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If you are a business owner, your primary aim is to increase the number of customers that you have. While this is our natural instinct, it is not enough to run after new clients all the time. You will realize over time that customer retention is equally (and sometimes more) important.

Content marketing is one of the most common ways of marketing. You acquire new customers through content marketing. However, the reach of content marketing doesn’t end in obtaining new clients. You have to get into a relationship with your clients for an unspecified timespan. Why? Because the more you will retain the present customers, the more you will be able to increase your sales. Loyal customers are more likely to spend on a new product or service that you launch in comparison with the new customers. So, even though your main target is to generate new leads, it can also be used to retain your present customer base.

Whatever operation you provide, you should aim for creating a buyer-centric environment. And for that you will need to take an all-inclusive content marketing approach.

What are the types of content we are talking about?

When we say ‘content marketing’, most people think it refers to either blogs or content posted on social media platforms. No, you are not wrong in that sense. However, when it comes to retaining the present customers, the extent of content becomes much more than just blogs and social media posts.

Starting from your email campaigns to your blogs to the newsletters to your website content and a lot matters when it comes to content marketing. Believe it or not, your customers are loyal towards your brand as long as they are satisfied with the product and they feel connected to your content. So, if content marketing is this important for retaining customers, it is best that you start with the process now.

Customer reviews and testimonials:

Most of your customers will feel connected immediately if they see customer feedbacks. Don’t you go through reviews before buying a product? The theory is same here. Your customers will also check out your website or third party websites to see what others have to say about your product or service. So, how does it help in retention of the present customers, right? Well, if your customers understand that they can share what they are feeling truly, they are more likely to stick to your company.

It is also necessary that you go through the customer reviews regularly. If not daily, make it a weekly plan to check out what your present customers are saying about your business (whether on your website or anywhere else). It is extremely important that you reply to the reviews posted by the customers. People who are providing positive feedback should be appreciated for their time.

Negative feedbacks should be treated with extra care. Do not remove negative reviews unless the customers use improper language. Rather, reply as courteously as possible and provide them with a solution. Since the feedbacks posted are public, try and make sure to follow up whether the problem has been solved or not. This thread of content will show that you not only keep an eye on the customer reviews but you also pay attention to the problems faced by the customers.

Get yourself visible on communities:

There are many online communities where people share their feedbacks. While some of these communities are officially sanctioned, some are created by fellow customers. No matter what the origin of these communities are, you have to make sure that you also take part in at least a few of these communities. You may not even know that people on these platforms are talking about your product or service.

So, what can you do? You can ask your marketing team to create content that is driven by some purpose. Be sure to maintain regularity when creating content that advocates your brand. The most important part is to create content that the customers feel related to and content that is experiential.

Connect your marketing team and customer support team:

Suppose you have a marketing team that works for creating your website content, social media content and other pieces of content that are used for marketing. This is what drives your sales and attracts more customers. Now, when it comes to retention of the present customers, the most important part is customer support. You may have a dedicated team to take care of the requirement of your customers.

Is your customer support team equipped enough to provide them with what they want? While your marketing team is talking about the features and benefits, your customer support team may lack the knowledge on the same. So, make sure that both your customer support team and your marketing team are on the same page.

A huge part of the conversation between the customers and the support team takes place through emails. Now, I am not here to explain the importance of emails to you. But I can surely confirm that email content is one of the major reasons why your customers stay with you for longer. So, it is your responsibility to train your customer support team to create email content that is not only inclusive but that is also constructive. Apart from offering resolution to their problems, customers should also be appreciated regularly for staying loyal. The more you believe on them, the more they will remain trustworthy.

Use your website as a tool:

It is obviously important that your customer support team is using content in a better way. There is more to using content for your business. Your website is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to retain the customers that you got.

So, what are the points that you should remember? First, your website should be easily navigable. If there are different segments of your business, make sure that all the segments are separated from each other. Make sure that the segments are named properly as well.

Include a FAQ or ‘frequently asked question section’ so that people can take a look at the questions and know whether the answer to their problems is already there. Inclusion of chatbots in your website is a great initiative. You can have some preset reply content that the chatbots will use until any customer support executive from your end is able to reply to the queries.

When you are creating content for FAQ or chatbots, the quality of the content should be your primal focus. Research on the type of questions people might look for and answer those on your website. Keep updating the content from time to time to keep the website fresh.

Apart from everything else, create a blog section in your website and keep updating that regularly. The content that you put in your blogs should also be high in quality to maintain uniformity of your website.

Do not confine in written content:

Content marketing is not confined in written content only. Video content is also something that you can try out. Video is a great way to engage your target audience. There are many platforms that allow you to post video content now. You can choose any of those platforms and upload content related to your business.

Now, suppose you offer digital marketing service. You might think that there is no one that you can target on YouTube or Instagram. But trust me, it is not true. Your target audience can be anywhere and everywhere. You just need to target the right people. And the best way to do that is to start producing content that is suited for these websites. However, my advice to you will be to research properly before getting started with using these mediums. This will ensure that you produce content that your target audience wants to see.

The same theory applies for newsletter as well. Newsletters are great when you want to engage your present customers and retain them. Why? Because your present customers get to know about what new service or product you are about to launch. Or they may also know whether you have made profit (sometimes sharing profit updates help in customer retention) in the last quarter. This ensures that there is a connection between you and your customers. They feel valued and part of your business. Hence, they want to continue the business relationship with your company.

Conclusion:

Since you own a business, you will realize that growing your business is not an easy task to do. It is getting even harder with the growing competition in every field. Hence, it is extremely important that you give your full effort to improving sales. And retention of the present customers is one of the most effective ways of increasing sales. Content marketing can help you in making sure that you retain your customers apart from encouraging new clients to avail your service or buy your product.

You may not be accustomed with the fact that you can use content marketing for customer retention. Hence, we are here to help you out. Nico Digital is a digital marketing company that offers content marketing service. We ensure that you not only get new clients but also keep the ones that you already have. Besides, we also have experienced content creators and marketers who know how to drive sales for your business.

What is the recent item you purchased? A pair of headphones? A Bluetooth speaker? A lipstick? Or maybe a pair of jeans. I am sure that you checked out at least a couple of reviews if not more.

This is an era of influencers. With the advent of YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and other social media websites, people started sharing their feedback on these platforms. Gradually, these people started to influence the purchase habit of their followers. Since they influence what we buy, these people are termed as influencers. There are different types of influencers. From macro to micro to nano influencers inspire us to make our purchase decisions.

What is micro influencer?

A few years back, people who had 3,000 followers were termed as micro influencers. However, the number of nano influencers has increased in the last few years. So, now the number of followers that you require to be a micro influencer is at least 10,000. While some people say that micro influencers should have 10K to 50K followers, some say that the number can be from 10K to 100K.

Whatever the number is, if you follow someone with a minimum of 10,000 followers’ base, you are following a micro influencer.

Where would you find micro influencers?

Now, this is a question that many of you may be thinking right now. We all know that social media platforms are used by influencers, be it macro or micro, to influence people. However, influencers who are famous on Instagram may not be as famous on YouTube. Similarly, Facebook influencers may not be as known on Pinterest.

So, first, you have to understand which medium is suitable for your business. If you think that your primary target audience is on Facebook, you can take help from Facebook micro influencers. Likewise, you can contact with Instagram influencer if IG is the platform for your business.

Once you know which platform to choose, you can now start your research. Like any other step that you take regarding your business, choosing the right micro influencer is also important for you. While the number of micro influencers is increasing, not each or any of them is suitable for your business. I suggest you to conduct a thorough research before you invest on any micro influencer.

You have to realize that each influencer has his/her own follower base. The target audience of the influencer should match the audience that you target. Besides, the influencers that you want to collaborate with should be associated with products or services similar to yours. You can’t really ask a beauty influencer to promote your ERP module, can you?

However, there are a few companies that have taken a different approach in influencer marketing. SprezzaBox Inc., Daniel Wellington, Adidas, etc. are brands that are targeting audiences in different spectrum as well. So, these brands are thinking outside of the box and involving influencers who are not directly related to these brands.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2EnKQ2h

As you can see from the image above, SprezzaBox has collaborated with Candianbros. This Instagram page is owned by two dogs (Jasper and Louie) and their owner HuMan (Rodson). Whether your company is a well-known brand or not, you can still try this hack once in a while.

