2022 is going to be the ‘Year of eCommerce’. Would you believe it if we made this statement? But it is!

Well, what is e-commerce?

It simply refers to online shops that sell multiple products that have a particular layout and set up. They allow you to browse the products just the way you want and add them to your shopping carts. The only difference is that you can do all these at your home and once you check out the products are simply delivered to you wherever you are. One of the best examples is Amazon.com.

It’s a simple and familiar concept. But what makes it important? Why is e-commerce the future?

After 2 years of the COVID19 pandemic, around a 50% increase is seen in the e-commerce market, all around the world. The Indian E-commerce market is expected to grow to US$ 111.40 billion by 2025. India’s e-commerce orders volume increased by 36% in the last quarter of the year, with the personal care, beauty and wellness (PCB&W) segment being the largest beneficiary. India’s consumer digital economy is expected to become a US$ 800 billion market by 2030, growing from US$ 537.5 billion in a year, driven by strong adoption of online services such as e-commerce and edtech in the country.

So the first thing is that e-commerce is growing year by year with a lot of changes happening around it. Long before, people were uncertain about spending money online and found it intimidating to hand over their card details and trust a supplier they couldn’t meet face to face.

But today just take a look at companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra or even any common product sites. From youth to elderly people, all are much happier to shop with them. As the years are passing Amazon has sold many products that together are worth a billion with more than 304 million active customer accounts. Moreover, the brand is worth $47.73 billion. Now the high street stores are in fact struggling as people are getting familiar with e-commerce.

When you sell products online, it means you don’t have to employ staff and rent the same amount of physical space. If you wanted to set up a high street store, then you would need to be willing to spend a large amount of money to rent the physical space to invest in the stock and manage staff, etc. Instead, if you are setting up an online store then all you are going to need is some inventory and a website.

Now that’s a much broader appeal!

So, if you are looking for a way to make money online or if you want to increase the profit of your existing business, creating an e-commerce store is a great step.  The growth of e-commerce sales is rising by the time of the year and so do the competitors.

Hence, it is important to know certain strategies that could help your business to stand out from its rivals. Let’s dive into a few of the effective strategies that you could make use of for your business

Ecommerce Strategies

Assume that you have an e-commerce store on your website and have an idea of things you would like to sell and who your targeted audience is. 

However, you may have no idea how to make your brand reach out to those audiences. And for that reason, you must pick the right strategy to achieve your objectives and improve your position in the market. 

So, let’s jump into some useful strategies that you can implement on your site today to make sure that you are ahead of the curve.

• Mobile shoppers

The first one is the increase in mobile shoppers. Just take a look at the statistics of 2016-2017. It is estimated that around 50% of the shoppers were on mobile devices and will continue to grow which is huge.

So, make sure that your site is optimized for mobile devices because if it doesn’t look good on mobile devices 70% of the traffic coming from mobile devices will slow down which will result in a huge decrease in your conversion rate and traffic.  COVID-19 led companies to make bigger investments in digital, including developing the website experience, adding direct-to-consumer operations and partnering with delivery services. Many turned to social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp to facilitate interactions.

• Instagram shoppable posts

The use of Instagram is rising day by day which is a great deal for business as the customers can buy products directly on Instagram with shoppable posts. 

To make use of this feature, all you have to do is set up the product catalogue on Facebook and connect it to your Instagram business account, and finally, tag any product in the posts that followers can buy.

• Google ads smart bidding

Smart bidding is another strategy that can be helpful if you are running any shopping campaigns or any type of advertising campaigns on google ads.  Moreover, Google makes use of machine learning so that it can help to optimize your bids for better results. There are different bidding strategies based on business goals.

Smart bidding is quite useful to bring brand awareness, enhance traffic and conversion rates. You can start to get a lot more strategic about how you optimize your google ads bidding strategy. Here you can make adjustments to the creativity you are using, work on your landing page, or even improve your mobile shopping experience for users to enhance your results.

• Transparency for customers

Customers usually look for more transparency from brands. You see a huge rise of people incorporating social causes in their branding. So either they are showing that a portion of proceeds go to a specific cause or they are showing that their products and materials are ethically sourced. This is huge for just showing the transparency of what goes on behind the scenes of a brand, We can also see transparency in terms of just brands showing behind the scenes of order placement.

Amazon has been the frontier for that but with their prime shipping of orders being shipped in one to two business phases, people are starting to expect that level of engagement where they can see where their order is every step of the way and they are expecting shipping faster.

• Influencer marketing

The first thing when it comes to influencer marketing is to choose the right influencer for your brand and it is always better to choose macro-influencers because they have powerful and engaged niche communities that are often a lot more focused on a niche than just a general broader community.

The reach that will be looking for macro-influencers lies around 5000 to 50000 followers. They are the most likely to be willing to showcase your product simply in return for gifting.

The influencers should be those who are within your category and relevant to your brand.

• Video Content

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, etc are emphasizing video content. But that doesn’t mean you have to create a youtube channel, you can just concentrate on how to create a video for your product so that could be something like creating a how-to demonstration video of showing the way to use your products in a video. 

You can also experiment with video ads if you are running any paid advertising or reach out to influencers who already have a Youtube or Instagram channel that they are adding some video on and you can go ahead and see about getting your product featured with them.

• Focusing on User Generated Content

This is a huge way to get your brand and your products to reach out to customers more. Whenever you see the actual customers have purchased the product and really like it and are recommending it to others as well, that can give a lot of social proof to a product where someone may not be completely sure if they want to purchase it or not. 

But as soon as they see those reviews on your site then they are a lot more likely to go through with that transaction. 

It’s simple…the more people you can get their hands on your product and review to a bigger audience the better.

• Upsell your customers

This is all about increasing your average order value and your customer lifetime value. These are the two metrics that you want to focus on in your ecommerce store. 

Moreover, you should focus on the upsells, cross-sells, and bundles. 

