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8 Tips to Start a Successful Online Community

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Online Community|8 Tips to Start a Successful Online CommunityOnline communities boost brand recognition and help in lead generation. These communities are one of your most powerful marketing platforms if they have a defined purpose and proper moderation.

Below are valuable tips on how to create a successful online community.

1. Choose the best online community research software

It’s critical to have the appropriate tools to support your online community if you want to get the most out of it. Because each online community has unique requirements, choosing an online community research software with the appropriate functionality is critical. First, it should be mobile-friendly and must have enough levels of privacy and security.

2. Choose the best community manager for the job

Your Community Manager is critical to the success of your neighborhood. If your manager is not properly managing the group, members may be upset by other members, quit, and negatively perceive your brand.
Members will quit if they do not believe they are receiving the value promised to them when they applied for membership in the community. Members will also leave your community and forget about it if they are constantly bombarded with alerts.

3. Selecting the Best Platform

To develop your online community, there are literally thousands of tools and programs to select from. You might use a social media program such as Facebook or a custom software solution.

Consider the following questions while selecting a platform:

  • What platform and device do the bulk of my community members use?
  • Is the platform simple to use? (Single sign-on, as part of an app the person is already familiar with, and so on.)
  • Is it simple to share material and communicate with other members of the community on the platform?
  • Is the platform compatible with your CRM/database?

4. Set up reports to keep track of crucial community indicators

The long-term sustainability of the online community is heavily dependent on how you can demonstrate its worth in relation to your overall company goals. Do you want to enhance possibilities, decrease client turnover, or promote brand awareness?
Whatever your aim, you must define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will report on and utilize to measure your progress. You might want to think about the following:

  • Engagement (discussions, likes, comments, and shares)
  • Followers/members
  • Referral traffic
  • Active members
  • Conversion rate

These are just a handful of the essential metrics you should be paying attention to.

5. Satisfy a need

To begin with, you cannot build community if you cannot satisfy people’s desire for community.Every community meets a need. They assist us in staying educated about the world around us or assist us in feeling protected, proud, or good about the world. They assist us in carrying out more significant and more daring efforts. And maybe one of the most strong needs: groups make us feel less alone in the world.

6. Celebrate the members of your community

Your community exists to serve its members. While it’s a wonderful marketing technique for increasing product sales and brand recognition, it only works if you treat your members well.

Highlighting your community members is an integral part of maintaining a thriving online community. You may accomplish this by mentioning members who are successful with the product, performed well in a challenge you organized, referred the most new members, had the greatest participation rate, and so on.

What makes these individuals feel unique and respected is determined by your community. It might be showcasing them in a case study, providing them with a free month’s supply of products, mailing them a t-shirt, or making a post about how glad you are to have them as a member of your community.

7. Create a content strategy

The sort of material you provide is essential to your community’s effective activation and growth, so make it relevant to your audience. Before you reveal your community to the world, make sure you thoroughly understand your target demographic.
When crafting what you want to say, keep the community’s goal in mind, as well as your broader approach. Are you advertising a new product launch, informing your audience about industry trends, or generating fresh ideas?You most likely have a plethora of content ideas; however, bear in mind that how you contact your community, as well as the type of your material, may differ from typical one-way marketing interactions.

8. Participate in and learn from other communities

It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Several online communities have discovered the formula for success. You may take ideas from other thriving communities, put them to the test with your audience, and adjust as necessary. Learning from other communities may assist you in growing your community more quickly, increase participation, direct visitors to your website, and scale your business.

Conclusion

Building a community is a labor of love that takes time. Consider the resources you’ll require, from community managers who will live and breathe the community to having the proper design and content assets in place.

Four Key Web Design Rules For 2022 And Beyond

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Web Design Rules|Four Key Web Design Rules For 2022 And BeyondThese days even the smallest businesses are expected to have top-quality websites. This means that new entrepreneurs should be prepared to invest in them. You don’t have to build your website yourself. In fact, it’s usually best to delegate the building to a professional. It can, however, be useful to understand the key web design rules for 2022 and beyond.

SEO needs to be baked in

When the internet first started, web design and search engine optimization were separate disciplines with little to no crossover. Now, however, the design of your website can do a lot to help or hinder your SEO. Modern search engine algorithms now assess sites on safety and usability as well as content. This is why SEO has to be baked in from the start.