Why do you need micro influencers?

Influencer marketing has become popular because of the fact that it is much easier to influence the target audience in comparison to traditional advertising or promotions. As people trust the influencers they follow, they tend to purchase the items that these influencers recommend.

However, you may think of big names such as Kim Kardashian or Neil Patel or Usain Bolt depending on the product or service you want to promote. While these influencers do have a huge number of followers, they may not help you as much as you think.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/38JtFpG

On the contrary, micro influencers, with their less number of followers, can engage with more people and influence them. I assume that you are planning to collaborate with micro influencer(s). So, here are a few reasons that will explain why you need micro influencer instead of macro influencer.

Affordable options:

Whether you are a small brand or a big, you will have a budget fixed for promoting your brand. While big brands have enough budget to collaborate with macro influencers, small and medium companies may not have that budget. If you own a small or medium business, you may not be able to team up with celebrity influencers who have huge fan following.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2POxGR7

In that case, you need an affordable option. You can collaborate with micro influencers for as small an amount as 100USD depending on the number of followers they have. If you identify the right influencers, you may end up spending nothing. You can simply work in partnership with the influencer with a contract of promoting each other on your respective social media platforms. This will help both the parties to increase the number of followers on their respective social media accounts.

Accessible:

While macro influencers may have a huge fan base, they do not really communicate with their followers regularly. However, micro influencers are more accessible to their followers. Micro influencers generally communicate by replying to comments, direct messages, and other ways. Their followers are also more likely to post a comment on their posts.

These influencers are not only accessible to their followers but also to the brands. You don’t have to go through PR to reach these influencers. The micro influencers generally handle their emails by themselves and you can directly reach them via their official email ID.

Relevant:

Many of the time, brands just team up with any celebrity to endorse their brands. The celebrity might not even be related to the company’s products or services. This approach used to work before. But now, consumers are more aware about what they are buying and who is being associated with the brand.

If you want to market a new fried product, you can’t really collaborate with a fitness influencer. You have to connect with someone who is associated with food, each and every form of it. So, a food blogger should be your ideal choice.

Similarly, when you are launching new beauty products, micro influencers in beauty industry are more relevant than any other influencer. Posting videos or photos or writing blogs is not all that matters. When the blogs are written by the right blogger or the videos are uploaded by the right influencer, people are more likely to get influenced.

Trustworthy:

There are two types of people that we follow on social media. We either follow celebrities or we follow influencers in particular niches. No matter which celebrity you follow, you will hardly get influenced by the products they recommend.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2RV7K9d

In contrast, people are more likely to trust influencers who communicate with them on social media platforms. As most of the micro influencers use the products in front of the camera and provide a true feedback, they are more trustworthy.

The micro influencers are more trustworthy to you also than the celebrity macro influencers. Why? The simple answer is that the micro influencers have a follower base that they connect with on a regular basis. So, these influencers can create more engagement among their followers. More engagement means more people knowing your brand and trusting your brand because the influencers recommend it.

Influence:

What are influencers for? To influence, what else? However, recent survey shows that as the number of followers of an influencer increases, their impact on the followers reduces. Impact cannot be measured with the number of likes. But it should be measured with the increment in your sales figure.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2rGpKcQ

A micro influencer may not have hundreds of thousands of followers. But the limited number of followers that they have is more likely to be impacted by what products or services they recommend.

Conclusion:

When you are trying to create an impact on the consumers, better do it rightly. If you are not sure about how to find out the micro influencer for your brand, you can start by researching on your target audience. Check out who they follow on their social media.

If you are just getting started with the process, it can be intimidating, maybe even appear to be impossible. However, let me assure you that it is not. You have to invest a little time of yours before you invest on any micro influencer and success is yours.

You may not be accustomed with the fact that you can use influencer marketing. Hence, we are here to help you out. Nico Digital is a full service digital marketing agency that takes care of all your digital marketing needs so that you can focus on growing your business.

 

India’s economy is largely depended on outsourcing. According to Statista, 8% of India’s total GDP in 2017 was represented by IT and associated businesses. In 2019, India’s outsourcing industry generated almost 180 billion USD as annual revenue. In the last two decades, India has seen a huge growth in outsourcing. As a result, most companies that want to outsource choose India over any other country.

Now, the question is why are companies choosing India over other countries for outsourcing?  There is not one single reason that can define the reason behind the success of outsourcing in India. India has been gradually ascending in terms of a hub for perfect outsourcing. If you take a look at the last two decades, you will notice that the number of start-ups has increased in leaps and bounds.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2RDEcfZ

Besides, more and more oversees companies have collaborated with Indian retailers or have established partnership business. Many companies have outsourced their web development and web design to India. Some companies even outsourced their graphic design work to India.

Let’s check out why companies are outsourcing to India.

A pool of experts to choose from:

India is the second most populous country in the globe. The youth demographic in India is more promising in comparison to other countries. Hence, it is a pool of young population that foreign companies are interested in. Most of the young people have technical knowledge that is helpful for companies that want to outsource to India.

Because of the huge population, India is known for easy availability of trained professionals.  If you own a company that requires offshore website developers, you can get hundreds of options in India. As there are quite a number of developers and designers available, it is even easier to manage large solution that is intricate as well.

The professionals in India are known to adapt the technological changes and advancements. As the foreign websites are available in India, people train themselves with the help of many such websites. In many Asian countries, using internet is banned. And even if internet is not banned, accessing many websites is forbidden. It can be difficult for companies to implement technological changes without a trained workforce and India offers exactly that.

High in quality and reliability:

If you have been worrying about getting high-quality work, India is the right country for you to outsource your work. India is a country where companies maintain all the international standards to provide you with the best service possible. Are you wondering what international practices the country follows? Here are a few that you may find helpful.

• The companies that offer outsourcing follow the guideline set by International Standard Organization or ISO 9000. Hence, the companies offer you superior quality service when it comes to developing, designing, producing and even implementing new process.
• The companies are under Six Sigma Certification that is a mark of having skilled workforce. It helps you to understand that you are working with professionals who know how to categorize risks and get rid of those as early as possible. It is extremely important for a business to detect errors and solve those to make sure that the process is running smoothly.

• The companies follow Capability Maturing Model or CMM. The model helps each company to assess its own proficiency to undertake any project and deliver it.
• The companies also follow Total Quality Management or TQM standard so that they can focus on providing you with quality support.
• The companies also work to provide service within the deadline under Customer Operations Performance Center standard.
• More than 75% of Capability Maturing Model Integration or CMMI level 5 certified companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Limited, Larsen and Toubro, HCL Technologies Limited etc. are situated in India.

As you can see from the above list, the IT companies in India follow the standards. The certifications are the proof of quality that the companies maintain.

Cost-effective option:

Believe it or not, you can reduce almost 30 – 35% of your cost if you outsource to India in comparison to any other countries. Most of the Indian companies that offer outsourcing services follow a certain process. You can either go for a monthly fixed rate or choose an hourly rated service depending on your requirements. If you want to make profit, you should hire Indian website developers and designers. This will allow you to get the highest quality of service within fraction of the cost. Hence, your profit margin will be much more than what you expect.

If you haven’t calculated your profit yet, I suggest you to calculate the amount you make by outsourcing your development and designing work to India. Apart from the increment in your profit margin, you also get professionally optimized service.

Easy to communicate:

Any company can perform better if the communication among the employees and the management is smooth. English is the language that is used by companies in the USA or the UK or even Australia. No matter which country you choose to outsource, the employees should be able to communicate in English.

India is a country where almost 10% of its population (approximately 125 million people) speaks English. It is the second largest country to speak English right after the USA. It is assumed that the number will quadruple in the next decade.

This is one of the perfect reasons to outsource to India. When it comes to communication, you won’t have any issues if you outsource in India.

Positive effect of time difference:

Trust me when I say that time difference can be a boon for you if you are outsourcing to India. The time difference between India and the west coast of USA is around 12 hours. India is ahead of USA.

If you are in the UK, India is still around 5.5 hours ahead of you. This time difference can have a positive effect on your business. By outsourcing to India, your work may get completed much before the time you expect. Besides, many outsourcing companies have multiple shifts. It allows the companies to complete the task before time.