Upsell is when somebody is looking to purchase your product and being able to sell them more of that same product. 

A cross-sell is like selling a complementary product with the original purchase.

On the other hand, bundles are nothing but an easy and simple way to show the discount rates.

• Voice search

In 2016, one of every five searches online was done through voice search for things like google home and Alexa.  This is going to continue to increase and we can see some statistics saying that 50% is estimated to be voice search in the year 2025.

This means that you need to have your site optimized for voice search. Therefore, you need to be thinking about what people may be searching for whenever they may come across your product, any questions that they may have that can lead them to your product as well, and create content on your site both in blog and in your product post that go through and answer these questions and use long-form of keywords.

• Personalization

This just does not mean personalizing your products and having it to where customers can generate personalized materials like that but more like a personalized experience for customers. 

Hence, email automation is huge for this but make sure that you are segmenting your email marketing list and are reaching out to customers at whatever point they are at in this journey with you online.

So, to conclude, we can affirm that the eCommerce market has already established their strong presence in the shopping habits of people. And there will not be a downfall. It is said that 95% of all purchases will be done online by 2025. Well, no wonder as everybody these days likes to buy online since it is available 24/7.  This only means that there will be lots of bigger and better changes yet to come and you should keep an eye on all the technological and strategic changes accordingly and select the relevant ones to your needs. So it is high-time you got your eCommerce website developed and implemented the right strategies!

The post Ecommerce Website Marketing in 2022 appeared first on digitalbuddha.

Everybody knows that you can market your business and products by putting up posters and hoarding on city traffic and signing up for ads in the local paper, but what about having some more modern marketing strategies in your hand? It is high-time we upgrade our own marketing techniques too. But few questions about these techniques need to be addressed first.

Modern Marketing for Business

Let’s start with the 4 Ws – What, When, Why, and Where of Modern Marketing?

According to the definition by Google, “Modern marketing is the ability to harness the full capabilities of the business to provide the best experience for the customer and thereby drive growth. Philip Kotler is known around the world as the “father of modern marketing.” Customer is, and will always remain the King in every business. And they remain loyal to the brands which meet their expectation levels and provide the best each time.(which may sound Impossible but can be managed)

And knowing the customer and getting a step ahead of their needs is the key point of effective modern marketing.

As you know, the number of internet users has boomed in the past year and so has the opportunities & scope of modern marketing. Modern Marketing is mainly online and internet media-centered. And that is exactly where you need to put your business to drive growth and profit. ‘NOW’ is the best time to start if you haven’t started it yet. Whether you are a business owner or an active user of an online platform, you must adapt to the competitive and evolving changes in the world of marketing. Moreover, these methods are cost-effective, save time and reach a wider and targeted audience.

Let us discuss a few methods of Modern Marketing

• Micro-moments

Micro-Moments are those moments in Marketing where you need to foresee the demands that your customer may have and keep the solution handy for them. According to Google, micro-moment marketing revolves around intent-rich moments. In these moments, users turn to a device, like a tablet or a smartphone, to act on a specific need. A need can include going somewhere, plus knowing, doing, or buying something. And if you have the answers to their queries, you can easily draw their attention to your service or products and thus create a business conversion.

• Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a budding rockstar in Digital Marketing. It is an advertising model in which a company pays others (e.g – bloggers or influencers) to advertise their products and services and generate sales. Affiliates place ads or market the products or services on their website, app, or blog. As the number of Bloggers, vloggers and influencers have increased post the pandemic, the scope of this type of marketing has sky-rocketed

• Email Marketing

No. Not Spamming their Mailbox with a lot of junk mail. Strictly NO! Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. It can help make your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing automation efforts. Here, we need to be specific in choosing the audience. Our emails must be tailored to suit their needs and requirements.

• Content Marketing

Content is always the King in Marketing.It is the creation and distribution of digital marketing collateral with the goal of increasing brand awareness, improving search engine rankings, and generating audience interest. Once you start providing meaningful content to the customers, they start believing you and your brand.

• Influencer marketing

Have you noticed that the number of social media celebrities and influencers has increased over this period of time? Influencers are those individuals who can ignite a spark in the minds of a number of people. Unlike other Mass Marketing methods, Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing in which places focus on influential people rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that influence potential buyers and orient marketing activities around these influencers.

• Video Marketing

Video marketing is using videos to promote and market your product or service, increase engagement on your digital and social channels, educate your consumers and customers, and reach your audience with a new medium. Thanks to Reels and other Video Creating Applications, 81% of businesses are now using video as a part of their digital marketing strategy. Live videos account for 13% of total traffic.

• Conversational Marketing

A good open conversation helps people to trust us even more. And the same is the psychology behind Conversational Marketing. It is a method of engaging with website visitors and converting leads via dialogue-driven activities. Essentially, it is all about connecting your marketing activities directly with the sales team, ideally through one platform, so the user has a smooth journey down the process.

• Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is not a new thing to discuss. It is the most inevitable part of modern marketing. Like the Quote says, “Brands that ignore social media…will die. It’s that simple.”

• Search Engine Marketing

“Lead people with what they want.Yes that is all about Search Engine Marketing. Let Google or your Search Engine push your brand to the customers. And with the right timing, strategies, and planning, Google will never let you Down!

Implementing Modern Marketing techniques to your business is a need of the hour and the most intelligent strategy to boost your business. They anticipate unmet consumer needs, identify opportunities they didn’t know existed, and reveal subtle and addressable customer pain points. To make sure that marketing spending, technology, and processes are all managed to deliver maximum impact and efficiency, the best companies must foresee the new techniques and move accordingly.

The post Modern Marketing for a Modern Era appeared first on digitalbuddha.

In a world where digital marketing spending is going to reach $2 trillion, and 10% of the money is going to be allocated to digital services by businesses, it is high time that while a business develops business strategies/business models, develop digital strategies along with it.

The business strategies include creating a business model, creating an operational process, creating a customer attraction factor, and developing customer retention methods.

