Marketing Strategy is not complete unless it has campaigns. These can be email marketing campaigns, Social media marketing , Google Ads campaigns etc, depending with your goals and target audience.

Make sure your campaigns are well planned and optimized for conversions. You may have a number of channels to manage or combine to achieve certain results, use marketing automation tools to enhance efficiency of your activities.

*TIP Personalize messages based on buyer personas.

Step #7 Monitor and Analyze

This is the last and most important part of creating an effective Digital Marketing Strategy; Monitoring and Analyzing your progress and outcome.

Measuring your performance across all your channels and of your campaigns will enable you to detect what is working and what is not in time to make necessary changes.

Measure your Key Performance Indicators by using tools like Google Analytics, Insights built in some Social Media platforms like Facebook.

Conclusion

Every business that plans to utilize Digital Marketing must invest in the creation of a comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy. This strategy must include; a SWOT analysis of the company and market, establishment of SMART goals, a Target Audience, selected Channels by relevance, Content Strategy, campaigns strategy and ways to monitor and analyze progress and outcome.

Good luck on creating your Digital Marketing Strategy!! Alternatively , contact us, our Digital Marketing experts will assist you with one customized to your business, based on an extensive research of your industry, market and competitors.

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