If you have been worried about being available 24×7, the time difference with India will help you out. It is the best reason for you to start outsourcing. The Indian government has also been open towards this new growing industry. The government has created IT parks, special economic zones, better infrastructure, improved policies, better telecom system and a lot for the growth of the outsourcing industry. Besides, the IT industry in India also gets some tax benefits that can be ideal for a company that is outsourcing to India.

24×7 hour service:

As I mentioned already, the time difference is of great help when it comes to outsourcing. When you are outsourcing, it means you need support to provide services to your customers. We live in a competitive world. Every company is trying to outrun the other in terms of products or services that these provide.

However, there is a simple way that you can use to provide the best service. You can inform your customers that your company offers round the clock service. You can actually provide service 24×7 with the help of the remote team working from India.

The Indian professionals are trained to match the international standard. Hence, they are competent enough to handle the demanding circumstances. Thanks to the updated communication processes, you cannot only communicate through emails but you can also use chat support. In case of emergency, you can also make use of audio-video conference. All these methods make it easy to maintain an integrated support system for your clients.

What types of businesses need outsourcing?

While we are talking about outsourcing, let’s focus on what types of businesses require outsourcing. The most famous companies that outsource to India belong to industrial technology or IT. Now, there are different types of IT services that may or may not require outsourcing.

• If your company offers cloud services, your business is in high demand. Many companies are now opting to keep their data safe and secure with the help of cloud services. Cloud allows you to store a large amount of data in a much reduced cost. Outsourcing your business to India will allow you to target the Indian market as well as the international market.
• More and more companies are now looking for web-based applications. Web-based apps not only help to provide better service but these apps also help in connecting with the end users. From banking sector to e-commerce to healthcare to tours and travels to cafes – the list is endless when it comes to the application of web-apps. Outsourcing can be especially helpful for you as you will be able to provide round the clock service to the end users.
• Automation is a budding industry. More than 80% of people believe that artificial intelligence will be used by many industries. It is also assumed that robotic process automation will also see a surge in the near future.

• Internet of Things or IoT apps have long way to go. Companies from different industrial background are looking for ways to implement IoT in their processes. It is expected that the IoT industry will see a boom in the coming years. So, you need to be prepared and outsourcing is the best way to do it.

Conclusion:

Outsourcing in India is not a new trend. Companies like Cognizant, IBM, Dell, Wipro etc. have been offering world class service by outsourcing their services in India. More and more companies in different parts of world are also realizing that India is the best country to outsource their businesses. From communication to technology to support, India is the hub for outsourcers.

Since many companies are already outsourcing in India, you can choose the company you want to outsource to, based on your requirements. The only thing that you should remember is to hire a group of professionals instead of hiring an individual. Nico Digital is a company that offers website development, website design, maintenance of your website and even SEO services. Professionals who are experts in different fields work under the same roof to provide you with the best service.

Every business needs to have a website in today’s world. However, what most companies don’t keep in mind while creating a website is the speed of it. Most of us pay attention towards the pages, blogs, images, content, etc. that will go in the website. But we forget that the loading time of the website is equally important.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2sdGTdt

The loading time of your website can have serious impact on SEO and your marketing efforts. Are you still in doubt about how your website speed can make or break your business? Well, I would suggest you to read on.

First impression is the last impression:

Seriously, this is the exact motto that you should memorize. When someone visits your website, your website becomes the face of your business. If your website is loading fast, people consider your website (and company) to be professional. Even though there is no data to back this logic up, it is people’s psychology. People tend to believe if a website is loading faster, the company is trustworthy.

On the other hand, a slow website is often thought to be unprofessional and even insecure. People think that if a website is taking too long to load, it must have items that can corrupt their devices. Believe me, 80% of your visitors will not return to your website if it is slow to load.

Speed is what is expected:

Imagine having a conversation with a friend about the last Marvel movie you saw. While you may be a big fan of MCU, you may suddenly not remember the name of Gamora’s sister. What will be the first thing to do? You will search the answer. And you will definitely want to see the answer as fast as possible.

Now imagine the same situation where someone is trying to find information from your website. The person will want to get the search results as fast as possible. Speed is what we all expect from the websites. Many websites take only fifteen seconds to load, which is much faster than what these used to take last year.

However, you will be surprised to know that most people are not ready to wait for even fifteen seconds. Most people will abandon our website if it takes longer than three seconds (yes, 3 seconds!!) to load.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2sc0hrC

It is also seen that people who access any website from their mobile devices expect the sites to load even faster that what it takes to load in desktop. People may consider a website such as Facebook or Instagram or Google to load a slowly because these are established names. However, you don’t have the luxury as a small or medium business owner. People will not only expect your website to load fast, they will also expect it to function well while loading.

Improves your SEO ranking:

Search engines, especially Google, keeps updating their algorithms. Any marketer would agree with the fact that it becomes a pain in your neck to keep up with the changes. Can you believe that Google changes its algorithm more than the number of days in the year? It means, sometimes that company changes the algorithms more than once in a day.

It is impossible to keep up with the frequent changes. However, there are a few techniques that you can try out to improve your SEO ranking. One of these methods is to improve the speed of your website. According to one of Google’s team members, Google likes websites that load faster. Hence, since 2010, website speed matters when it comes to search engine optimization. 

As per a Google team member, an ecommerce website should take only two seconds to load. But it will be considered excellent if an ecommerce website loads within half a second. More than 40% of users expect a website to load within two seconds.

Reduced conversion rate

I know it’s difficult to believe that the speed of your website can even reduce the rate of conversion. Well, I will explain how it is possible. As we mentioned earlier, your website has three seconds to get loaded. Now, assume that your website takes around five seconds. No doubt that the five seconds loading time is excellent and is better than many other websites. However, it is not enough.

According to some studies, 53% of people don’t wait if a website takes more than the desired time to load. So, if you have 100 visitors every day, you are losing 53 visitors. In a month, you will be losing 1590 visitors. If only 10% of this 1590 people becomes your customer, you are losing 159 customers. Let’s assume that your product or service is worth $50. So, the result will be $7950 every month!

Do I need to calculate the amount that you lose in a year? Isn’t the number surprising? And the entire amount that you lose is just because your website takes two seconds more than what is desired to load.  

Bad user experience

What is the reason behind creating your website? The first reason is to give your customers what they want. But that is not enough. Your website should also be loading fast so that users get the right information and that too faster. As I mentioned before, users won’t stick to a website that takes long to load. If the visitors are frustrated, they will not only leave your website but they may also never come back. It takes us to our next point.

The long-term result of slow website:

If you don’t pay attention to your website speed, it will remain slow for longer period. And if that is the case with your website, I am sorry to inform you my friend, you have a serious problem. A slow website that remains slow for years or even months, will gradually go down in the search engine rank page.

Marketing is largely depended on the word-of-mouth. People often refer to a particular website that they feel to be good. Good website doesn’t mean that the website has all the necessary information but it also means that the information is quickly accessible.

If your website functions properly, people may sign up for your newsletters. Some of these people may end up purchasing your product or service as well. If your business website takes too long to load, users won’t subscribe to the newsletters. They won’t even visit your website even if they know that you have the necessary information. In simple words, the credibility of your website may seriously get damaged.

How can you optimize your website?

So, now you have a clear idea about how your website speed can make or break your business, you might be wondering how to optimize your website. The first thing that you must keep in mind is that images and videos take time to load, especially when the internet is slow.

Your graphics should ideally be in PNG form and the images should be in JPEG form. There are many other small details that you need to be careful about. Since it is not possible for you to pay attention to every minute detail, Nico Digital is here to help you out. We offer website development and website design services. We know how to design your website so that you don’t have to deal with a slow website, now or ever. Besides, we also make sure to update your website regularly so that nothing could corrupt your website and make it slow.

We have been so habituated in online shopping now that we often don’t feel like going to a store to buy a product. Similarly, many retailers are now taking their business online. With every passing day, the number of online consumers and online sellers are increasing.

It is estimated that over 2 billion people will be associated with online shopping and selling activities. As the number of online shoppers is increasing, the ecommerce websites are now trying to take innovative approach.

From visual search to audio search to dynamic emailing, companies are doing everything possible to gain the trust of their online shoppers. Artificial Intelligence or AI has helped the companies to be creative. AI is also evolving every day and ecommerce websites can make use of it. AI has changed how ecommerce websites used to work, and will continue to affect ecommerce sites even in the future. If you want to know how, read on.