Like these business models, develop a well-defined blueprint for developing digital strategies too. For this, the strategies must be developed only after thorough research and plan. There must be a unique factor in your digital strategies to attract customers, only after that, you should be taking any action.

Meaning of Digital Strategies

The digital strategy includes planning a well-defined digital business model where the goal is improving digital presence, improving customer experience, and maximizing profits.

Having a blueprint for every activity is essential. Having a well-crafted digital business model will only help you in achieving a competitive edge over others.

Your steps must include ways to fully optimize your digital marketing strategies. The marketing solutions for every type of business differ. You have got to cater to their needs and must be able to create bespoke digital marketing solutions for each of them.

Ten Reasons Why you Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

For every business, we know the 5 ‘P’s of marketing are: Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People. For online marketing too, these are the key areas you must be focusing on. The 10 big reasons why you need digital strategies can be listed down to:

1. Competitive edge:
An idiot with a plan is better than a genius without a plan. If you have good digital strategies, it will give you a competitive edge and you can win for the long term. 
2. Makes you consistent:
As it is said, the success of every brand lies in its consistency. Consistency is the key. With digital strategies, creating a digital experience for the brand becomes consistent and will help in growing a brand.
3. Provides value:
For this, focus on customers rather than proving yourself. You must be focusing on telling what value customers will get from you. Don’t pitch but attract your audience. Strategic planning will help you add value to your content.
4. Helps you monetize: 
Your payment methods must be clear. This will help you get real-time transactions with well-defined tactics. 
5. Leverage channels:
Gain from the insights the information on which channels achieve your marketing goals rightly. Leverage those channels for higher returns.

6. Track ROI: You can analyze which strategies give you higher ROI, and then opt for continuing with the most important digital strategies. 
7. Integrate your functions: With the right strategies, you will be able to integrate all marketing functions well. You will even get the time for integrating both the traditional marketing methods with the modern methods for better results.
8. Helps you optimize: Your strategies will help you keep time for optimization to rank it ‘one’ on google. You could improve the user experience, and you will even get time for optimizing it for the search engine.
9. Save your time and money: strategical planning will help you avoid duplications and thus, you can save your time and money
10. Expansion: Being systematic and keeping track of your business by gaining insights will give you scope for further expansion of the business.

Ways to Create Digital Marketing Strategies

Creating digital strategies may be troublesome at first. But, it can give you a higher ROI.  The importance of data and technology is integral for digital marketing. For this, the business must develop an environment where there must be an integral functioning of the executive, marketing, and IT team.

1. Create a well-defined plan for digital advertising:
Your plan must include choosing the right platform for advertising and making robust content by scheduling your content.
2. Plan for social media marketing:
Build content with a definite schedule, use analytics for getting insights on the activity inside your social media marketing channel. 
3. Well defined plan for SEO:
Strategic SEO planning can boost your marketing results. The results can be achieved by creating quality backlinks, using attractive tags, using long-tail keywords, and making a responsive design.
4. Building brand:
Adapting your brand to the changing needs is necessary. Tell a story for your brand that appeals to the target audience. Change the narrative whenever required. For this know the brand’s why first.

5. Strategies for personalizing:
Firstly develop an audience persona for this so you can create personalized emails, copies e.t.c. The Personalized experience can create a greater user experience. 
6. Select appropriate channels:
Target your digital marketing strategies to appropriate channels wherever your audience is.
7. Keep track of all your resources:
Keep all your resources together in one place so you have a better track of what you are doing. 
8. Measure and analyze:
Measuring performance and analyzing is very important for planning your next big digital strategy.

Conclusion

With a proper research and plan you can develop a winning Digital strategy. You have to be thinking for a long-term goal while crafting these strategies. 

You must be able to integrate all your team whatever be the area they are in, for the successful implementation of these strategies. 

You should also keep in mind that each business demands unique digital strategies.

Finally, save this in your mind that certain things happen unplanned, so your strategies must be adaptive to the changes that the business demands.

The post 10 Best Reasons Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy in 2021 appeared first on digitalbuddha.

The Year 2020 has been a year of change both in the real and virtual world. The massive revolution in the Digital World was extraordinary. Some changes were positive and some negative. It was the time of new normal which seemed impossible before.

The year 2020 was the year of  ‘Digital evolution’. Words like Work from Home, Webinars, COVID-19, Social distancing, Quarantine, etc, which we had never heard before became an integral part of our life. It became an essential keyword for digital marketing as customers demanded brands to be more emotionally appealing. It was the time of personalization and responsible marketing which we had never experienced before. 

Some changes in the digital world were evident and for some, we had become the part even without knowing it. In this article, we will discuss the major changes and the ruling trends of the year 2020  which will continue to grow in the coming years too.

Changes in Digital World

New Trends of Digital Marketing:

We all saw a world of new normals and new behavioural changes. We began to see uncertainty before us and we were looking for buying things that seemed like a ‘need’ rather than a ‘want’. As a response to this highly changing environment, the digital marketing world made its own set of Products & Services like

• Social distancing Support
• Remote work Support
• Online Education 
• Family time Support
• Entertainment and online products
• Necessity and medicinal products

If your brand’s products couldn’t fall in any of these lists, then your brand must have probably failed in the 2020 digital marketing world. Making the products & Services seems like a necessity was the secret market formula digital marketers found.

Increase in Digital Activities:

‘Meet your Customers where they are’ is the motto of now. Every small business had optimized their brands into one or the other Social media platforms where targeted audiences were engaged in. 3.80 billion people were engaged in one or the other social media platforms with a penetration of 49% in the year 2020. Social media is now growing to be the most user engaging platform in the digital world.

One in three users was engaged in creating and uploading videos in the lockdown period. The gross engagement rate in gaming and social media messaging services like Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp were huge during this period. As the theatres remained close, many became engaged and addicted to the streaming services like amazon prime and Netflix. Series like Money Heist, Family Man, The Sex Education, The Crown and films released through such OTT platforms were able to attract 18+million subscribers in the year 2020.

