An overall brand experience needs to be crafted to set you apart from the competition. Bigcommerce.com defines the eCommerce Customer Experience (or in our case journey) as the sum of every touchpoint, engagement, thought, or feeling that occurs or is exchanged between the customer and your brand — as experienced from the customer’s perspective.

Here’s a quick video on this concept from PlaybookUX to get you started.

Quick Takeaways

• The customer journey begins in the awareness stage and ends when a customer actively ends their business with you.
• Setting up a unique customer experience sets you apart from the competition.
• Maintaining this customer journey at all steps can help retain customers and bring more on.

There’s plenty of reasons why a unique customer journey is important to customer conversion and retention.

Building Loyalty with Your Customers

Emplifi says that 49% of customers have abandoned a brand in the last year because of poor customer experience. And why shouldn’t they? When you stay engaged with customers, you build trust and loyalty between them and your product.

Neglecting to keep their attention through things like content marketing and the post-purchasing experience can lead them away from your brand in favor of the competition.

Attracting New Prospects to Convert

Every step of your customer journey should be built with attracting new prospects in mind. Accordingly, things like excellent website UI and special offers for new clients attract the eye and put you in a great starting position with someone who’s never used your product(s) before.

Think about it this way: your overall brand is unique to you — by selling your brand at every step of the journey you are doing the most to differentiate your product vs the other guy’s.

Long Term Growth Through Data

Customer data is crucial to the overall growth of your business. Data should drive your KPI’s and long-term goals for lead conversion and customer retention. More importantly, customer data can help you see where your customer journey is succeeding, and where it could use a little attention.

Every stage of the journey is measurable. Things like clickthrough rate and traffic to your landing page can show you how many eyes are on your website, while email list websites like Constant Contact and Mailchimp provide crucial information on the happenings of your regular clients.

Here are some metrics to consider in the long run.

Traffic

Traffic is about pageviews and users. Services like Google Analytics can give you an accurate read of this data. It also helps you see exactly where your views are coming from.

Conversions

Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just leafing through your website? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product or scheduling your services?

Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. As a result, this metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.

SEO

Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy content marketing strategy. Consequently, keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the higher you are on Google’s search results. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the seventh link down?

Regardless of stage, knowing how many people are participating in the experience is crucial to the success of your overall customer journey.

Now that you know why, let’s talk about just how eCommerce retail brands are doing their customer journey.

Great Website UI

An aesthetically pleasing landing page is the first taste a prospect gets of your brand. No one wants to see an HTML page of word vomit. Instead, they want to see something nice and pleasantly informative. Here’s a great example of a good looking webpage from us!

Relevance is a great example of an excellent landing page because it has all of the required elements — from the catchy headline to the simple CTA copy and visually appealing screenshots.

The overall design banks on SEO. As a result, there is enough content to keep readers engaged with the site before they complete the next action.

Don’t forget — your website must be optimized for mobile. No one wants to open their phone and have to zoom in on every part of your website! Make sure the experience is great on all platforms.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the sustainable and cost effective tool to get your product or service in front of your top prospects. Creating content on your website and distributing them across your social channels can cut your marketing strategy spending down drastically.

Source: Entrepreneur

Blog Writing

Blog writing is the easiest way to get organic hits on your website by creating quality pieces that those who fall into your customer profile are already searching for. Proper distribution can also captivate your current customers, guiding the post-purchase stage of the customer journey.

This process is especially beneficial for top of the funnel prospects seeking information before they purchase. Creating context about why they need your item and leading them to the conclusion is key.

Social Media

By keeping up on your social media presence, you are also opening an avenue to get your content in front of your customer’s eyes. Posting your new content across different platforms gives you a variety of outlets to send the same message to different people.

Not to mention, an open comment section is a place for your community to discuss ideas and connect with each other. This organic engagement is important to the viewership of your content and the overall value of your brand.

Using a content calendar can keep your publishing efforts organized and well-planned.

Customer Surveys

How do we know what the customer wants out of their journey? Simple. We ask!