Targeted campaign for customers:

What is the difference between online shopping and offline shopping? Primary difference is the experience, right? When we shop in store, there are shop assistants to help us. They can guide us in buying the right product as per our choice. If you own a shop, you will know that more than often customers have queries about certain products. Sales assistants supply them with necessary information. Besides, they also try to understand the preferences of customers and suggest products as per their choice. Most of the time, a little nudge from the shop assistants make customers buy products.

However, you don’t have this luxury when it comes to online shopping. People know exactly what they are looking for and they search those items only. More than the experiences of shopping, people want their necessity to fulfill. Even if they have queries regarding any of the products, there is no sales assistant to help them out. You can’t even encourage them to buy a product since there is no way you can commute with them while they are shopping.

This is exactly where AI comes to help you out. AI helps you collect data about your customers. You can create a list of products suggestion for the customers depending on their search history and purchase history. You can even create targeted campaign depending on the collected data for each individual customer. Even without speaking to anyone, customers tend to purchase products that are suggested to them.

Optimization of search results:

While you may have a huge array of products to choose from on your ecommerce website, you may have listed the products as per keywords. Now, you can’t expect that each of your customers will know the significance of keywords. Or they will be pro enough to use keywords to search their desired items.  

So, what is the solution? AI can provide you with the solution. Using keywords is not enough anymore for your shopping site. It doesn’t matter what type of products or how many products you have on your website. If people can’t find what they are looking for, there’s no use of your website.

Apart from using the keywords, implementation of AI will ensure that your customers get exactly what they are looking for. AI collects data from the search history, the location of the customers, their purchase history and shows them products they are looking for. Besides, Artificial intelligence also shows keywords for easy searching.

Reduced cart abandonment:

Many a time you will notice that a customer leaves your website right before making a purchase. They leave the products in the cart. Your potential customer may have faced a technical glitch or may have gone through some unflattering experience before finishing their purchase. There are primary two reasons behind the abandonment of cart. Many people may start shopping on your website without even having an account. So, when they go to check out, the website may ask them to create an account. As it is a lengthy process, people abandon your website.

On the other hand, people who have account on your website may include items in cart. Then they may come across the same item on some other ecommerce website for lower price. They will obviously leave your website.

So, what is the solution to this problem? First, you have to understand why your potential customers are not completing their orders. If your website is AI enabled, you may ask people to log in with their social media such as Facebook account or their Google account. This will save them the time to create an account and will make the process much smoother. This will in turn reduce cart abandonment to a great extent.

In case your customers are leaving the cart without completing the transaction because of price issue, you can send them follow up email. It is seen that follow up emails often prove to be fruitful. You can take help from AI even in mentioning the reduction in price.

Moreover, AI can help you in understanding which of the leads are more likely to convert and help you be more specific with your follow up emails.

Answering questions:

I mentioned already that customers often have queries that are answered by shop assistants when it comes to brick-and-mortar shop. What will they do if they have queries while making purchase from your website? Customers may feel irritated if their queries are not answered quickly and it may result in cart abandonment as well.

Chatbots have become a part of many ecommerce websites. Chatbots can be programmed to reply to common queries. So, suppose customers are asking about the expiry date of a product, it can be answered by AI. Similarly, if your customers want to know more about the delivery details, chatbots can help them out.

For the rest of the queries that need human intervention, you need to have a dedicated team which can get back to the customer queries within 24-hours. You can program the chatbots to recognize the type of queries and forward those to the right experts.

Introduction to voice and visual search:

Do you know that we are entering a year when 50% of people will conduct web search through voice? As voice assistant devices such as Google Home, Alexa, Siri and all the voice assistants, more and more people are taking advantage of voice search. Hence, if you want to make sure that people shop from our website, you have to optimize your website. You have to ensure that your customers can find out the products they are looking for through voice search.

We are moving towards a time when we want convenience above all. And voice search provides us with the convenience. People can now listen to song or turn on the TV without reaching for their phone or the TV remote. The same convenience they want when they are shopping. If your website is optimized, your customers can place an order without accessing their phones or opening their computers.  

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2rqNGAu

Visual search is also something that you should take seriously. Shopping is often influenced by what others are using. So, when customers don’t know the name of certain product, they may use the image of that product to search it. An AI optimized website will understand the images shared by customers and will find out the exact or the similar items.

Detecting and removing fake reviews

We all check out reviews before making a purchase decision. 90% of people go through the reviews section when they are researching about a product. More than 80% of people get affected by negative reviews. So, that is a huge number of people. Now, while many people take time to write authentic review, haters or competitors often misuse this platform. Fake reviews can have serious consequences on your business.

So, how can you make sure that you remove the fake reviews? You can take help of artificial intelligence. AI will help you to identify whether the reviews are written by authentic customers. Negative reviews that are written by verified users shall be taken seriously to improve what they found to be problematic. Also, reviews that are up to the date are more reliable as well.  

Optimized pricing:

Pricing is one of the most important factors of online shopping. Customers often browse through multiple websites to check out the prices of the same product on different websites. Now, if your pricing is not optimized, you might be lagging behind. Even if it’s theoretically possible, practically it is impossible to keep updating the price of each and every product on your website. Besides, how many times a day will you be able to optimize the price of the products?

And this is exactly where AI comes to help you. You will be amazed to know that Amazon.com changes the price of an average product every 10 minutes. It means that the company optimizes price 2.5 million times every day.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/38fyQgZ

Okay, let’s admit that not all of us are as big a company as Amazon.com, Inc. However, if not 2.5 million times, we can optimize the pricing at least a couple of times with the help of AI. Artificial intelligence can analyze volumes of data. Thousands of customer details, their choices, their shopping patterns, product details, pricing details of each of the products, demand of the products, within minutes and optimize pricing depending on the collected data.

Prevention of fake goods sale:

You may be left surprised if you know that approximately 7% of world’s trade is based on fake goods. No matter how good your intentions are, unknowingly, you may end up being part of the fake goods seller. Unfortunately, if you end up selling counterfeit products even unknowingly, your reputation is at risk. Many luxury brands experience huge losses because of the counterfeit products sold in the open market. Reaching the right target audience through ecommerce websites has become even easier for the fake good sellers. It is assumed that the fake product selling market is worth $30.3 billion!

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/350PjDx

It is difficult for consumers to understand the difference between real product and counterfeit product. Even you, as an owner of an ecommerce website, may not be able to understand the difference. However, you can tell the difference with the help of AI. Artificial intelligence can monitor the keywords used; identify the differences depending on the images; spot even the minute differences etc. So, with the help of AI, you can basically stop 98% of the sellers from selling fake goods on your website.

Sales prediction:

You already know by now that AI gathers and studies the data on your website. But that is not all. Apart from all other benefits that you get from implementing artificial intelligence on your ecommerce website, you can also get sales prediction. AI notices the behavior of your competitors, demand and supply of products on your site, customer reviews, buying patterns of your customers, etc. to calculate and predict sales.

AI can also find out the reason behind cart abandonment and help you target the problem to solve it. You can manage your inventory with the help of AI so that you can stock on products that are predicted to sell well. This also allows you to stop investing on products that are not predicted to do well. 

Is artificial intelligence necessary for your business?

Even after this long discussion, you may have one valid question in mind. If you have been doing well without implementing AI for so many years, why would you need it now? Let me tell you that ecommerce websites that are driven by AI are doing much better than the ones that have still not implemented AI.

AI helps you to keep track of your own products, sales, your competitors, customers, reviews and many other small details. Suppose you still have not used AI but your competitors have. Aren’t they already in advantage?

Are you still doubting whether to use artificial intelligence or not? Well, if you want your business to grow and outrun your competitors, you will need to be brutally honest with yourself. And AI can give you the brutally honest results that can help your business grow.

If you need help with creating an ecommerce website that has AI implemented, Nico Digital is here to help you. We develop every type of website and optimize the website so that you get the best result. Contact us for more details.

Blogging has been in the business for quite a few years. Even though people started blogging as a medium to share their personal opinion and point of views, soon blogging became an active part of business. However, many business owners either don’t think that blogging can help them in their business or they don’t want to take the stress of creating blogs.

I agree that it is a time consuming process. You have to research on the type of content that you need to create. The articles should be related to your business. You also have to follow certain rules and regulations. The idea is to create content to educate your target audience and to add value to your industry.