Customer Focused Marketing:

The 2020 year saw a time of Responsible marketing and personalization in every product sold. The customer services and marketing content were in the need of a  complete alternation as customers began demanding things that satisfied their emotional needs. The customer’s needs during  Covid-19 was the most asked question by business this year. Every brand that came into the Category of luxury started looking for strategies to sound more emotionally appealing. The customers demanded

•  Virtual Accessibility: Customers began demanding everything they have been getting in the real world to be accessible in the virtual world too. This was highly challenging for businesses. The adaptation to new channels in a short time was way beyond manageable for many small businesses.
• Emotionally Attaching and Updated Infos: Customers began expecting brands to be more humane and personalized. The brands that don’t use covid-19 keywords have probably failed to get recognition. The need for updating their whole information related to the pandemic became a necessary aspect.
• Offers and Deductions: People started expecting offers and deductions due to the lockdown. The offers and deduction were seen as the way of getting emotionally appealing to the customers.

E-Commerce Shift:

COVID-19 changed online shopping forever. The year 2020 saw an up stick in e-commerce sales. People began spending increased time online and there had been a massive use of social media. It was a time when Social media marketing saw an immense possibility in e-commerce. 

The boom in Affiliate Marketers in Digital World shows the success of Social media marketing. The hiring of digital advisers for the e-commerce market increased as the period of uncertainty demanded experts in the Digital field to plan and launch advertising campaigns and successful strategies. The Ecommerce website saw an increase in website visits and conversion rate during the lockdown period. There was a rush for buying even groceries through eCommerce websites. With a combination of e-commerce and social media, companies have realized that the fusion of these could create wonders.

Visual e-commerce is the trend now with many e-commerce brands creating immersive and interactive content in the e-commerce social media handles.

Digital World Trends you can’t Ignore

If you continue to move with traditional methods and still ignore Darwinism in the Digital world then your brand is going to probably fail in this highly competitive digital world. 

Here is the Top 6  Digital Marketing Trends:

• Content Marketing and Personalization: 

People want marketing to be personal. We all want one to one real-time connection between the marketer and us. Everywhere we go, we need a feeling of being a part of anything we do even when we are buying a product. Conversational marketing does just that. It gives you an experience of higher engagement and loyalty from the website you are in with a feedback-driven model. No one likes generic advertising blasts now. Every company is challenged to create contents that give a highly personalized experience. The type of content you create, the useful links, and regularly updated information could drive a lot of organic traffic than using SEO. This is why many brands are focusing now on improving the content. Consistent, high-quality content can take your brand far ahead.

Video contents are capturing the interest of people. People not only see but also tend to share video content of brands. There is a huge shift to video content now.

• Influencer Marketing:

The year 2020 saw a sudden wake of the growing number of influencers. It was the time when brands realized it is not only the celebrities that could market your brands well but also ordinary personalities who create content on your particular niche. These contents seem to be more accepted and authentic than regular corporate advertising. Influencer marketing is therefore now the most used marketing technique with affiliates booming each day.

• Use of Artificial Intelligence:

If you believe it or not, 2020 was the year where everyone became a part of Artificial Intelligence, although you may not be aware of it. There is much reason why AI is better than normal humans because Artificial Intelligence can analyze a lot of information with accuracy and predict the future far beyond what human nature could grasp.

We are living in times of augmented reality and immersive technology. It has helped to enhance the consumer experience and to boost sales. The predictive analysis of Artificial Intelligence is finding the trends and future of the digital world.

Are you wondering whether you have used Artificial Intelligence?

We all are part of this revolution. The chatbots you can find on every e-commerce website is the by-product of AI. We cannot expect humans to be responding at this fast pace and many of the bots are doing well by responding to you more naturally than normal persons which are helping you well by giving you instant replies.

We already see the dominance of AI in every basic communication, product recommendation, and email and this can be seen as a huge starting point for the dominance of AI everywhere you go.

• Visual & Audio Searches:

Visual Searches are taking people to a highly valuable user experience level. We could now just insert images and find specific results with the Pinterest lens, google lens, camping lens e.tc. It is also the time of enhanced voice search and smart speakers. People tend to far more contend with audio results.

• Programmatic Advertising:

For reaching the targeted audience more accurately the use of AI is needed. To get your ad more specific and to get faster and higher conversions for your marketing campaign, automation is very much necessary. Programmatic advertising uses these 3 methods to fasten automation:

• Keyword
• Time of day
• Location

• Social Messaging Apps:

People spend most of their time in social messaging apps to feel connected at the time of social distancing. So, the companies are realizing that their targeted customers are more engaged here and the marketing has begun to channelize their marketing in these messaging apps. The huge driving force of these messaging app is that it is a highly profitable way of bringing more personalization and greater user experience.

Face-Paced Digital World Changes

At this time of uncertainty, a proactive approach is essential for understanding trends in the Digital World because the digital world is growing more than ever. The digital trends are changing and we have to be assuming trends. The time demanded things that were way beyond adapting. Both the real and virtual world changed rapidly and the need for overnight change was something too far to catch. The traditional marketers had to shift their marketing channels to the digital world. The ones already in the field of the digital world had to introduce something more effective that could make them more differentiated from others.

As it is said, it is not the fittest nor the most intelligent that survives, It is the most adaptable to change and these words have gained momentum in the historical year 2020. Let us learn from these new chapters and upgrade ourself for the new year.

The post Revolution 2020 – 2021 appeared first on digitalbuddha.

Generally, Search engine optimization means optimizing a specific content so that search engines such as google will rank it higher on the search engine results page.

International SEO is the same thing but with a few additional considerations. This includes keyword localization, local content creation and the search engine preferences. It can expand your business web presence by translating the contents into different languages and optimizing it in order to drive traffic.

However, optimizing a particular site into an unknown language can be a bit difficult. But, there are certain steps that could benefit your international SEO easily.