Keeping in contact with prospects converted into customers and asking about their experience provides excellent insight into the customer journey. It also helps build the communication line that instills trust in your brand.

Surveys can be sent directly to clients via the email addresses they used at checkout or through the email blasts from your content marketing efforts. Either way, providing an incentive like a discount code can encourage them to give the feedback you need.

Wrap Up

The customer journey is the entire process your prospect goes through from being aware of your product to the second they stop doing business with you. Making sure every step in your brands customer journey contains elements of your unique brand will help grow trust between you and them.

By keeping a connected and unique customer journey, you can ensure your product and brand stand out from the competition and blow past your marketing goals!

Hiring Relevance as your growth marketing agency can make this process easier on you as your brand and business grows in an ever-changing market. Ready to talk? Fill out an interest form and we can help your business on the path to success.

The post How eCommerce Retail Brands Are Delighting at Every Step of the Customer Journey appeared first on Relevance.

Starting your own business can be an enormous challenge. Oftentimes, investing in small business content marketing resources isn’t exactly top of mind!

However, you’ll need to create a website with an eye on search engine optimization. You’ll also need a unique selling proposition (USP), and a brand that can help you to showcase your company. However, you also need to find effective ways of engaging in content creation, content management, and B2B marketing. The goal, of course, is to find a tool you can use to convince your visitors to choose you over your competitors.

Perhaps the simplest way to turbocharge your online presence, and bring some interest to your new business, is to invest some time in content marketing.

With engaging content and the right tool, you can build your brand awareness. You will seek to deliver value to your customers with every blog post and email marketing piece. You might perhaps even schedule a few Google Ads. The point is to start to generate audience loyalty. You do this by creating quality content that is useful for them such as videos, blog posts, and infographics. This is what today’s professional marketer refers to as “inbound marketing.”

Setting Yourself Up with Realistic Expectations

Content marketing isn’t just publishing a few blog posts as most people think. It can be any type of content that is useful for your target market. It also doesn’t matter how long or short the content is or the tool used to distribute it. The key is to develop some great, niche-specific content marketing ideas, map out an email marketing strategy to help get the word out, and pick the right tool for your niche.

Take the example of Joe Wickes a.k.a. “The Body Coach.” Wickes built a multi-million (euro) nutrition and fitness business off the back of 15-second cooking videos.

The question for you as a new business owner and content marketer is, “How do you find the tool you need to create incredible content without breaking the bank?” We’re talking about tech that goes a bit deeper than Google Docs or stumbling upon some random blog ideas generator.

Listed below, we’ll look at five great small business content marketing resources you can use to add pulling power to your marketing strategy. The best news? They’re all free or available at an extremely low cost.

1. PikWizard

Are you thinking of using blog posts and articles to drive traffic to your website or finding a tool to generate more engagement from your social media posts? If so, then you’re going to need some stunning images to capture the attention of your audience.

While articles with images get 94% more views, engagement on Facebook improves by 37% for posts with pictures. Nowadays, savvy B2B content marketers will kill a digital marketing piece rather than have it go out with a featured image that’s underwhelming. Your blog post or email marketing piece deserves better! This simple online tool can help.

PikWizard is a free resource packed full of high-quality stock images. It’s a tool that you can use for digital marketing any way you see fit. You can even use the pictures you find on this website to make your own site, blog post, and landing pages look more appealing. As a result, the digital marketing possibilities here are endless.

2. The Content Marketing Institute

One of the biggest challenges that new companies face when developing a content strategy is finding inspiration and guidance to get them started on the road to success.

One of the easiest ways to improve your content marketing is to enhance your knowledge. You can do this with content marketing tips and examples from the experts. The Content Marketing Institute is a powerful hub, brimming with content resources that will help you learn what good content is all about.

Depending on your niche, this resource alone might serve as your ultimate guide. At a minimum, think of it as a great beginners guide that can ease you into the world of marketing automation, B2B content marketing, content curation, keyword research, marketing analytics, and more.

3. TapInfluence

Need a little help getting your name out there? One answer could be to start using influencer marketing. Currently, it’s one of the most popular small business content marketing resources.