However, let me tell you that corporate blogging is one of the best methods to enhance your online presence. If done correctly, corporate blogging can increase the conversion rate and increase your sales so that you start gaining profit. But before getting started with the importance of corporate blogging, you should understand what corporate blogging is.

What is corporate blogging?

In simple words, corporate blogging is creating content that is related to your industry. You have to share your expertise, your experience and give tips about how to succeed in your industry. Creating blogs for your business is also known as content marketing. The primary focus of corporate blogging is to create content on topics that people want to read about.

Are there any guidelines to follow?

Blogging, in general, is very conversational and communicative. No matter what type of business you own, you should connect with people to make sure that they are reading your blogs. The best way to do that is to create blogs that have personal touch in them. Don’t just try to sell your product or service. Instead, educate people on why the product or service is necessary for them. You can give real-life examples to show the importance of the product or service you are writing about.

However, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. I am chalking down the points that you should remember.

• You can mention your competitors in a very subtle way. Never criticize the competitors.
• If you are hiring an employee to write blogs on your behalf, make sure to mention that the opinions shared in the blog should be personal and not official. It means that if you or your employee is creating content, it should not be the official statement of your company. This takes us to our next point.
• Just because you are giving your own opinion, you shouldn’t give any false statement. Don’t flourish any information that you are not sure about or that is incorrect. Either research on the topic to know something you are not sure about or avoid writing on that topic altogether.
• Refrain yourself from sharing your political views and opinions. Your business blog is not the right place to share your political opinions.
• Never disclose any company secrets or any data that is confidential in your blog.

Now that we have got the guideline out of our way, we can get started with the importance of corporate blogging.

The importance of corporate blogging:

No matter how small or big your company is, if you are not blogging, you are not giving your 100% in your business. Here are the reasons why you need to start corporate blogging, now.

Creating brand awareness:

If you own a startup or you are an owner of a big company, your target is same – to establish your business as a brand. Blogging helps you with increasing your brand awareness. If people are searching on the type of business you offer, they may come across your blog.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/33WFsNX

If you provide information that people find helpful, they will keep returning to your website. Besides, they will also know your brand through your articles. Even if you are a big company, blogging will only help in strengthening your virtual presence.  And we all know that internet is the most effective way to reach a large number of people at once.

Increases visibility:

Just like your website has your clickable social media handle icons, your corporate blogs should have share button. This will allow the readers to share your blog if they like it. If your blog is shared by people on their social platforms, it will immediately increase your visibility. People who are not particularly your target audience or people who don’t follow you will also get to know about your blog and brand. At least a few of them will start following your blog.

Makes your company relatable:

Suppose you own an ecommerce website. People land on your website to buy products. The whole process is automated, right? Now, imagine that you create a blog page that you keep updating with fresh content. If the topics are what people are looking for, they will relate to your blog.

It will give your company a human touch. You can also share the image and a short bio of the writer of the blog. Also, make sure to encourage people to comment on your blog and do reply to their comments. This is how you can start a conversation on your blog, which makes it even more humanized.

Increased trustworthiness:

You may wonder how creating content can improve trust among the people. Suppose people are looking for information on a particular topic. They may have commented on your previous blogs to discuss a specific topic. When you actually create content on what your readers want to read, you are establishing yourself as a trusted source.

Each fresh piece of content that you create shows your time and effort that you have invested in researching and writing the article. If you back your article with proper data, people may even refer to your article.

Makes your company transparent:

If you want to increase your sales, being trustworthy is not enough. Reading or referring to your blogs in one thing, purchasing your product or service another. When people spend on something, they want to make sure that the company is transparent with its work process. You won’t see many people spending on new ecommerce websites for they aren’t sure about their transparency.

Now the question is how corporate blogging can improve your company’s transparency. While you can’t share any confidential information, you can share some information related to your company. Suppose you just reached a milestone in terms of the number of employees in your company. You can create a small blog post on that. In case you attend any formal event, you can write a blog post on that with some pictures of the event.  If you feel confident, you can also share your sales figure.

Improves search engine optimization:

The ultimate aim of creating a website is to increase your online visibility and improve your sales. If your website is not search engine optimized, you won’t see much difference. One of the best ways to improve the search engine optimization is to update your website with fresh content. And what can be better than updating your website with articles, regularly?

When you write articles and post them on your website, you are continuously updating your website. Including the right keywords will increase your SEO efforts even more. When people search something using those keywords, your website will also get a chance to rank on the search engine results page.

Helps build relationship with the customers:

Corporate blogging is the best way to build a relationship with your customers and target audience. As I mentioned before, you can ask your readers to comment on your blog post. Once they comment, it is your responsibility to reply to their comments. If you do this regularly, you may see some of the people who comment regularly on your blog posts. People who regularly comment trust you and like to read your blogs.

You can also share your blog links on your social media to attract more people. Taking the help of social media can ensure that you are targeting specific people who are already following you.

Creating anticipation:

Depending on the type of business you own, you can totally use blogging to serve your purpose. Apart from sharing important and related information with your readers, you can also make them aware about the products that you are planning to launch. Creating a blog post on your new launches or the ones that you are planning will create anticipation among the readers. They will keep following your website and blog to get more information about the product. This will also drive sales.

Generate leads and drive sales:

The key to success in blogging is to be consistent. You have to keep researching on topics that people are searching in your industry, you have to keep creating content and you have to keep connecting to people. If you are persistent with your corporate blogging approach, you will definitely see results.

I have already mentioned that you will notice some people are regular readers of your blog. A few of the regular visitors of your blog will subscribe to your newsletters. These people are your leads. A number of people from the subscribers will enquire about your product or service and will end up purchasing it. This will increase your sales, which is the direct result of your corporate blogging.  

Conclusion:

From increasing your brand awareness to building relationship with your readers to generating leads, the prospects of corporate blogging are many. If you haven’t started blogging yet, this is the time you should start. Are you not sure about how to research and create blog articles?

Well, Nico Digital is here to help you. We have team of experienced writers who have been creating content for many years. We know how to research depending on the industry your business belongs to. We also know how to present the right information so that it is easy for your target audience to comprehend the information that you shared. While also ensuring  to back your post up with proper references and high-quality images.

You might be thinking that stickers are so childish. Teenagers like to decorate their phones, bags and god knows what else with stickers. How can you use stickers for your marketing efforts, right?

Well, it’s time that you face the reality. The teenagers who used to stack on stickers have grown up and become your potential target. So, if you want to reach your target the right way, stickers can be really helping you. However, you have to know how to design stickers so that you can reap the maximum benefit from them. Let’s get started then.

Why are you designing the stickers for?

Before you get started with the designing process, you have to understand why you are designing the stickers. Will you design the stickers to promote your business? Or will the stickers be a part of your marketing strategy? Where will the stickers appear? Are you going to make huge stickers that can be stuck on walls or other places or will those be small in size that can be stuck behind a mobile phone?

There are numerous questions that you have to answer to make sure that you end up creating a sticker design that is communicative enough. Besides, the number of stickers that you need to print is also something that you need to pay attention to. Once you have sorted out all the details regarding designing and printing stickers for your business, you can proceed to the next step.

Don’t get overwhelmed because I am here to help you out with the process.

Determine the shape:

The design that you would create for your sticker design will depend on the shape and the size of the stickers that you want to design. The shape and size are dependent on why you want to create the stickers.

The most common and cost-effective sticker shape is rectangular. The reason behind why most companies opt for rectangular stickers is that this shape doesn’t need to be cut or processed to fit any custom shape.

However, if you want to create a design that is more customizable or has customized shape, you can do that too. Create a sticker design that has custom design. Get the sticker printed on a rectangular or square shaped cardboard. It will look like the card is shaped as per the shape of your design. Some designs are prepared to paste on transparent surface such as glass doors or windows or mirrors. In this case, the design can even be reversed so that they don’t lose their actual shape.

Even though stickers are generally small and rectangular, sticker designs can be practically of any size. It can be a sentence that you stick on wall. It can also be a collage of pictures that you can stick on the wall. At the same time, you can also choose to create a sticker that is small enough to be stuck on the back of your mobile device. 

Stickers should be colorful:

Why are you designing stickers in the first place? The simplest answer will be to grab the attention of people. While some of you will create stickers that can be used behind pop-stickers, some of you choose to go big with stickers. No matter what the size of your sticker is, you should make it colorful. The more colorful the sticker design is, the better it will serve the purpose.