Learn about your current international audience

The first process is to find out who and where the current international traffic is arriving from.

How will you find it?

Well, you can make use of google analytics where you will find an option called “location report” under Geo tab and sort it accordingly and you will get to know the countries from where the traffic is hitting from.

Once you find a specific international audience, start with that country itself as it will be easier for ranking well in places where you already have some grip.

Multilingual vs multi-regional targeting

Multilingual SEO is the translation of your website into different languages and getting your website ranked in different language versions of google.

So, Google has different versions for each specific language and country and there are lots of benefits laying down there.

Whereas, multi-regional is basically looking at different countries. That is, there are different country versions for google and if you get ranked in different countries, it could help you get more traffic, sales, discounts and lots of other offers from that particular area.

For instance, what if Microsoft had sold Windows only in America? Do you think it would have reached into a position as it is now if it was like that? Never!

If you translate a website into different languages, you are in fact enhancing the amount of your potential customers visiting your site.

For instance, assume that you would like to enhance the sales in Russia and for that if you create a Russian site and translate your original content which is in english to russian language, you will not only have two variations of the same page, but also it will pave a way for increasing the number of audience visiting your site as well as it could help you to rank higher.

It seems simple! But how will you translate your content into languages that you are not familiar with? Here are some tips!

#1 Hire a translator

A professional translator can be helpful in preventing miscommunications and provide instructions or feedbacks in their local language. Moreover, you will be able to have a profound and significant connection with your international clients where you can understand their objectives more clearly.

#2 Usage of technology

A simple, basic and one of the best online translation tools is the Google translate in which it supports over 100 languages and translates within seconds.

Other translating tools include Bing translator, Magic Search, Linguee, WordFast Pro and many more.

#3 Visual form of communication

Making use of pictures to bring out the exact instructions or messages can be very useful rather than text when you don’t know the language.

#4 Clarification

The chances of misunderstanding when you have a language barrier are more. Hence, you should make sure that the customer or even the team members are understanding what’s being said in order to make sure that the content or the functionality that you propose goes exactly with the objective of the client.

Domain Structure

A proper domain structure is a chief constituent when it comes to international SEO and for that there are various types of options that you could make use of and they are as follows!

#1 ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domain)

A ccTLD is just a domain extension and has a country connotation or a regional connotation. Mind you, this is only specified for countries and not for language. These domains are the most powerful way to rank a page in a certain country as it sends strong signals to search engines conveying that it is meant for users in a specific country.

Examples: www.yoursite.fr : France www.yoursite.jp : Japan www.yoursite.de : Germany

#2 Subdomain

Subdomains are useful if you’re targeting an audience with respect to both language as well as countries.

Example: En.wikipedia.org De.wikipedia.org Fr.wikepedia.org

The demerit of subdomain is that sometimes it does not inherit all the domain authority, trust or value that you might get from separate subdomains or from a single root domain.

#3 Subdirectories

If you would like to assign all the language versions to a generic domain with contents kept in a different folder for every language and country, you can choose subdirectories.

Example: yoursite.com/en-uk/

In here, /en-uk/ means that it is an english language site targeting the UK and it’s all done in subfolders.

Use hreflang tags

These attributes tell Google which language you are using on a specific page so that the search engine can show the results to users searching in that language.

Code sample: <link rel= “alternate” hreflang= “language-country” href=”URL” />

For example, assume that you would like to target spanish speaking people in America. For that you can make use of the below given code in the header of your respective page.

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es-us” href=”yoursite.com/us” />

But before you start adding any tags and links to your pages, you should decide which method you would like to use and stick to it later on.

1. You can add some HTML code to your site’s page.
2. You can specify hreflang tags with an XML sitemap.
3. You can add the code to the site header

Localize your content

#1 Check out Search engines other than Google

You can’t ignore the fact that google is not only the player in the search engine game. For example, Baidu covers 70% of the market in China and Yandex covers 60% in Russia whereas Naver covers 80% in Korea.

While the basics might be simple, each has their own unique ranking algorithm and it’s a good idea to make sure that you are optimizing for the right one.

Now, if we take a look at Korea, apart from a few, others will definitely perform searches in their native language.

So, if you don’t localize your content, you will definitely lose a major part of the traffic coming from local search engines.

#2 Keyword Research

Before you start optimizing any pages on your site, you have got to begin with solid keyword research. You should find the keywords that are important to target and out of that list which ones have the most search volume.

It won’t do you much good to optimize a phrase that no one ever searches for as it won’t bring you any additional traffic.

For instance, British, Canadian and American English differ from each other and the way they search for contents might be different. So, you must search for keywords with respect to the language or the country that you are targeting.

And for that you could make use of keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner, adwords, Unamo, etc. Google Trends is a type of keyword tool where you can view the most used keywords by people in their native language when they search for a topic. Moreover, you can make use of this in your content for relevance.

Once you are finished with the research, make sure to add these translated keywords to a few important areas of your page such as URLs, meta descriptions, content and title tags.

In summary!

Expansion of your site to the international audience will be a complete break through for your brand, traffic and sales. And one more thing i would like to add is the user experience. Having a multilingual website will provide better user experience which may lead to conversion rates, and attain customer’s trust. However, Multilingual SEO is a hard process and I hope this article helped you even in the slightest manner!

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A logo is the face of any company which is imprinted into the minds of your customers. It creates a unique brand identity for the company which nourishes its business. So it is one of the main things to be taken care of in the initial phase. A logo can be an ambassador of the company which will represent the company in all its future endeavours. And it should stand out among all other things. 

So, we can say that Logo Designing is the Arrangement of Brand in a Creative Design and Effective Format using Graphical Ideas.

Having an eye-catching logo makes half of the marketing easier. The logo itself will speak a lot about the personality of the company. And there are many things to take care of before creating any logo. The first challenge of the graphic designer is, to sum up, the personality of the company to the logo.