In some contexts, the effectiveness of your SEO will be seen as an indicator of your overall competence. This is particularly true of tech-related companies. For example, if you’re offering web design services in West Palm Beach then you’ll be expected to rank well for “website design west palm beach”.

Mobile-friendliness is a must

In the old days, people used to surf the net from a computer at their desk. Now, they can also surf it from mobile devices and they increasingly do. The experience of using a website from a computer is often very different from the experience of using a website from a mobile device. This means that websites have to be carefully designed to satisfy both groups of users.

At a superficial level, this means either having two separate websites for the two groups of users or having a single, responsive website. Effective, mobile-friendly web design must, however, go much further than this. It has to accommodate the very different ways and contexts in which the various devices are used.

For example, computers are generally used when you’re seated at a desk or table. Mobile devices can be used in all kinds of places and ways. Computers tend to have fairly large screens whereas mobile devices can have very small ones. Computers have keyboards, mobile devices don’t. In fact, mobile devices are often worked using one hand.

Voice search is now serious

Voice search has now matured to the point where it deserves to be taken very seriously. It’s particularly important for businesses targeting people who are actually on the move. Regardless of whether you’re driving or walking, you want (and often need) to keep your eyes focused on where you’re going. That’s why voice search is so useful.

Even if you’re not targeting people on the move, it’s often still useful to optimize your site for voice search. The growth of smart assistants, especially smart home assistants, is leading to growth in the use of voice search. Quite simply, it is or should be, a really convenient way of getting quick answers to straightforward queries.

Chatbots are go

Chatbots can be used for all kinds of purposes from collecting user feedback to answering basic queries. One of their most popular uses is as “first-responders”. In other words, they will try to help users themselves. If the query is beyond their capability, they’ll pass it on to a human agent. If it’s out of hours, they’ll take a message.

Explainer Video for Your Business: Do You Really Need It?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Explainer video|Explainer Video for Your Business: Do You Really Need It?Each second, the internet is flooded with thousands of videos. A study predicts that this year 2021, 80% of the total internet traffic will be from videos. This means you’re missing out on a massive opportunity if you’re not using video in your business.

In today’s digital era, you need to convey your product or service in a way that inspires your target market. But how? The answer lies in an explainer video.

What Is an Explainer Video?

An explainer video is informative and communicates best what your company offers. It’s a small animated video that focuses on explaining different types of problems, businesses, or products and services in a simple way. Explainer videos help break down ideas to make them easier to digest.

Imagine how boring it’d be to start talking about the black hole in a traditional way. Your viewers will be leaving before you make your point. In fact, according to Insivia, explainer videos are the most efficient way to communicate a new product’s concept to a potential customer.

Why Your Company Needs Explainer Videos?

Basically, explainer videos come in a complete package that combines moving texts, graphics, animation, or any other form of communication you like to use to describe your business.

Let’s have a look at these four reasons why businesses prefer choosing an explainer video.

1. Grab Attention

Being able to grab someone’s attention in today’s age is an asset in marketing. It’s incredibly difficult to get notice of your target audience. It becomes even harder as a report supports that a human’s attention span is less than a goldfish.

So, to catch the attention of your desired target audience, you’ll need enticing video than traditional web content. When you look at a compelling animated video, it catches your interest and commands you to watch. It’s because the animation in an explainer video awakened your curiosity.

2. Explain Complex Topics

It’s hard to explain every product or service easily as it includes some technical aspects that require a detailed explanation. This is where explainer videos come in. They encourage the viewers to purchase the product by making them understand its use.

Survey says that around 98% of people learned something after watching explainer videos. An animated explainer video lets your audience have fun watching your characters facing problems and how they solve them through your product or service.

3. Retain Information in Customers’ Minds

There’s no point in creating videos if your potential customers don’t get what you’re trying to say. But if you use explainer videos, you can take advantage of its high retention rate. According to a case study, an explainer video of less than a minute has a 77% retention rate.

If you include a valuable message with your animated explainer video, conversion rates will increase. It will break down the concept or process for your audience and stick to your viewer’s minds. In addition, the viewers will share what they’ve learned due to a higher retention rate, either through word-of-mouth promotion or social media.

4. Increase Search Engine Rankings

Embedding explainer videos can significantly increase website traffic — the most critical factor that determines your success online. If you have no site viewers on your website, you can’t expect more sales to come in the future.

Google likes video. That if you search for a term, you’ll likely see a list of videos on the first page of results. Your website will get plenty of love from Google, and you’ll see a spike in organic traffic if you integrate high-quality types of videos in your page.