Your stickers can be seen from quite a distance if it is colorful and bright. Even if you are planning to create stickers that can be stuck behind laptops, you would like to make sure that the stickers look bright without making the design look gaudy.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2Yn2rAp

Now, here comes the tricky part. It is too easy to get swept away when using colors to make a design look bright. There are possibilities of using too many colors at the same time. You have to remember that you are asked to create a design that looks bright, not something that looks flashy. So, restrict yourself from using too many colors or colors that don’t complement each other.

Use typography carefully:

The typography that you use for your sticker should be clean and clear. It should be easy to understand even from far away. Give paragraphs a break when you are creating a sticker design. Your sticker should be legible from a distance. Besides, people should be able to read the text in your sticker even if they are on the move.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2rlbSEn

A clear typeface is best to convey whatever you want to. You can keep the font bold to ensure even more visibility from far away. There is a simple way that you can implement to ensure that the text is not only visible from a distance but it is also readable. You can use a solid background, preferably a light but bright color. Now you can either use two contrasting colors to place your text or create a shape on the background and place the text along with the shape. Both the methods will help you in creating that contrasting effect to help read the text.

Write less, say more:

The key to attract people is to induce curiosity in them. The less you say the more curious you can make your target audience. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it can save you! Your sticker is not a Wikipedia page where you have to put the history of your company. On the contrary, the design has to be precise and crisp. So, the less you try to say in the sticker, the more you will grab the attention given the fact that the text needs to be to the point.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2OUOIOs

You can create a design where you put the name of your company along with the logo. This is the simplest form of design. On the other hand, you can ask a question and let people guess the answer. You can also use icons in case you don’t want to include any text whatsoever. However, you have to keep in mind that the icons or the text that you are using should have an impact on the audience. Check out the image above. You can see how the companies have used the different shapes to create the stickers.

Include your brand:

You should not forget the idea behind creating stickers. Your ultimate aim is to make sure that people recognize your brand. So, no matter what text you include or what typography you use or even the colors that you choose, you should never deviate from your brand identity. Your brand is not only the name of your company or the tagline that you use. Your brand is the typography, the color schemes, the tagline, the name and many other things.

When you are trying to create a sticker that should represent your brand, you should never use typography that contradicts with your brand identity. No matter what colors you choose, don’t use colors that don’t represent your brand. The idea of creating stickers is to increase the span of your brand. If you use anything other than what represents our brand, you are basically not creating any impact.

Let me explain with an example. Suppose you have used a shade of green and blue as your brand color. Now, it’s not ideal for you to use something that doesn’t relate to either of these colors. So, if you use pink or red to create your stickers, it may create conflict with your brand design. Similarly, if you have chosen modern typography for your brand logo design, there is no need to use calligraphy or comic fonts that don’t represent your brand.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/33PQILP

If you check out the stickers from Apple, you will see that the company has retained its brand value even when it has used multiple colors. How? The company has kept the design as simple as possible and that is what it is known for. It has not experimented with any other shape than its own logo, which is also a reason that you can recognize the brand.

Image courtesy: https://rdbl.co/2RoZgXv

Now, if you are not the owner of Apple, you have to take a different approach. Take a look at Heinz Ketchup sticker and you will understand that it’s not really difficult to capture the essence of your brand.

Call-to-action:

Call-to-action or CTA button is a part of your marketing efforts. Your website or social media pages or brochure or any other marketing asset must include a CTA button. So, the same theory applies when it comes to stickers as well. However, I have seen that many companies either don’t use CAT buttons or the CTA buttons that they use are not appropriate.

What is call-to-action? It is either a clickable image or a text that will ask the viewers to click take an action such as contact you or order your service etc. However, the CTA buttons that you can use on your websites are not applicable when it comes to stickers. It should be more understated

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2rZyn1T

When I say call-to-action, I don’t mean that you should use a sentence like “call us now” or “click here to contact us”. On the contrary, your call-to-action should be subtle. Your audience should not feel like they are being forced into taking action. Rather, the decision should be theirs to take.

So, what can you do?

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2sS5BRd

The first thing that you can do is you can include a barcode a barcode is the simplest way to capture the attention and driving people to take action, which is to scan the barcode. You can also create a sticker using a social media icon and add your social media handle as a CTA button. Keep experimenting with the CTA buttons. You can also hire professional designing company to help you out with innovative CTA buttons.

Choose CMYK instead of RGB:

While digital designs look good on RGB color scheme, print designs look good when used CMYK color scheme. Now, if you hire a professional graphic design company that has past experience in creating printable design, you don’t have to worry about the color selection. However, it is still important for you to understand why it is necessary for you to use CMYK instead of RGB.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/366s3nP

 RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. So, why should you use CMYK for your sticker design? The reason is that when you will print the design, the paper will absorb light. On the contrary to this, computer or mobile or any digital screen reflects light. So, when you print anything on paper, RGB color scheme can’t give you the best image that you expect. You get a better and more vibrant outcome from using CMYK color scheme for your stickers.  

Vector design for best results:

As I have already mentioned, you can create stickers that are huge in size as well as the ones that are to be stuck behind your mobile phones. So, if the resolution of the image is not good, can you imagine the disaster that will take place? When you will print the sticker, it will look bad.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2LHOKHt

The best way to design your stickers is to create the design in vector. No matter how big or small your design is, you won’t have to worry about the image getting pixelated, in digital format or in printed version. Hence, the sticker can be printed for wall printing, t-shirt printing, coffee mug printing, laptop cover printing etc.

Keep the design simple:

If you take a look at the famous designs, you will notice that most of these are simple design. You may have already understood by the suggestion of using simple typography and writing less that the design shouldn’t look overcrowded. It’s petty to go overboard with a design when you have a lot going in your mind.

But you have to remember that your sticker is not where you can share the story of how your company started nor is it the right place to share the testimonials of your clients. You can take reference from other designs (obviously, don’t copy) and create a simple design that has originality.

How to print the stickers?

Whether you have completed the sticker design by yourself or you’ve hired a graphic design agency, your sticker design should be ready by now. Make sure that you complete all the changes and update the design so that it is ready to be printed by now. Follow the next steps to complete the process of printing. Even though you may think this step to be the most difficult, we will get it done together.

Choose the print material:

There are a few options when it comes to choosing materials where you can print your sticker design. However, most of the stickers are generally printed on vinyl, be it small or big. In some cases, the sticker can be printed on t-shirt material.

Now, for the vinyl stickers, you have to decide whether you want the sticker to be matte or glossy. While the glossy stickers will look shiny, the matte ones will be less shiny.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2DSOgcV

You can either choose a colored vinyl for your plain stickers or you can choose a clear background for the customized stickers. The clear background shows the customized design without incurring the cost of cutting the stickers as per their shapes. You can also use clear vinyl so that the stickers can be used on transparent surface.

Set the size and resolution of the printing:

To get your sticker printed nicely, you have to set the resolution first. Even though you have designed the sticker in vector, while printing, you have to choose a particular size and resolution. You can choose inches or centimeters or pixels to determine the size of the sticker. 300DPI should be your ideal image resolution.

You also need to pay attention to designing the edges of the font so that it looks prominent when printed. You can either use Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator to flatten the edge of the fonts or you can hire a graphic design company that can help you with the design works.

Trim the border:

The last thing that is needed for your sticker design is trimming the borders of your sticker. You have to allow some area to bleed (3 to 4cms) and then trim. The bleed area allows you to trim the edges properly without ruining the sticker. The reason behind this step is to make sure that the design fits inside the given space and no part of the design or the text is cut off.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2sJ3dvQ

Conclusion:

If you are new into designing and printing stickers, the process may seem intimidating to you. However, let me assure you that it is not that tough. However, expertise in this field will always play in your favor. If you have knowledge on creating designs or handling designing software, everything becomes much easier.

But you don’t have to worry if you don’t have acquaintance in designing. Nico Digital is here to help you out with the process. By hiring the company you can hire the professional designers working under the same roof for years. You can choose any pricing plan depending on your needs and rest assured that you will be delivered your task within the promised time.

Let me ask you a simple question. Do you take your car to the service center for regular maintenance or do you handle the maintenance work all by yourself? I assume you take the car to the professionals. It is not because you can’t learn how to take care of your car. But the question is, will learning car maintenance help you in any way? The answer is NO.