For that we need to know a few things;

1. What is the personality of the company?
2. What do we want our customers to know about us?
3. How can we be unique among our competitors?

The designer and the company must have strong communication and understanding between them and should openly discuss how can they portray the company in the best way.

Once we list these things, we can move to the technical side of the creation, which is totally in the hands and minds of the designer. The creativity and technical knowledge of the designer help to convert the communicated ideas into a crisp logo.

How to be an out of the box designer?

Any creative work is the borderless and limitless arena of opportunity. We cannot set any fixed protocol for creative work. An out of the box Designer is someone who finds ideas in the simplest of things and takes into a whole new perspective. A designer first needs to picture things in his mind and then bring that picture to the canvas. 

What makes you a star designer is how you use your talent to convince the idea you are trying to communicate to your audience. And that itself is your biggest challenge as you will have an ‘n’ number of different minds to convince. So you are a champion if your design satisfies all your audience as well as your client.

Now how will you choose the right elements for your design?

• Always follow the GOLDEN RATIO

1:1.618 is the magic dimension between elements. This makes the design aesthetically soothing to the viewers. 

• Never use more than 3 COLOURS in the logo

Colours are more than just visual beauty. They have a lot of emotions and inner-meanings in them. So choosing the right colour for the logo can do wonders. But one thing that should be taken care of is that the logo should not be flooded with a lot of colours. Restrict the colour combination to 3 or less than 3 to give a standard look and feel.

• FONT and TYPOGRAPHY

How you portray the words also is important in the logo. Typography should be unique and suitable for the whole idea.

A logo will have a story to tell. Our logo definitely has one. If you closely observe the logo of Digitalbuddha, you can see letters B and D hidden in the logo which are the starting letters of the keywords of the company. You can figure out a man with a laptop also. But all these factors make the logo more relatable to the company. The entire soul of the creative ideas of the entire company lies in the logo. So it is important to make your logo the striking part of the company. Once you fix the logo to the minds of people, then the logo will say your story for you. 

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“Backlinks” are one of the smartest technique of every successful SEO campaign. They are an essential part of the SEO process.

First of all, it’s necessary to sort out what a backlink is.

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks are those links coming to our site from other websites. Backlinks make a huge impact on a website’s prominence in search engine results. In other words, a backlink is a link one website gets from another website. Also, related to as “incoming links,” backlinks execute their connection through external websites.

These links from external domains lead to pages on your own domain. Whenever backlinks happen, it is similar to receiving a vote for a webpage. The more votes you receive from the top ranking sites, the more positive impact on a site’s ranking and search visibility.

Although Google has altered how backlinks operate when it comes to search engine optimization. Yet, they still act a role in how high your site ranks in results. Not only do these links help improve your result position, but they can also support to brand reputation and domain authority. However, you need to make sure you hold quality links.

Today, the old link building strategies are outdated. Check out these few smart ways to earn backlinks to your website.

Smart Ways To Earn Backlinks To Your Website

• Broken-link building method

Broken link-building is a tactic how you detect a broken (i.e., dead) link, recreate the dead content, later tell the webmasters linking to the dead resource to instead link to your recreated content. It operates because nobody requires dead links on their website. Thus when you say webmasters about broken links on the site, they’ll cheerfully restore them with working ones. Here, you are offering the webmaster a favor by reporting the broken links, and hence the possibilities of a backlink back to your website are high.

• Backlinks through Infographics

In today’s world, Infographics resume being insanely popular. At present, infographics are liked and shared on social media 3x higher than any other type of content. Infographics are an excellent blending of visuals and text. Most infographics are visually attractive, usually carrying interesting information about a certain topic that the audience can easily browse through. Hence, good infographics have the capability to make your content go viral, generate tons of high-quality backlinks, and increase your site’s overall SEO.
Once you are done with creating infographics, and which shines on your website, just distribute it on multiple sites. There are infinite infographic directories where you can submit yours. For example, here is a record with more than 100 sites to submit your infographic.

• The advantage of guest articles

Guest blogging is one of the best online marketing tactics you can advance in. Guest posting clearly spells publishing posts written by others. If you desire to expand your brand’s message and acquire the trust of your target audience, start sharing content to different blogs associated with your business or market.  Content is very essential for SEO as well as engaging your readers. Here are some of the best guest posting sites to submit your articles.

• Spy on your competitors

To help you build great content that will earn your site backlinks, you need to spy on your competitors. Do you know why? It’s because the possibilities are that they’ve got great content which is already ranking great and has generated plenty of backlinks. Accordingly, what you need to do is to not just follow them on social media but also sign up to all newsletters they send out. Another clever way is to catch up with their latest content is to create a Google alert. One of our favorite tools for identifying when and how your competitors are building links is Monitor Backlinks or smallseotools.

• Build internal links

Internal links are a key factor for running a successful blog. A good internal linking structure contributes to developing a great user experience because visitors can easily navigate your site and find relevant articles that add to or match the page they’re already viewing.
Be cautious not to burden your pages with internal links, though. It’s good to keep backlinks per page down to below 100, and you want to include external links to the count (you’ll see why in a bit).

• Promote your content

Official websites won’t magically link to your content. You need to place it in front of them! First and foremost, the only approach to achieve in your promotion attempts is to promote content that official websites have reason to link to. For doing this, one of the best approaches to achieve this is to contact bloggers or websites running weekly or monthly roundups. Again here, you can make use of Google alerts. Make certain you pick, in order to view results only from the past week or month.

• Write Testimonials

An excellent and innovative method of winning some backlinks is to compose a testimonial for a website. The first run is to settle your target, write them an e-mail explaining how pleased you were with their product or service. Don’t mention anything about backlinks. Once the lines of communication have been opened and they have agreed on the testimonial idea, then make the move. Once the testimonial has been done just add your name and website URL to the bottom of the testimonial. They’ll think nothing of it. After all, you did just take the time to write them an awesome testimonial.