Around 1 out of 4 online buyers say that they look for a YouTube video online before purchasing. So if you have an interesting animation video on YouTube, then integrate it on your website, users will spend more time viewing your page. This will give more positive signals to search engines, boosting your site rankings and organic traffic.

Another good thing about organic traffic is that they’re free (you don’t pay for them through paid ads) and are highly targeted visitors. This means there’s a higher chance to engage them with your video content and lead them to buy your products if it gives them value.

Outsourcing the Video Production Process

Video production isn’t only about learning to use specific software. You need to be a master of storytelling, animation, writing a script, and many more. If you don’t have the right skills and experience in your arsenal, you must consider outsourcing the video production task.

If you’re handling different businesses and are short on time, a good video production company like www.dreamengine.com.au has the knowledge and skills to speed up video production. Outsourcing the creation of your explainer video lets you focus on other aspects of your business while a professional videographer is doing the work for you

Diversify Your Marketing Channels

Now that you what an explainer video can do to leverage your marketing strategy. It’s up tointo you to decide whether you really need it or not. But with its tons of benefits, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t be using an explainer video to diversify your different promotional channels in your business.

Talking Shop – What Your Ecommerce Site Can’t Do Without

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If you’re reading this then you know that the future of shopping is well-and-truly online. But not every shop is created equal. The ecommerce businesses that keep the tips below in mind are going to see much more success with their customers.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article

Focus on the user experience first and foremost

This should be a given for any site but in the world of ecommerce, it’s actually easier to lose customers. Beyond categorization for products that makes sense and smart advanced search options, take an in-depth look through the whole process of buying items on your store. Think about where you can trim the fat, where another page or another click might not necessarily be needed. Putting customers through too long a process puts you at real risk of shopping cart abandonment. Another way of fighting it is by using breadcrumb navigation that shows customers at what stage they’re at through every part of the process. User friendliness must be your first and last concern.

Work to your product

No two ecommerce systems should work alike. In fact, if they have different products and different target markets, they should be wildly different. Beyond good navigation, you need a focus on the value proposition of the site and the individual products. For instance, the front page should be loud and clear with the deals on some of the most popular product types on the site. A front page that says nothing about the products is going to result in a lot of confused visitors. But attention to detail should go deeper than that. For instance, writing great product descriptions depends wildly from product to product. Lifestyle and fashion products, for instance, rely more on greater visual detail. Meanwhile, tech like computers and TVs need the technical details up-front. We’re talking resolutions, gigabytes, and compatibilities. You can’t sell two different kinds of products on the same selling points.

Have a site that works with you

Even worse than a site that’s confusing to customers is one that’s confusing to you. Not just in terms of design but management. Nowadays, there a lot of ecommerce hosting options that make it a lot easier for site owners to choose a platform built specifically for hosting ecommerce pages, with all the various sub-pages that go with it. Continuous, never-ending testing of the site is essential, too. Not just to make sure all pages are working. Methods like A/B testing also help you better understand how to make the site much easier to use for the customer.

Watch and learn

One of the best things about running a shop online as opposed to in the physical world is how much easier it is to store data on not just your customer base, but individual customers, too. Measuring the whole gives you a finger on the pulse of the market, seeing the trends from the customer’s’ point of view that can help you decide on which new stock might work best for the business. Building individual customer profiles, however, lets you go even further. You can specialize offers and create a bespoke browsing experience for each user that makes them a lot more likely to see something they’re tempted to buy.

10 Examples of AI In Our Everyday Lives

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |AI|10 Examples of AI In Our Everyday LivesPerhaps you think that artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) are concepts that do not concern you at all or are too complicated for everyday use? In theory, you may be correct, but in practice, these concepts are already an indispensable part of your daily life, though you may not be aware of them. In this article, we will give you ten examples of AI in our everyday lives.

Do you remember the image of artificial intelligence you had in 2010? At that time, for most of us, artificial intelligence was reserved mainly for science fiction works. It was not yet anchored in our daily lives. It was, in fact, a research discipline. Over the past eleven years, this technology has made great strides in many industrial sectors. It has also burst into our daily lives and has materialized in the form of smartphones and autonomous cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, and self-propelled lawnmowers. Based on a few particularly relevant examples, see for yourself how much artificial intelligence has changed the world in recent years.