The same theory applies when it comes to website maintenance. You don’t need to invest your time in learning how to maintain your website. You can simply outsource the maintenance work to a company that is dedicated to do that.

What did you say? You are not convinced yet? No problem. Here I have jotted down some of the benefits. You will understand why you must almost always outsource your website maintenance work.

Time saving:

Developing and designing a website is not enough. You have to maintain your website, keep it up to the date, get backdated links removed, and do a lot of other things – on a daily basis. It takes serious time. And dedication. You will need to hire professionals who can maintain your website.

There are many other things that you need to take care of when you are handling a business. Maintaining your website is definitely not one of those works. Hiring a professional takes time. Besides, you have to train the person to learn new technology. On the contrary, hiring a company that is dedicated to maintaining websites saves your time. Neither do you need to hire anyone nor do you have to waste time in implementing new techniques. Most small, medium and big companies follow this technique to maintain their websites.

Less expensive:

Believe me or not, outsourcing your website maintenance is much less expensive. Let me explain how. While you may think that you will maintain your website in-house, you have to hire professionals. I have already mentioned earlier that hiring is not all that you need to do. You have to make sure that you train these people properly so that they work in coordination as a team. You have to invest in tools and software to train the professionals and make them work. Besides, the wages of these people become a recurring expense for your company.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/38aoor1

If your company belongs to the first world country, hiring professionals from your local region is even more expensive. However, no matter where your company is situated, you can curb the expenses by outsourcing the maintenance work. Outsourcing is especially helpful and popular among companies that are situated in Europe or North America. Most of the companies outsource the work to companies that are situated in Asia and Africa. Since you get the desired service in low price, you can save a lot.

Get access to different types of talents:

If you plan to hire professionals for maintaining your website, you have to choose a couple of them from the available options around you. However, if you outsource the work, you get access to different types of talents. You can hire a company that has experienced specialists working with them.

It doesn’t mean that the employees of the company are experienced only in maintaining website. It means that the employees know development, design, maintaining and a lot more. It also means that these experts have years of experience in executing their work properly. In some cases, it is seen that people hire a company to maintain their website and invest in the same company to help them with other projects.

Many established companies outsource their website development, design and maintenance so that they get to know different points of view.

Company reputation and protection:

Your website is one of the marketing assets of your business. So, you have to make sure that your website not only works fine but also that it is not perceived as threat. Your website should not have any elements that can give rise to any doubts. It should also keep working 24×7. Technical glitches can make your website non-responsive, which can be a great downfall for your business.

Hiring a company to maintain your website ensures that the website works all the time. It also means that your website has some new elements being added from time to time. As a result, it remains trusted among the users and your company reputation is also saved. Besides, an updated website increases the chances of conversion.

Moreover, when you hire a company to outsource your website maintenance, you make sure that all the data is backed up properly and saved in a remote location so that you can recover the data whenever you want.

Round-the-clock service:

Generally, the companies that you might hire for outsourcing help you with round-the-clock support. Either the project managers are available over phone or you can contact them via messages and emails. Since there is a time difference between the European and Asian countries, the experts work when you sleep. There is a time difference of about 10 hours, the professionals start working while you are still not awake. It makes sure that you are operating in shared working hours.

Risk sharing:

When you are working with another company, you are sharing the risk factor with that company. The same theory is applicable to outsourcing as well. The risk factor associated with the maintenance and service of your website is also depended on the company that is taking care of the maintenance work.

You may think that you can hire in-house developer to take care of your website. However, it will only increase the pressure on your employees and your company. On the contrary, outsourcing will ensure that the other company takes care of your website to maintain their reputation.

Outsourcing is based on trust. So, every company will try and make sure that the business relationship lasts long. And that is why the expert developers will be attentive towards your company.

Flexibility to grow:

You may have started small when you started your business. But do you always want to remain a small business owner? No, right? So, why settle for a website that is basic? It is fine to start with a simple website. But that should not stop you from creating an extensive website. And that is why you should take website maintenance seriously.

Hiring a company that offers to maintain your website means you are hiring website developers and web designers. When you would want to expand your website, you will have the flexibility to grow. You don’t need to hire developers or hire another company for the scalability of your business website.

SEO benefits:

The more updated your website is the better your chance of ranking on search engines. Google and other search engines algorithms are constantly being updated. Ranking factors of websites continuously keep changing. Competition is pretty stiff nowadays no matter which field your business belongs to.

It is important to make sure that the site is optimized for the user experience and loads fast. While also ensuring that your website is considered to be adding value. And for that, you have to keep adding fresh content, be it images, articles, texts, videos, PDFs or anything else.

Focus more on the growth of your business:

Suppose you don’t outsource website maintenance. Instead, you maintain your website regularly. But, I have a question for you. What will you do when you need to go out of town regarding business? If not out of town, you may need to attend business meetings, get-togethers, business parties and other formal events. What will you do when you have to invest your time in the growth of your business? You won’t be able to invest time that is required to maintain your website.

We understand how important your business is to you and we also realize that you need to keep growing. That is why it is important for you to keep your focus on building and growing your business as a brand. That is where you need the support of an agency that takes care of your website maintenance.

Conclusion:

We live in an era when everything is being digitalized. Nowadays even the small business owners have their own website so that they are reachable by more people. Your work doesn’t end with creating a website. But you have to maintain the website, keep it updated, keep threats at bay, keep an eye on any security breaches and do a lot more. I have already pointed out why you need to hire an agency that is dedicated to take care of your website. It is always good to hire professionals who not only know what they are doing but they also know how they are doing it rightly.

Nico Digital has been maintaining the websites of its esteemed clients for so many years. Our first priority is the maintenance of your website. We have monthly schemes to choose from to fulfill your need. If you want to know more about how we can help you, contact us.  

What is the reason behind your SEO efforts? Let me answer the question for you. The reason behind your following search engine optimization is to make sure that the traffic in your website increases. Whether your SEO efforts are showing result or not can be understood if you track your ranking and the search traffic. Better ranking and more traffic mean better revenue as well.

However, the problem is that you can’t really decide upon a particular amount that will determine your success in SEO. So, how will you get return on investment or ROI from your SEO effort? And how will you understand that you have reached your target?

The simple answer is that you have to calculate the ROI to determine whether your SEO technique is working or not. Here, I have discussed a few steps that you can try out to get an ROI from your SEO effort. So, let us get started.

Ecommerce website vs. lead-based website conversion:

You have to understand that conversion tracking and ROI of an ecommerce website is not similar to a lead-based website. Ecommerce websites are different from lead-based websites. While you can sell products or services directly through an ecommerce website, you can collect potential customer leads through lead-based websites.

So, an ecommerce website will collect customer data from the transaction that is happening on the website. On the contrary, a lead-based website will have to depend on paid tools to find out the conversion rate.

There is simply no doubt that it is easier to determine and increase the ROI of an ecommerce website. However, it is also possible that a lead-based website can determine and increase its ROI. How? Here’s how:

Track conversion:

You have to create a set-up for measuring the conversion rate. The process for measuring is different for lead-based website and ecommerce website.

• Lead-based website

When it comes to lead-based website, tracking the conversion becomes a bit complicated. You don’t really have any transaction happening on your site. However, the approach in this case is different. You have to check out what actions the visitors on your site are taking. So, suppose some of your potential clients are reading your blogs while some are filling up the contact form to get more information.

We will mark each lead having a worth. So, if someone signs up for your newsletters, that person will be worth $50. Someone who wants you to contact him/her is worth $100. There is a simple technique to determine the worth of your clients. Let’s check that out.

Since it is easy to calculate with a round figure, we will assume that you get 100 fresh newsletter subscribers each month. If 20 among them hire you for your service, you can say that the conversion rate is 20%.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/34WCNVE

Now, suppose each of these 20 people is spending around $300 to avail your service. So, the average value of each of these 20 sales will be $300. The final step is to determine the value of each of the leads. You have to divide the total number that you make from the amount spent by your converted clients with the total number of leads.

So, the total amount that you get in this example is 20 (people) X 300 (dollar each) = $6000.

Now, divide the total amount with the original number of leads, which are 100 people in this example. So, the average value of each of the 20 clients will be 6000/100 = $60.

So, once you have chosen the worth of each of the potential clients, you have to treat them as your goals. There is a section in Google Analytics, which is named as ‘goals’. Include your ‘goals’ in Google Analytics ‘goals’. You will see a value marker in ‘goal details’. Once you start including each of the ‘goals’, it will become easier for you to calculate the return on your investment because you will get some tangible data with you.