• Social Media

Social signals play an important role as a ranking factor. And, there is a lot of attention on Social Media that just isn’t going away. Linking back to your site from social media sites drives traffic and advantages to your website from an SEO viewpoint. There are numerous chances to create backlinks on social networks and they are strongly believed in Google’s eyes. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. occur to be the commonly visited sites and are a great place for you to earn some attention for your brand.

• Donate

In the SEO industry, you can make donations to certain non-profit websites, and in several cases, this results in a valuable SEO backlink back to your site. Once you find a site that actively allows donations and which links out to sites that have donated, it’s simply a matter of clicking on the donate button, offering a donation along with your site anchor text. A few days later, or sometimes also a few hours later, your link shows up.

• Get Interviewed

Nowadays, getting interviewed on podcasts, news sites, blogs, and in different publications is likewise an honest way to earn natural backlinks. And besides, it’s one of the most neglected and underused natural link building strategies. By advertising expert interviews on your site, you can not only increase the existing following of popular people but also convince readers with valuable and unique questions and answers. This fulfilment will definitely have a high chance of converting into backlinks and social shares.

Conclusion

Outside links still matter and aren’t old, therefore start acting on tactics to gain valuable backlinks to advance your search visibility. Lastly, remember that holding your backlinks is as essential as growing them. Hence, have a record of the backlinks your website is getting, by using tools like Monitor Backlinks, Ahrefs, smallseotools or Majestic.

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“Which marketing platform would work best for my marketing strategy? And how can I make my money work best for me?” I am sure you have asked this more than once for yourself…

For any small business, having a marketing budget is very important but it’s equally important to spend it in the right direction and make the most of it. Now the question is, how do you know where and when you should be spending your budget when it comes to Digital Marketing v/s Traditional Marketing.

Marketing is that aspect of a business that you can never ignore. Now, we live in a generation where a huge part of the population does the transactions online, while the other part of the population does not even know how to use the internet. Because of this reason, for many businesses coming up to the right decision on marketing becomes difficult.

So, the decision between traditional marketing and digital marketing is very confusing and tough.

The solution for this is you need to know the pros & cons of both Digital & Traditional Marketing & see how it applies to your business. Before we get into the details of Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing, let’s first look into the basic ideas you need to understand clearly.

What is Traditional Marketing?

Traditional Marketing refers to the conventional modes of marketing which is one of the well-researched, long-lived & a proven method of reaching out your message to the customers with various offline advertising & promotional methods. It includes all advertisements before the internet came into existence & shook things up. This includes:

• Newspaper Ads
• Television
• Radio
• Magazine Ads
• Flyers
• Billboards

What is Digital Marketing?

In traditional Marketing, you are trying to reach to the customers directly. While Digital Marketing has an extra advantage of targetting a specific audience, but with a different approach. Digital Marketing is the kind of marketing where you can make sure that people find you when they are looking for the services you provide. You will be doing this by creating & optimizing your website to show up higher in search results, by creating social media accounts that people would love to follow, by creating informative and attractive content that convince your customers about your products or services you provide, and various other methods. The term “Digital Marketing” is a vast category of marketing through various online marketing approaches. It has helped to create awareness & promote business on a much larger scale. Digital Marketing is an approach to advertising through various digital channels. This includes:

• Online Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Video Marketing
• E-Mail Marketing
• Blogs & Content Marketing
• Paid Search (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Online Brochures

Now, its time for us to know about the detailed information on the benefits of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing.

Benefits Of Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

• Less Expensive & More Effective

It’s no surprise that Digital Marketing is less expensive compared to Traditional Marketing. And of course, digital marketing fetches you a greater ROI than traditional marketing because it’s cheaper than traditional marketing in more than one way. Paper & printing costs, and also newspaper & television ads are relatively very high in more than one way. Digital marketing allows you to spend your budget less while gaining more effect.

• Higher Level of Customer Engagement

With traditional marketing, you can never really interact with your customers directly. You will have to wait for the response in order to go with the further step in the process. This is a long and exhausting process. On the other hand, with Digital Marketing strategies you will have an advantage of contacting your customers directly through various digital marketing channels via social media comments, emails or instant messages. It allows you to engage your audience in real time. You will be able to chat and discuss your brand and will easily able to build long-lasting relationships with customers by interacting with them via videos & webinars. And of course, this claims more engagement from your side too and you need to be prepared to invest that much time into this.

• Easy Analytics

In traditional marketing when you give away brochures and magazine ads, it’s almost impossible for you to know how far your marketing is going to be successful. On the other hand, while utilizing digital marketing you can instantly measure the bounce rate, inbound traffic, conversion rate, profit, and the number of visitors to your site, all in real time. This can be done through Google Analytics, which is one of the best tools where you can easily study all the records and then adjust them carefully.

• Bigger Audience Range

Traditional marketing is limited in many ways. And the biggest limitation is that you cannot do marketing beyond the regional or the local audience. While using digital marketing, you will be able to create highly customized campaigns where you can widen your audience range to different cities, and also to different countries. Therefore, through digital marketing, you can perform your brand awareness to your customers quickly and widely.

• Brand Development

Here, when the question of brand image arises, then digital marketing has an added advantage compared to traditional marketing. You can  Instead of giving a newspaper ad and tv advertisements, if you own a website providing all your services or products through informative and quality content, then, of course, there is no doubt that your brand image arises and also in brand development. Also, you can promote your brand with the help of social media and also through various blogs.

• Immediate Publicity

With digital marketing, you get the real-time results, where you get instant publicity, and even if you don’t, you get to know instantly that which of your ads is not working. An advantage here in digital marketing than traditional marketing is that you get a newer audience and newer visitors to your website every nano-second because there is a chain reaction on the shares and comments through social media and similar other online platforms which results in quicker publicity of your brand or company.

We at Digital Buddha, hope that we would have convinced you with the facts that digital marketing is definitely the best way compared to traditional marketing to advertise your business. If you have already tried traditional marketing and not yet found a good growth, then give digital marketing a shot. It will be a bit risky at the beginning but returns great results for your business.