In this content marketing strategy, you simply connect with the people on social media. These folks already have “influence” within your target industry. They share content on your behalf and drive people to your landing page.

TapInfluence is an online marketing platform that allows you to connect with influencers in a more streamlined way. This tool could be a great way to give your promotion a boost once you’ve learned how to create great content.

4. Social Media Examiner

Google Analytics is great for evaluating website traffic and conducting a regular content audit. However, if you really want to make the most out of content marketing for the modern era, you need to learn how to combine your content strategy with your social media presence.

Social Media Examiner is a website you can visit to learn about the latest tips and tricks for making your social platform work for you.

Along with helpful hints and tutorials, you’ll also be able to keep yourself up-to-date on content marketing tools. As a result, you’ll understand the latest content creation changes happening to Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and other popular platforms and social media marketing tools.

5. Design Wizard

Businesses are turning to video marketing to raise brand awareness as it’s so much easier for audiences to consume.

Customers are becoming more overwhelmed by the countless articles and infographics available online. Additionally, they’re beginning to turn to videos as a way of getting their daily dose of entertainment or information. It’s also really easy to create videos these days as part of your content strategy. Smartphones routinely offer 10 and 12 Megapixel cameras as standard.

Think of how you can use video content ideas to educate your potential customers before they ever step into your office. You could provide a complete guide to the customer experience! For example, if you were a physical therapist, you could create videos showcasing five-minute stretching routines. People could use these to increase mobility and decrease their chances of injury. It’s a content marketing strategy that helps your target audience visualize the benefit your product or service can provide.

If you are going to create great video content, YouTube is the ideal platform to host your visual content. Consequently, if you want to get more views on your great content, you will need to make your channel stand out. YouTube marketing can help you become a go-to resource.

Design Wizard is a content creation application that allows you to create relevant YouTube channel art to spruce up your pages. It’s a nifty content marketing tool that gives your thumbnails that extra-clickable element.

As well as creating YouTube channel art, you can use the Design Wizard tool to create flyers, engaging social media posts, professional-looking Facebook ad creatives, and more. As a result, this will save you time and money on graphic design costs. Consequently, it will keep your business lean as you become your own marketer and develop your own content marketing strategy.

The post 5 Free Content Marketing Resources for Your Small Business appeared first on Relevance.

The Key to Adwords Success

The thing is that both sides of the argument are right. When you create an adwords campaign using the correct procedures and optimize it accordingly, you will see instant results and a strong ROI. When you set it up without following the correct procedures or continuously optimizing the campaign, you can be sure that every penny you spend will be wasted.

The big mistake most people make

One thing that is consistently attributed to wasted adwords spend is using broad match keywords. Using Broad match keywords are like giving Google a license to empty your bank account. Some of the other ways you can waste money on your campaigns include:

• Not using targeted landing pages
• Not setting up call tracking for conversions
• Forgetting to add negative keywords
• Not optimizing your campaign on a regular basis

By consistently optimizing your campaign, you can continually get more out of your adwords campaign and better results. That’s why we wanted to share this Adwords Optimization infographic from SMBclix. It is jam packed with 50 techniques you can use to optimize your adwords campaign for better performance.

Some of our favourite tips from the Infographic:

1. Add negative keywords – As mentioned above, adding negative keywords is key to your success. By adding search terms (that triggered your ad, but are not relevant to you) as negative keywords, you will continually increase the relevance of the traffic to your site.
2. Find new keywords – The search terms report isn’t just something you use to find negative keywords. It’s also a place where you can mind for Gold! Find search terms that have converted and add them as keywords in your campaign to increase relevancy.
3. SKAGs – Single Keyword AdGroups are a great way to increase the relevancy of the search terms to your ads, this will increase click through rate, which will in turn increase your quality score and lower your cost per click. It’s a no brainer strategy to get more conversions at a lower cost.

The infographic has so many actionable tips that you can use. There’s no point in me explaining them all, so without further ado, I give you 50 Adwords Optimization tips to increase your leads!

The post Adwords Optimization – The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Relevance.