• Ecommerce website

Tracking your ROI for ecommerce website is much easier. You have to take help from Google to track your website. Even if you haven’t invested in SEO and nor do you plan to do so, enlisting your website on Google will help you in measuring your success or failure.

Once you have set your tracking details, all you have to do is check out the information regarding the conversion rate. Follow this by the transactions, the average value of orders and the total amount of revenue.

This process will allow you to find out the exact number as in revenue generated by your SEO efforts. If you need help with the process, Nico Digital is always there to help you out.

Analyzing the data:

It takes a couple of months to track the conversion on your website. Now, you can start examining the collected data to see the ROI that you are getting from your SEO efforts. Google Analytics conversion report will let you know the exact number of conversions that you have gotten from organic search, social media, paid search, referrals, newsletter and any other source.

Google Analytics will not only show you the number of conversions but also the value of the generated revenue. Now that you have a real number, you can compare it with the amount that you have spent on SEO for this particular time span. Even though this will not give you an exact number that you can term as ROI from SEO, you can obviously start to notice the acceleration.

Suppose your total revenue is $100,000. You have spent $25,000 in paid search, keyword research and content generation. So, your ROI is $75,000. Now, you have to find out the revenue that has come from organic search, from social media from paid search, individually.

It’s time to calculate now:

This is the easiest part of the whole process. You just have to follow a simple formula to calculate the percentage of your ROI. Here is the formula that you need to follow:

{(The amount you gained from your investment – The amount you spent as your investment)/ the amount that you have spent as your investment} X 100

So, the equation will look like:

So, the percentage of your return on investment is 300.

While the percentage may or may not be satisfactory to you, it is definitely not the time to stop, right? You have to keep growing and increase the return on your investment. Now the question is how you can increase your ROI from your SEO efforts. We’ve got you covered in that. Here are a few things that we recommend doing:

Location-wise audience targeting:

No matter what type of business you own, you first need to target the local audience. SEO works best when you apply it locally. Even if your target is to go global, you must take baby steps. Believe me most big companies have come to realize that a business can’t grow big without targeting the local audience. When you dedicate your SEO efforts to targeting a specific location, the results of the efforts will show better.

Try and improve the Click-through Rate:

Click-through rate is the proportion of people who click on a particular link on your page in comparison to the total number of people that have viewed the page. The click-through rate determines the success of your website. The better your CTR is the more your SEO efforts will show results.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2YjM1sL

So, one of the most effective ways of improving your ROI from SEO efforts is to ensure that the CTR increases. You have to design your SEO efforts in such a way that more and more people, who visit your website, click the links that you share. Try changing the title of your blog; try and make the call-to-action button clearer and understandable; use an updated SERP snippet, etc.

You need to research on what the ways are that can help you improve your SEO efforts.

Where can we help?

Whether the whole process sounded simple or complicated to you, you have to follow the process attentively to get the best possible results. You need to calculate the ROI properly. You also need to conduct a thorough research on how you can improve your CTR. You also have to find out why your SEO efforts are not giving the desired results and act upon that to ensure that you get the best ROI possible.

And that is where we come to help you out. We not only conduct a thorough research but we also make sure that we keep improving the content on your website. We keep your website updated and keep on looking what improvements we can make. The best part is you can rest assured about the success of your SEO efforts when you hire us. Your ROI is our responsibility. So, what are you waiting for? Contact us for more information in this regard.

There are many companies which use WordPress to create their business websites. However, if you are new into the world of WordPress, you may ask the necessity of using this platform. You may think that your old custom-coded website is working fine and you can carry on with that. But if you want to re-design your website and make sure that you add something fresh, you can give WordPress a try. Why? Check out the reasons why WordPress is the answer for your website design.

WordPress is completely free:

 Believe me when I say that WordPress is completely free. The software allows you to download, modify, install or use any of its features without any cost. However, there’s one thing that you have to remember. While WordPress is free, you have to purchase a domain name and web hosting to install your domain on WordPress. You can also get the paid version of WordPress to get more benefits.

What is a domain name? A domain name is the name of your website. It is the name that people search you with. So, the name that appears on the address bar is what the name of your domain is.

Web hosting is the place where the files are stored. There are many webhosting sites. However, Bluehost is the most popular among those and for good reason. So, I would recommend you to invest in Bluehost. If you are lucky enough, you can end up getting a cheap deal as well.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/2RmU9Hg

Since you get to choose from a number of themes in WordPress, you can create a customized website with zero investment. On the contrary, you may need to invest additional amount on a custom-coded website to create a theme as per your requirements. WordPress is also custom-coded website. However, the codes are already written for you.

If you are not confident about hosting your own website on WordPress, we are here to help you out with that.

Saves time:

When you are designing a website from scratch, it takes time. The developers need to code your website as per your requirements. The website needs to go through trial and error to see whether every feature is working or not. Usually, it takes weeks and sometimes months to make your website go live depending on how extensive a website you want. Besides, it also requires that you hire at least a website designer and a website developer.

On the contrary to this, WordPress allows you to make your website live within minutes. You can make moderations as you wish. Since the coding is already done, all you need to do is use your content.

Get SEO benefits:

I will try to explain in simple words why WordPress offers SEO benefits. As I mentioned earlier, WordPress is created with pre-written codes. Now, these codes are high in quality and they allow search engines crawlers to crawl easily. Hence, it is much easier for WordPress websites to rank on Google.

If your website is made on WordPress, chances are your website will rank higher than usual given that the content you provide is also superior. So, you can understand that WordPress websites are SEO friendly and they provide the best SEO results that you can expect from your website.

The best part is that you don’t have to settle with what you get. You can further optimize and get even better SEO results with WordPress plugins for SEO. If all of these are overwhelming for you, you can always look for help.

Multiple themes to choose from:

Most of the websites that you see when you search are made on WordPress. And trust me, most of the owners of these websites are neither programmers nor are they web designers. So, it can be assumed that these owners don’t know how to design a website. So, how do they manage to create the outstanding websites that not only look good but also work well?

WordPress has many themes to choose from. No matter what type of website you have, WordPress has at least one theme on that. I mentioned before that WordPress allows you to customize without any cost. So, you can customize your website depending on what you want it to look like. You can change the colors, the background, your company logo, etc. You can add sliders, hamburger menu or other details that you want.

Image courtesy: https://bit.ly/33WndIe

You can also add contact forms, blog page, career page and many other pages within your website. Depending on the plugins that are available on WordPress, you can add more functionality.

Safety is pivotal:

When you are creating an official website, the last thing that you need to be worried about is the safety of the website. However, as we all know, internet is not a safe place to be. Many websites have been hacked and important information has been stolen. But when you use WordPress to create your website, you can rest assured about the safety of your website.

I recommend checking the security guide on WordPress to know how you can ensure safety of your website. The security guide on WordPress will allow you to keep malware and Trojan horses at bay.

Include different media:

If you have been thinking that WordPress is about adding written content only, I am sorry to say that you are not right. You can also include audio files, images and even videos. WordPress also allows you to embed YouTube videos, Tweets, Instagram profiles, SoundCloud audio files etc. You just need to paste the URL of the video or audio or photo that you want to use in the editor in WordPress.

Ease of using:

If you are looking for website that is easy to manage, WordPress allows you the same. It has an update management system which is built-in. Hence, you cannot only update themes but you can also update the plugins that you use. WordPress keeps updating itself and it keeps notifying you about the updates. As a result, it takes just a click to update your website on WordPress.

As I mentioned already, WordPress is secure to use. If you are worried about keeping your data secure, you can also create a backup using a plugin. You can store the backup somewhere safe so that you don’t have to afraid of losing anything.

Conclusion

No matter whether you have a simple website or you want to build an ecommerce website, WordPress allows you to do anything, yes anything. So, what are the ways you can explore WordPress? Here are a few examples that you can try out.

Firstly, you can start an online store where you can offer products or service directly. Secondly, start a business website that allows you to connect with people without selling your product or service directly. If you like writing or you are passionate about something that you want to share with the world; you can start blogging on WordPress. There are many types of websites that you can create on WordPress.

If you are not sure whether you can design your own website on WordPress, you can always contact us – Nico Digital. We have professionals with years of experience working with us. So, you get the best support possible from our side.