Email Messaging

Electronic messaging relies heavily on AI to optimize its performance and increase user satisfaction. Our email boxes have been learning over time thanks to advanced algorithms—for example, spam filtering. Spam filters rely heavily on artificial intelligence, which can process large amounts of messages and detect new spam flooding of your inboxes very quickly.

The publishers of these spam emails change their strategies regularly. As a result, having a few keywords is not enough to identify adverse content. Hence the need to use AI solutions. A perfect example is Gmail from Google, which uses TensorFlow and blocks over 99.9% of spam.

Search Engines

Search engines could hardly function without AI, given the massive size of the web. The AI is deployed in robots that crawl the sites to index them, classify them, and ascertain the display order according to the search expressions. As a result, search engines are fully harnessing the benefits of AI: Technology is helping to understand user behaviors better and drive better outcomes for brands and internet users alike.

Social Networks

AI largely determines the way information is displayed, especially on social networks. For instance, Facebook distributes posts from followed pages, then filters them to highlight those considered most significant while covering the rest. However, no matter what social media platform you use, what you see and do in these applications is primarily influenced by machine learning. As a result, AI controls the channels you see when browsing these platforms or the notifications you receive.

E-commerce

While it’s impossible to predict the future with precision, an excellent data-driven strategy allows marketers to get a more holistic view of upcoming consumer trends. As a result, consumers receive more personalized purchase suggestions based on research conducted by sellers and based on their purchase decisions made so far. As a result, online retailers increasingly use AI consulting companies to take full advantage of the available data and provide their customers with more personalized offers, thus generating higher revenues.

Banking applications

When discussing online shopping, you cannot ignore online banking. Banking is one area that has adopted technological inventions earlier than most other areas. Secure payment is possible in particular thanks to artificial intelligence, as systems continually learn to recognize fraudulent transactions. Have you ever got information from your bank when you purchase using the new device? That is a case where banks used artificial intelligence to detect any potential fraud. Notifications from banks and financial institutions regarding their services and products are examples of artificial intelligence that allows you to understand your preferences, requirements, and financial condition to propose appropriate products.

But the process goes further. Banks use artificial intelligence in many areas, including analyzing customer investment trends, providing customer service, and more.

Chatbots and Customer Service

For most retailers, dealing with many inquiries and comments from consumers through multiple phones, email, and social media channels can be challenging even for the most experienced marketing departments. For this reason, brands are increasingly using chatbots.

With chatbots, the customer experience is smoother. Social media and customer service teams can free themselves from tasks like scheduling appointments and focus on more strategic activities. They can seek out brand ambassadors and create interaction with user-generated content (UGC). Through intelligent learning, chatbots can better understand the language used by each customer, which makes interactions more authentic and easier to navigate. It also allows brands to respond more quickly to micro-moments–targeted junctions where consumers look for specific products or information.

Artificial Intelligence and Smartphones

Imagining life without cell phones seems like a challenge. However, the various applications in our cell phones are now an integral part of our daily life. Many of these applications are based on artificial intelligence. The intelligent assistants built into our phones, such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, are the most prominent examples of AI that most of us know and use.

In addition, more and more mobile technology platforms are developing solutions that use artificial intelligence to manage various aspects of the device, such as battery management, event suggestions, etc. One of the standard functions, such as unlocking the screen with the image of a face, also uses artificial intelligence. As a result, AI-enabled services are now an essential part of iOS and Android platform updates.

Smart Homes

Alexa and Bixby come to mind when it comes to using AI in the development of smart homes. However, these applications of artificial intelligence are not limited to these intelligent voice assistants. A great example of smart homes are AI apps that save energy by automatically turning lights based on human presence. And we also have intelligent speakers, apps that change the color of light according to today. These are just some of the applications where AI is used to make homes smarter.

Navigation

In the morning, you leave your apartment and log into your favorite navigation app. What happens most often? Without even typing a single character, it offers to take you to your work or school, if that’s where you are used to going at that time. Artificial intelligence has changed our traffic habits. Thanks to navigation applications like Waze or Google Maps. These determine the shortest route and estimate the time of arrival. They can even take real-time traffic into account to automatically change the trajectory to avoid traffic jams.

There is no doubt that AI will grow more and more, and thanks to it, people will become more productive and lead a more comfortable life to a higher standard. The possibilities offered by artificial intelligence seem endless. Therefore, we should enjoy them and use them instead of perceiving them as a threat.