Our experts here in Digital Buddha will help you ease your job. We do all your business advertisements and promotions for you. At Digital Buddha, we take the responsibility of your business’s marketing strategy, so that you could concentrate on other parts of your business where you are needed the most. Contact us today on info@digitalbuddha.in. It’s that easy.

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With the change in generation and in the enhancement of technologies, people’s taste also differs. In the past, businesses used images for marketing which was one of the top methods. But now videos have taken that leading place because most users like watching videos than images. It is easy to influence your audience to buy the products through videos than marketing through images.

Definition of Video Marketing

First of all, what is Video Marketing? The definition of video marketing is not complicated. Video Marketing is the method of adopting videos to promote or market your brand, product or service. If a photo is worth a thousand words, then how much more treasurable is a video? That’s the base of a video marketing, a well-developed marketing strategy that helps in engaging videos into your marketing campaigns.

A strong marketing campaign includes videos such as Vlogs, Culture Videos, Interview Videos, Webinars, Event Videos, Presentation Videos, Tutorials, Product Reviewing Videos, Testimonials, Animation Videos, Behind-the-scenes Videos, and Live Streaming Videos.

Video Marketing Statistics

• HUBSPOT – “Every Week around 78% of individuals watch videos while around 55% view videos on daily basis.”
• CISCO – “Videos will make up over 80% of all online buyer traffic by the end of 2020.”
• ALEXA – “After Google, YouTube enjoys the most number of online traffic.”
• FORRESTER RESEARCH – “A video of 1 minute comprises around 1.8million words.”
• WORDSTREAM – “Around 59% of administrators say they would preferably watch a video than reading any text content.”

How Video Marketing Works

Here, we can help you with the science behind why video works. We hope the above video marketing statistics that we had listed would have helped you understand the impact of video marketing. The how of Video Marketing strategy is very simple. Your business creates videos that in some way or another, promote your company, raise awareness of your products and services, to boost sales, or to engage your customers. In the process, its a little more complicated. Like many of your marketing attempts, you will have to guide various metrics and track the record of customer engagement.

To advance your video marketing you’ll have to:

1. You are going to need to allocate resources. You will need some budget for the video – a decent equipment, good editing software, and a great video marketing team.
2. Tell your stories to your audience.
3. Not only telling the story, but you need to engage your audience. How will you make your stories interesting? What type of videos will hook your audience? Think about all of it.
4. There is no length set for the size of videos in video marketing. But try to make it shorter as much as possible. Cut all the extra parts and publish a short and cute video.
5. Publish your videos as distant and wide as possible. Publish it on YouTube, on your website, and on all the social media platforms. And then, try to promote it as far as possible.
6. Always analyze and track the stats and metrics, to determine which of your videos did the best and why. So that you can later create such videos to attract your audience.

Now the time has come to go through the different benefits of Video Marketing for your business.

Benefits Of Video Marketing

1. Modern Customers Spend Most of Their Time On Videos :

Around 78 percent of people watch videos once per week and 55% watch videos every single day. Also, YouTube gets more than 5 billion views per day.

After noticing such popularity in videos, we can hereby conclude that in today’s world, each person is watching videos. From these results, you will automatically have an idea of creating videos and posting it on different social media platforms. You should make Video Promotions, Ads, Web Series, Funny Viral Videos, Educational Videos, etc. based on the desires of your existing and promising customers.

2. Excellent Return On Investment (ROI) :

About 80% of our studies, tells that by adding an explainer video to your landing page, you can increase your sales. We tell that such videos are not required in order to increase sales. You can make a decent video in your phone itself with an awesome planning. Your audiences are not expecting a high-quality blockbuster video or something. In fact, they prefer a simple video that does a nice job of explaining a product or a service with a good content, rather than a polished, high-budget video that doesn’t say much.

3. Videos Convey Information More Efficiently :

When you are trying to find out more of about a product or a service, what will you do? Will you try to read the content or will you go click the video and watch the video first? Of course, you will click the video first.

 When your audience wants to know about a product or a service, they want to know the details quickly, in an easy presentation. Videos are the best way to communicate with your existing and potential customers. In a few seconds, you grab the attention of your audience, explain what your business is about, and tell them for what reason they should care. Will you be able to do this in your writing? Yes, sure you can do it, but not as fast as a video. Videos are quicker and memorable.

4. Videos Increase Conversion Rate And Sales :

Companies which use videos in their marketing strategy has 27% higher click rates and 34% higher web conversions than those who don’t use videos. Therefore, using videos in your marketing strategies such as e-mail marketing or landing pages will help you increase your conversion rates and sales, and also helps you achieve your goal.

5. Google :

When Visitors go through your website and play videos, then they start spending time on your website. When your visitors spend more time on your site, search engines detect it, trusting that your website has a good content. This increases the possibility of your website showing up first on popular search engines such as Google. The number of videos on your website also increases your search engine rank.

6. Engaging Via Live Videos :

Nowadays, almost all businesses and celebrities use Live Videos to engage with their audiences. If you can do a good live video, then your business can have great rewards and benefits. Engaging your audiences through live videos is one of the best methods, as it allows people to engage and post comments. This engagement gets people involved. The one who is recorded in the video can see the comments from people and reply to them at the same time. To come up in this, you will need to maintain and have a good social media followers.

7. Videos Can Convince People To Buy :

Nowadays, most of the people buy a product by viewing Online Video Ads, than by viewing TV channels. 34% of people buy it online but only16% of people buy the products through TV Channels. The reason is that TV Ads do not have ‘Buy Now’ Button, whereas Online Video Ads are one click away from ‘Buy Now’ Button, which helps in more conversion and sales for your business.

We at Digital Buddha, hope that this blog might help you with a successful Video Marketing in your Business. We are one of the best online marketing and top advertising agency in Kannur with more than 30 happy clients.

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